This Texas-based vodka uses prickly pear cactus and it seems to lessen the hangover

When most people see cactus, they see danger.

But when Logan Sligar saw cactus, he saw opportunity.

Now, almost seven years later, Sligar's High Desert Vodka has hit stores and restaurants across Austin with the help of prickly pear cactus from a ranch in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

"It truly is a magical place," Sligar said. "I mean, you walk around Austin, you see prickly pear cactus — they're like three or four feet tall. At this ranch, these cactus are 30 and 40 feet tall and have tree trunks. It truly looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book."

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Sligar said the ranch purees the prickly pear cactus after hand-harvesting it in the summer. The puree then makes its way to High Desert's distillery, located between Austin and San Antonio, for fermenting, distilling and bottling. From there, the bottles go to most major Austin liquor stores as well as roughly 45 high-end restaurants, including Aba, Ranch 616 and Comedor.

It's a business that all started with a question from Sligar: how had seemingly no one made liquor from cactus? It's also a business Sligar never expected to enter alongside co-founder Ryan Springer. He actually came from a real estate and construction background.

"But I always wanted to build a brand that had some passion and a story behind it," Sligar said. "When I had this idea, it was one of those that I couldn't put it down... and wouldn't give up on the dream. It's like raising a child. We have our own little cactus child, and it's been really cool bringing it to life."

Sligar and Springer spent years trying to figure out if a cactus-based vodka was even possible. Then they focused on branding and formula refinement. With this formula, Sligar said his company creates a vodka that features "the earthy sweetness of the cactus but the neutrality of vodka" without the "hand sanitizer, heavy ethanol taste."

The vodka also seems to leave consumers with less of a hangover, though no liquor can call itself hangover-free, Sligar said.

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"Hangovers usually come from heavy sugar or additives, and we have none in our spirit," Sligar said. "So it's about as direct farm-to-table of a spirit as you can have."

High Desert Vodka officially launched this past January and plans to stay exclusively in Austin for a little over a year. The company then hopes to expand to either Houston, Dallas or all of Texas as well as Mexico and another major city like Los Angeles.

"There is really no Mexican vodka on the market, and we have a really good network there from sourcing our cactus where there's a lot of buzz in Mexico for us to come there," Sligar said. "So that'll probably be our next steps."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Cactus-based High Desert Vodka comes to Austin stores, restaurants