100% Natural Ingredients: The Heart of Our Sheffield Gin
Botanicals
With the exception of our Carbon Polished Vodka, we add botanicals to everything we make.
There are several methods of using them, cold steep, hot steep, vapour infused, extractions, pre and post distillation options.
The important thing is that in order to get the best out of each botanical it's important to use them in the right way. We experiment with our botanicals to find out how they are best used.
Many of our spirits use a combination of the techniques just mentioned. It's possibly a little silly and would be easier to just use the same method in each product, but when chasing perfection, you do silly things!
Sourcing the Best Local Yorkshire Ingredients
It wouldn't be a distillery page without a nod to the ingredients we use...
So here it is, great care is taken to use only ingredients of the utmost standard.
We try and use local suppliers and produce where we can, Yorkshire Rhubarb is a firm favourite for example.
Some things we grow in our own garden.
Not everything is possible to source locally however, Blood Oranges don't grow especially well in Sheffield!
Everything we use is hand selected by our head distiller. We dry, freeze and prepare a lot of it in house to make sure its in peak condition.
Carbon
We make interesting choices for our spirits. One I thought was interesting to talk about is our carbon polishing process.
Our vodka is made close to bottling strength, we could then pass it through a series of activated carbon filters.
You'll often see "Triple Filtered" on the side of Vodka Bottles.
That's ok, it works but... there's a limited amount of time the vodka is in contact with the filtration media, seconds or maybe minutes.
We do things differently, we add carbon into our vodka and allow it to "age" on it for a week. This allows the Activated Carbon to act like a sponge and extract any "off flavours" left from the fermentation and distillation process to be absorbed, in our opinion, makes for a smoother, cleaner product.
This process also comes with the added advantage of using a lot less carbon than filtering. It helps us to be as sustainable as possible.
Soxhlet Extraction
Some ingredients-looking at you, Sloes-are a bit stubborn and like to take their sweet time to share their flavour. To give nature a nudge without losing any of that craft quality, we use a bit of kit called a Soxhlet extractor.
This clever device sits on our still and allows a continuous flow of warm spirits to wash through the fruit, pulling out every drop of deep, fruity goodness much faster than traditional steeping.
This bit of science is the secret behind ourBerrySloe Gin; it lets us keep the sugar low and the real fruit flavour high, so you get a proper sloe gin that isn’t just a syrupy mess."
The Best Ingredients (The Hard Way)
We try to do things a little differently around here, one of which is to find interesting ingredients to bring to you.
The one that we always have to explain is the mighty Chuckleberry.
A chuckleberry is a hybrid between a redcurrant, gooseberry and jostaberry (a jostaberry already being a hybrid of a gooseberry and blackcurrant). This large mix of different flavour profiles has resulted in a dark red/purple fruit around the size of a blackcurrant, with a complex, yet delicious taste.
Not gonna lie, we bought it based entirely on the name and immediately fell in love! Our chuckleberry vodka is a firm favourite.
We are always on the lookout for new and interesting flavours, if you have an idea, get in touch and it may make it into one of our products!
You can read more about why we refuse to take shortcuts with our ingredients here: Why We Peel, Chop, and Macerate While Others Just Pour.
Piccaso didn't weave his own canvas
Confession time... Bryn, our founder and distiller learned the craft of making a stunning base spirit (Grain Neutral Spirit) only to find that in taste test comparisons... it tasted identical to GNS bought in from bigger distilleries.
Cards on the table, it's lengthy and more expensive to make our own than to just buy it in. We could pretend it's all us, a lot do... but we believe in honesty as a core principle of what we do and our view is the base spirit isn't where the magic is. Or at least for Gin and Vodka.
It's an open secret in our industry and we don't hide from the fact it's widely practiced.... and it's OK.
In the same way that a perfect, white canvas allows an artist to paint a glorious piece, we treat our base spirit in the same manner, it is our canvas. The botanicals and methods we use are our paint and brushes.
We let others make the canvas, we make the art!