Once upon a time, distilling was synonymous with alchemy, and inside the Sipsmith garage feels like a glorious throwback. At one end, a beautiful copper still sits snugly, all pipes and glass and portholes, while along one wall, shelves are filled with a cluttering of partially-filled glass vials; along the other, a work bench holds a couple of used glasses, some bottles, and jars of dried herbs and spices.

Within a few seconds, the heat of the air is warming up your hands, and the warm scent of juniper and spices is already settling in your nose and lungs. Best of all, you can actually hear the gin bubbling in the still pot at one end, tinkling out into the spirit safe at the other.

Once the gin capital of the world, London saw a steady decline in spirit production in the mid nineteenth century, and the gin style it gave its name to, London Dry, is now produced almost everywhere in the world except for London – until two years ago, the Beefeater distillery in Kennington had the distinction of being the capital’s sole copper still producer.

“We’d commissioned a 250 litre still and they said ‘Yeah, well we made you one for 300 because we thought it made more sense’. What ever happened to German precision?”

For Fairfax Hall, Stamford ‘Sam’ Galsworthy and Jared Brown, that seemed like a dreadful shame, and so they set out, in Hall’s words, to “bring a little bit of that history back”. To do this, they commissioned their own little copper still, bought themselves a little garage in the heart of London – late beer legend Michael Jackson’s garage, no less – and set about making gin. Any article about Sipsmith must necessarily dwell for some time on ‘Prudence’. The first new copper still to be installed in London in 189 years, she is hand-crafted by Germany’s oldest still manufacturer to a bespoke design which enables her to distil both vodka and gin.

She is what you always hoped a still would look like – that is, like something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – and staring in through the port-hole of the still pot, watching the hot gin slosh around with berries and orange peel, is oddly exciting. Part of her charm is her compactness – with a capacity of just 300 litres, HMRC weren’t even sure if she was legal – but, incredibly, she ought to have been even smaller.

“Sam went to Germany to sign off the still. They’d built it in the warehouse for us to look and make sure it was all right, and… it looked pretty big!” Hall laughs. “We’d commissioned a 250 litre still and they said ‘Yeah, well we made you one for 300 because we thought it made more sense’.” What ever happened to German precision? “There was Sam panic calling me – ‘What kind of clearance have we got on the ceiling?’” Three centimetres, it turns out, which is one of the reasons she looks so cute and snug.

But then much of the gin distilling going on in London in the 18th and 19th centuries would have been on a very small scale, and homage to history and respect for tradition is what Sipsmith are all about. It’s what marks Sipsmith out from the other boutique gins that have eased into the market over the past few years. Where others are adding their own twist with quirky botanicals, Sipsmith is radical in its conservatism.

“When we all first met and talked about this, what came out immediately was that we all wanted to make gin as the masters had done when gin was perfected,” Brown explains. “We’ve almost inherited 189 years of history, so we set out to celebrate the traditional method and to show people what a gin could be, without hanging our hat on any strange botanical,” Hall agrees.

“We felt there was a good reason why all those botanicals that you find in Greenall’s, Beefeater, Gilbey’s and Gordon’s are there. It’s pretty much the same selection of 14 botanicals that are tried and tested over the centuries.” “Because the truth is,” Brown cuts in, “those guys already tried those other ingredients. There’s nothing new that anyone’s coming out with that wasn’t rejected two centuries ago because it didn’t belong in the gin.”

“We felt there was a good reason why all those botanicals that you find in Greenall’s, Beefeater, Gilbey’s and Gordon’s are there”

The search for London authenticity has driven the trio to extraordinary lengths. Having decided they wanted to use London water, they opted against dipping into the Westminster Thames and instead set out to painstakingly trace the course of the river back to its source, using Google Earth. The mighty river begins, they claim, not in Thames Head, but in Lydwell Spring. Hall gets out his phone to show me a shaky video clip of water gushing up from under a stream. “Isn’t that awesome? Just bubbling up out of the ground. It’s incredible.”

And so they transport 1,000 litres of the water by road, 145 minutes down the M4, every fortnight. It’s sounds crazy, but it’s possible because Sipsmith produce on such a small scale. 200–300 bottles a day may sound a lot, but in commercial gin terms, it’s but a sprinkling. The reason for the small-scale production is not Prudence’s diminutive dimensions, but what they claim is a near unique production method.

While other commercial distillers, they say, produce their gin from an intense concentrate, which is then diluted with neutral spirit – Brown likens it to making stewed tea and then adding more hot water – Sipsmith gin is wholly distilled with the botanicals. “You could almost say it was in our innocence at the outset,” Brown says. “We didn’t spend a lot of time around watching the secrets of production of the big companies. And so we went into it completely the wrong way to make a fortune.”

The smallness of the still also means consistency is impossible. “When I first told Sean Harrison, Master Distiller of Plymouth, the capacity of Prudence, he said ‘You’re never going to get consistent product under 500 litres, you just can’t, stills won’t function’,” Brown recalls. “And I sat there dumbstruck for a moment and I then I thought to myself ‘Thank God!’,” he laughs.

“No one ever complained that the ’85 Chateau Margaux was not an exact match to the ’82.” Hall agrees: “You can have one bottle and then buy another bottle two months later and it can be a completely different product. You’d still recognise it as Sipsmith gin, but each one will have its nuances – and we actually celebrate that character”

After the visual treat, the warmth, the smell, and the sound of Prudence at work, finally comes the taste. There is something very refreshing about drinking from a natural source, and when Brown reaches across to the spirit safe with a clean wine glass I feel the same tingle of anticipation. At 80 odd percent, it ought to blow my head off. Yet although it is intensely warming, it doesn’t burn at all.

“No one ever complained that the ’85 Chateau Margaux was not an exact match to the ’82”

The reason for the smoothness, I’m told, is that the spirit is distilled ‘properly’. Of course, they would say that, so I ask for a bit more elaboration. The first quality of Prudence, they explain, is that she is made of copper – a natural purifier, which helps to separate the impurities from the spirit in the still pot, leaving black streaks of copper sulphate on its inside walls.

The grain spirit, which becomes Sipsmith vodka and is also used as the base for the gin, then moves as gas through to a column of six separate compartments, which each act like miniature stills, condensing and vapourising, condensing and vapourising, refining the spirit each time. “It’s effectively six times distilled by the time it’s made it to the top,” Brown explains.

Finally comes ‘the cut’ – the point at which the spirit is no longer deemed fit to be bottled. For both their gin and vodka, Sipsmith claim to cut earlier, sacrificing more spirit, but retaining its purity. As a result, around 2–3% of the run is lost in the ‘head’ and over 20% in the ’tail’. It seems a lot to lose. “There are so many economies that you can sneak in if you want to squeeze a lot more money out of it, but those are generally distilleries run by the accounting department,” Brown says.

Of course, Sipsmith is a commercial distiller, and a media-savvy one at that; and, of course, they extol their own virtues; and, yes, I probably should be more cynical. But there is something infectious and honest about Hall and Brown’s enthusiasm – an hour and a half of answering my questions and Brown is still dashing across the garage, reaching for samples for me to try, then handing me another, and another: vodka, gin, sloe gin, damson vodka, mustard vodka, smoky vodka. Only an impatient photographer can finally curtail the session.

Sipsmith is certainly not the only good gin on the market, but the love with which their spirits are made, the care and attention with which they apply themselves to the task, and the pride they take in it is as warming as the spirits themselves. And so I hold my hands up – they’ve won me over. And the gin is very nice, too.

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‘Suburban Artisans’ is a feature from Issue 1 – The Gin Issue, which is available to buy from our shop.

 

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