Was this true home made vodka or was it the home made alcohol with flavouring (think they call it essence) like most home brew places seem to sell?
Given vodka means water, I wonder whether the original stuff was ever truly meant to ever have any flavour...
The essences are for like bourbon and scotch, and they're absolutely wretched. My old friends expected similar quality to the bottled stuff and were shocked when it wasn't; I just laughed in their faces.
This was ethanol and water, nothing more, and that's what vodka should be. If you had a sip, it's like drinking water that has the alcohol burn to it, it's surreal if you haven't experienced it before.
The reason bottled vodka in shops has a flavour is because to make it on that scale, they need to use pot stills. Pot stills will not make alcohol concentrations as high as a reflux still can, and will retain more of the flavour of the original wash because of this. Reflux stills are great at putting out very close to pure ethanol, but do so in far lesser volumes. To distill down 25L of wash in a reflux still takes between 3-4 hours, you have to monitor it for the whole duration, tweaking water flows to control the temperature. This nets about 3-4L of high percentage ethanol.
I will say some of the liqueur additives are really good. There's a Baileys, and a Kahlua clone from Samuel Willards that are fucking amazing, but they're good for a mixer and nothing more; if you like to drink them straight, they're not for you. I've heard the Butterscotch Schnapps and Triple Sec ones are meant to be decent, but I haven't tried them. Outside of them, I wouldn't touch any other of the flavoured mixtures.