The distillery was started in 2009 by Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall, formerly Fuller’s and Diageo reps in the USA, with writer and drinks historian Jared Brown coming in as master distiller and recipe guy. They bought a garage in Hammersmith (formerly owned, it turned out, by legendary beer writer Michael Jackson before he died), obtained (through a scary amount of effort) the first new distilling license for a copper pot still in London for 189 years, filled the garage with a beautiful 300l still made by Christian Carl that they named Prudence (after one of Gordon Brown’s favourite traits, so the story goes) and started making gin and vodka. They don’t do it alone, though – they also have a nice chap called Chris who does the day to day distilling. So, between the three of them, Jared being an occasional visitor, they produce a large amount of booze, the increasing quantity of which Sam seems genuinely shocked about.

Their production process is quite simple – obtain barley based spirit and redistill it. If they’re making vodka that’s it, but if they’re gin-ing then they add the botanicals to the still and leave them to macerate overnight (if I remember correctly – there is a distinct hole in my notebook where my notes from my first visit to the distillery should be) before redistilling. Both vodka and gin are brought down to their bottling strengths of 40% and 41.6% respectively using water from Lydwell Spring, the current source of the Thames up in the Cotswolds, adding yet another London-y string to their bow.

However, my most recent encounter with Sam, Fairfax and Jared was for a slightly different reason – it was to do with fruit. Last year they produced a sloe gin for the first time, starting with 10kg of sloes in May 2010 for experimentation and then moving swiftly up to a first batch using half a tonne. Rather unromantically they matured it in the black drums that their barley spirit is delivered in, but on release it flew off the shelves. This year they decided to up the stakes a bit and went for 4 tonnes, a lot but not quite in the league of Plymouth and their 50 tonnes per year. Like the chaps from Plymouth they couldn’t be doing with pricking all the sloes so took the ‘cheating’ route of freezing them for 3 days to cause the skins to burst (a technique that seems to have varying levels of effectiveness in the home), before adding them to a high proof version of their gin, to aid flavour extraction, along with a small amount of sugar to help the process along. I tried last year’s and it was rather good – sticky, sweet and with enough of the original gin flavour coming through to let you know that it’s ‘proper’ sloe gin.

This year, however, they decided to add a couple of new things to their range. Sitting in the no-man’s land between released and not is their Fruit Cup, a Pimm’s like beverage that’s meant to beat the market leader hands down for taste, and a damson vodka – the reason for my recent visit to the distillery. I was invited along to their late launch party (we’re already selling it at work, so I hope they did a few more) and rocked up to their convenient-for-my-office-and-home distillery to be greeted by a hot garage with some smelly cheese from La Cave à Fromage, some grub from The Ginger Pig, a pile of London drinks folk and a bar manned by Jared and Graphic‘s Adam Smithson. The focus of the evening was to have a bit of a party, drink some drinks and judge a competition. The week before I had been sent a bag of sloes by PR queen Rose McCullough to use to make some kind of interesting recipe to bring along to the party – the best recipe using the supplied sloes or damsons would win a mixed case of boozes and the never ending respect of our peers. Unfortunately I ended up drunk in The Netherlands at Maltstock and singularly failed to make anything. I have since pricked all 2lbs of sloes and stuck them in bottles with varying amounts of gin and sugar, but that’s a story for another day. Anyways, the winner was Ailbhe of Simple Splendiferous who made a rather impressive Damson relish, just pipping Becca of How to Make a Mess‘s sloe syrup to the prize. Anyways, enough food – drink.

I managed to get a bit of the Damson Vodka on its own, but most of the evening was focused around cocktails. While it does work well as an ingredient I think a bit more time spent on the vodka as a drink in its own right wouldn’t have gone amiss, as it was rather nice. On the nose it was very reminiscent of a Sloe Gin but with a bit more of a jammy edge – red fruit, plasticine, sticky boiled sweets, a hint of sourness and a heavy underlying richness. To taste it was as thick and sticky as you’d expect from a fruity liqueur, but was definitely not sloe gin – cherry jam, hints of prune, old ruby port and a buttery finish. It doesn’t quite have the complexity of the sloe gin, but it does have a lot of excellent fruit and is one that I wouldn’t mind sipping.

Cocktail-wise we started off with a Damson Royale – Damson vodka topped up with champagne, as with a Kir Royale. I’m not the biggest fan of champagne, but this did exactly what Kir Royale’s do – champagne with the edge rounded of thanks to some sweet and sour fruitiness. As the evening moved on some cognac started getting added for a bit more buttery fruit. With the damson vodka falling behind on number of cocktail recipes Jared and Adam did a bit of on the fly creation and put together a combination of damson vodka, gin, champagne and amaretto, that worked rather well and was speculatively christened ‘Damson on the Fly‘.

The sloe gin was a bit more established with two solid cocktails – the Blackthorn and the Blackthorn No.4. The former is a simple mix of 2-1 sloe gin to sweet vermouth that I suspect I will trying when my maturing sloe gin is ready. The No.4 was much more interesting – a combination of equal measure of sloe gin, Jameson whiskey, gin and, according to the recipe, amontillado, although I’m fairly sure they were using La Gitana manzanilla instead. Either way it was a great cocktail, with the sloes providing sticky fruit, the gin a punch and some aromatics, the whiskey a warm buttery base and the amontillado a bit of dry astringency. One that I will definitely be trying around Christmas time and a perfect excuse to buy even more sherry.

Anyways, as you might be able to tell I rather like the Sipsmith folks. Luckily they do produce good stuff (although their vodka recently got a bit of a thumbs down on the Bitters & Twisted blog) which I rather like drinking (although my house gin is still Tanqueray – I need to do another vertical gin tasting to try and see beyond the brands and kickstart my rubbish gin flavour memory) so I feel slightly less of a shill when I write a fairly glowing piece such as the above. However, their enthusiasm for making tasty boozes rubs off on you after a few minutes at the distillery or even just having a chat in Waitrose (one of the more random places I’ve bumped into Sam: doing a ‘Try my gin’ stand at the Westfield branch – it’s not often you see a company’s co-founder handing out samples of their booze on a Saturday afternoon down the supermarket). Long may they continue.

Sipsmith Sloe Gin
Sloe gin, 29%. ~£22

Sipsmith Damson Vodka
Damson vodka, 28%. ~£24

The project seems to have started with Dan deciding to do a documentary about his grandmother, who left Ukraine after the Russian revolution. However, after finally finding the family’s home he also found a spirit factory, still churning out vodka, and thus was a new documentary born. It’s currently appearing episodically on Babelgum, but it should be appearing on More4 next year after it’s been edited into a feature. There’s 6 episodes up out of the 24 of as my writing and there’s been a lot of wandering in the snow and looking a bit down so far, but I suspect that things are about to hot up…

Here’s the first episode (a bit of a longer, overview style one), here’s a link to the rest and there’s a new one appearing up on Babelgum every few days:

A few days back a clinky envelope flopped onto my desk at work, containing a couple of sample bottles of Dan’s Zorokovich 1917 for me to try, complete with bow and a label marked ‘Drink Me’. Named after his family and the year of the revolution its appearance and my mentioning it here does spoiler the end of the documentary a bit, but this post would feel a bit empty without some booze to drink.

I chilled one bottle down in the freezer and left the other at room temperature, as seems to be my vodka tasting regime, and I started with the warmer. On the nose it was sweet (and alcoholic) with a hint of mulchy cereal. In the mouth it was quite thick and oily, with quite a clean taste – a touch of mintiness, a hint of sweetness (maybe red berries?) and a slightly bitter finish. It did burn a bit on the way down, but it didn’t linger. The cold one got down to -16 before I got bored of waiting and had lost almost everything on the nose. To taste it was very clean, with little burn in the chest, with the sweetness and menthol/mint notes coming through if you sip and consider, but otherwise just a light honeyed sensation on the back of the tongue when it slips down.

I’m still very much learning about vodka and this one seems to do better chilled, with it being a bit oily for me when warm. Luckily my freezer is rather good and I rather liked it. I’m quite pleased that having joined the Vodka Club I now have a bottle of it somewhere in my future.

Update: I just got a mail from new father Dan (congratulations!) welcoming me to the Vodka Club, and it seems that the sample I got isn’t the final Zorokovich 1917, but the current top vodka the distillery produces. They’ve got the final version with a new recipe appearing in July, complete with supporting events that I will be keeping an eye out for…

Made by the people who used to be behind Tyrrell’s crisps, Chase (formerly Tyrrell’s) vodka is a small batch, British potato vodka made in Herefordshire with potatoes grown on the farm that is used to produce those for Tyrrell’s crisps. The internet seems to be slightly divided on the definitive timeline, but it seems that around the time that the original owner sold the Tyrrell’s brand he decided to branch out a bit and started making vodka. They also make another vodka from the farm’s apples (not an apple flavoured vodka, an apple based vodka – a clean spirit that just so happens to come from apples) which they also use as a basis for a recently released gin. It’s great what you can make with potatoes and apples.

Potato vodka is not so common these days, with my researches suggesting that the main issue is one of cost, with potato based spirit costing more than the regular grain based products that are the basis for most vodka. Chase is the only British potato vodka (although we do produce a bunch of other generally cheap and nasty white spirit that goes under the name of vodka from a variety of cereals and sugar products) and the comments out in the wild are not only about that uniqueness – they picked up the World’s Best Vodka award at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition back in March, beating 114 other vodkas submitted to the judges.

I decided to taste it both at room temperature, as advised by the makers, and, as is more traditional, cooled down in the freezer. At room temp it has the traditional vodka smell, but without much of the petrol notes you get off of cheaper vodkas. It’s sweet with an underlying bitterness and a hint of liquorice. It’s smooth drinking, with quite a thick and sweet taste, a creamy feel and lots of the liquorice from the nose fading to a bitter finish, with almost woody notes down the sides of the tongue.

Chilled down (to -18°C according to my slightly dodgy ‘probe’ – I tested it again this morning and it had hit -24°C. My freezer works much better than I thought – my first version of the picture to the left was at -4 and I almost stopped there) it still has a bit of nose, mainly just the hint of sweetness. In the mouth it’s much thicker, as you’d expect as it chills, and a lot of the taste has disappeared. The liquorice sweetness is still there and the finish is now clean, fading to general warmth quickly, with a buttery hint at the end. There’s still a creaminess, although more custardy now, and all in all it’s rather a nice package. It isn’t as flavourless as I’ve been told premium vodkas are meant to be, even when thrown down your throat in the ‘proper’ method of drinking, but it is creamy and sweet, has a short warm finish and overall actually tries to taste of something.

I’d love to say that I can taste the potatoes, and many of the tasting notes I’ve seen on the web claim their flavour is in there, but I reckon that was cleaned out somewhere earlier in the distillation process. It’s got a nice chunk of flavour and I’ll hopefully savour the bottle that’s sitting in my freezer, although it might come out soon to warm and be served with a bit of ice.

Chase Single Estate British Potato Vodka
40%. ~£30. Available in specialist shops and Waitrose.

We started off with BBR’s signature cocktail – a Pink Rhubarb Gin and Tonic. It was both sweet and tart, with a slug of rhubarby goodness running through it, and topped with a fairly stiff head that we assumed to be under the influence of egg white. For a G&T it wasn’t at all fizzy, which is good as I suspect that making it gassy wouldn’t have worked. We asked a waitress about the preparation and after a quick disappearance to consult with the bar she came back with a rough recipe: add rhubarb and sugar to Bombay Sapphire and heat until things are about to start bubbling; turn off the heat and leave overnight; strain the liquor to give a rhubarb infused gin; mix with tonic and ice, shake and serve. The egg whitey head is actually brought about the high sugar content and our theories of rhubarb syrups were all shown to be rather pedestrian – a nice drink with an impressive effort behind it.

The plan for the tasting was to try five vodkas, each with a different piece of zakuski. At this point the difference to a whisky or wine tasting became apparent – the vodka wasn’t particularly meant to be tasted. Very specifically, the history of vodka production has involved continued refinement of the process to try and remove more and more of the bad products of distillation, giving as clean and light a taste as possible (as well as minimal headaches and a continued ability to see) – cheap vodkas may taste of petrol cut with meths, but expensive ones will barely taste at all. Luckily Leonid was away for the day and Richard was not quite as harsh a tasting master as his colleague rumoured to be, allowing me to have a bit of a sniff and sip as long as I knocked back a chunk of the booze, as is the Proper Way Of Doing Things.

First up we had a Kauffman Special Selected Vintage 2006 – Kauffman’s vodka is made using grains of a specific year, hence the use of a vintage in the description, and produced in very small batches. As with wine, certain years are said to have produced especially good vintages, with 2003 and 2006 being singled out recently. That said, they haven’t been producing the spirit for long, with their website only listing the 2002, 2003 and 2005 vintages. A quick knock back of the first half the glass showed a surprising smoothness, with a fairly even distribution of flavour, a good mouthfeel and a nice warmth (rather than burn) on the way down. A bit more of a sip and savour revealed a honeyed sweetness across the whole tongue and a long grainy finish.

Next we followed along the range with a taste of the Kauffman Private Collection Luxury Vintage 2003, a name with way too many qualifiers in it for my liking. This was one of 25,000 bottles to be produced from the harvest (the Special Selected Vintages run to about 45,000) and was the most expensive vodka of the afternoon, coming in at about £12 a shot on the BBR menu. The initial chuck down the throat gave a more aquavit-y sensation, with the centre of the tongue going almost untouched by taste, with a bit more of a sensation down the throat and a gentle warming feeling spreading out across the chest. With a bit more of a swill around the mouth the centre of the tongue stayed unworried, but a pleasant pepperiness crept across the sides of the tongue to go with a sweetness similar to the 2006. Very clean tasting, I can see why this is a favourite amongst ‘real’ vodka drinkers.

After these two we took a break for food, as previous tastings had seen a marked decline in tasters who drank through without a break. Accompanying the first two vodkas we’d had jellied ox tongue with quails eggs and horseradish (which I thought was excellent, despite the jelly fear in some of the other tasters – the horseradish was especially good and quite happily edible on its own with a long spoon), and salmon roe on hard-boiled quail’s eggs (which, due to a rather serious love of big roe, happily went down my neck). We were now confronted with some slightly larger dishes to share, with the week’s special of scallop, black pudding and cox’s apple with watercress and chives (not my fave – a bit too dry a black pudding for my liking, although Richard did say that they deliberately went for such a beast, and I don’t really see what the fuss about scallops is, even if these were rather nice), blaeberry wine cured Orkney beef with celeriac, blueberries and hazelnuts (this was rather excellent, although the bluberries were confused for olives and then grapes before a final realisation of their identity), goat’s cheese salad with pickled beetroot (which I avoided due to a dislike of goaty cheese), and potted shrimp with watercress, croutons and lemon (which I started craving while writing this after seeing the picture – butter with a few prawns in on crunchy toast…tasty). It was all rather tasty and definitely a good bit of fortification for the next few drinks.

After a quick table clearing we were presented with glasses of Beluga Vodka. There was some discussion as to the nature of its relationship to the Beluga sturgeon, spawner of tasty caviar, and eventually we came down on the side of associating itself with luxury. The vodka is made in the middle of nowhere, pulling its water from a local well with no industry within 300km of the distillery, a big flag displaying the spirits march towards purity. On the quick throw down the throat it came across as much more prickly, raising the hackles of my tongue, and causing more of a reaction as it wandered down to the stomach. Going slower, it had much more flavour, with grain coming through a lot more than the sweetness of the earlier vodkas. This may be a fault for the Russian connoisseurs, but it’s the sort of thing I like – being able to actually taste my drink – and I thought it to be rather good.

We quickly followed on to Russian Standard Imperia. This was the first producer of the day that I’d heard of already, as I use the basic Russian Standard as my regular vodka at home. I don’t drink a lot of it on its own, but mainly use it to extract flavours from things to make flavoured spirits. I suspect I will write up my experiments sometime in the future, but for now the regular vodka is quite rough, but good at having its flavour masked by other things. The Imperia is a different kettle of fish, based on a recipe by Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, it’s been around for a while and had its recipe declared to be ‘The Standard of Vodka’ in 1894. The production process strikes me as maybe going too far, with 8 distillations and two filterings through quartz (I don’t even know how that would work…). I chucked half of it down my throat, as was becoming usual by now, and got much more of a burn than previously, with a much bigger taste of grain. On the nose this was the first to be easily discernible, with hints of caraway in with the regular alcoholic whiff, and in the mouth it had a touch of vanilla and a long warm finish – nice, but not quite as smooth as the others.

Finally we got to the last vodka of the tasting – Stolichnaya Vodka Elite. Described as being much rougher than the rest despite being an expensive premium vodka, this one was included to show us how refined the top vodkas at BBR are. True to form I necked half of it and got a nice burn down the throat and a chunk of grain across the tongue, definitely a bit more to it than the earlier ones. It had a slightly sweet smell and lots of flavour – honey and grain rolling around the mouth. Again, this was up my street and I quite enjoyed it, but it’s definitely not as close to the Russian ideal of clean flavour that was displayed by the Kauffmans.

The last three vodkas were accompanied by some more zakuski and we were treated to Meat Pelmeni (meatballs wrapped in noodles – a russian ravioli – served with vinegar and sour cream. These were my favourite thing of the day, excellently moreish and enough to get me to return on their own), Malosol Cucumbers (baby cucumbers cured in brine until crispy, an easy win for someone who likes both salty food and crunchy cucumber like me. I may have to make some of these at home) and Salo on Rye Bread (wafer thin slices of cured pork fat on rye bread. The fat melted in the mouth into a smoky butter that then infused the highly flavoured bread – it was almost great, but there was a bit too much bread for the [still quite large] amount of salo, so it turned into a bit too much of a rye fest for my liking) which continued the filling process to the extent that we turned down en masse an offer of Sunday lunch. We were, however, offered another go at whichever vodka the group liked the best, and after some umming and ahhing the consensus appeared to be the first one that we tasted – the Kauffman Special Selected Vintage 2006. It balanced the lack of flavour that the producers were going for with some very pleasant flavours, making it a very worthy favourite. I may not be grabbing a bottle for my freezer (at about £70 a go) but I may have to have a try next time I see some.

My favourite of the tasting was the Beluga – prickly and full of flavour while still rather smooth and easy to throw down the throat if need be. I may seek out a bottle and then offend the Russians by drinking the occasional shot slowly over ice. I wonder how cold my freezer is…

Many thanks again to Richard for leading us through the vodka, telling tales of running a restaurant and filling us with food; Siany for organising the thing (and letting me go along) and Qype for keeping their website going so that I can go and do such things.

Vodka Kauffman Special Selected Vintage 2006
40%. Approx £70 per 70cl bottle

Vodka Kauffman Private Collection Luxury Vintage 2003
40%. Approx £140 per 70cl bottle

Beluga Vodka
40%. Approx £40 per 70cl bottle

Imperia by Russian Standard
40%. Approx £30 per 70cl bottle

Vodka Elite by Stolichnaya
40%. Approx £40 per 70cl bottle

Bob Bob Ricard is at 1 Upper James Street, Soho, London W1F 9DF and they are lovely.

Siany’s Qype blog post is up and there are a bunch of reviews appearing on BBR’s page

I’ve already written about the inaugural Blaggers’ Banquet over on my other blog, but as I was a barman I thought I’d post something here about the cocktails we banged out during the evening.

Firstly, due to the donation of a case of Sipsmith Vodka and Gin, we acquired a bottle of vermouth (later complimented by the bottle on the bar at Hawksmoor when we ran out), some lemons and olives, and made Martinis. All the bar staff had, as is tradition, a different idea of what made a good Martini, and after some customer interaction most people seemed to slide under the table, pleased.

Gin/Vodka and tonic doesn’t really count as cocktails in my head (along with ‘Screwdrivers’ – just because you give it a fancy name doesn’t jazz up the fact that it’s vodka and orange) but as we were using Fever Tree tonic they were slightly different to normal. I’m a big fan of tonic water – I’ve got 3 litres of it in the fridge at the moment, the only carbonated drink therein, and I drink it on its own, untouched by alcoholic beverage. When I’m not drinking booze when out, tonic or orange and tonic is my drink of choice, and for years the only one I’ve been able to drink is Schweppes. I think it must be baked bean syndrome – if it’s not Heinz then they don’t taste right – as while I rather liked Fever Tree it wasn’t Right. Schweppes made be full of aspartame (a substance that makes me feel ill in any other drink than tonic or, randomly, Lilt Zero) but it has a certain bite to it that was softened out in the Fever Tree tonic, relegating it to a worthy second place in my heathen brain. It did make an excellent gin and tonic though, especially when combined with my OCD wiping of lime on the glass and other ritualistic G&T construction. A special thanks goes to @degs123, who later in the evening announced to all and sundry that I made the best gin and tonic in the world. Even when we ran out of gin and switched over to vodka…

Next up were our three cocktails:

Picture by Mark of FoodByMark

Cornish ‘Champagne’ Cocktail

What:
1 cube sugar
1 teaspoon of quince liqueur
1 glass of Chapel Down sparkling british wine

How:
Combine in the order above. Serve. Simple…

I didn’t get a chance to try one of these, but having tasted the ingredients separately (including popping a sugar cube) I’m suspecting they combined together to form a very sweet Kir Royale. I don’t really drink fizzy wine (formerly due to it giving me headaches, these days due to me being an unappreciative heathen who it’s wasted on) but the few people who braved the cornishness seemed pleased.

Black Velvet

What:
1/2 a glass of Chapel Down sparkling British wine
1/2 a glass of Curious Brew Admiral Porter

How:
Combine, trying not to make it explode everywhere. Wine then porter should help, if the porter’s cold, but it generally exploded everywhere.

A take on the Guinness and champagne black velvet and another I didn’t get a chance to try. I did manage to blag a few bottles of the porter on the way out and it was a rather nice dark malty porter that I think would have gone well with the wine. However, it was very lively and if it’s not very chilled then there is distinct potential for porter detonation, as happened to me as I cracked a bottle on the way home after the banquet.

Photo by Carmen Valino

Blagger-tini

What:
2 shots Chegworth Valley Apple and Raspberry juice
2 shots vodka
1 shot Galliano Balsamico
Lemon wedge and basil to garnish

How:
Put ingredients in a shaker with ice, shake. Strain into a champagne coupe (or whatever vaguely fancy glass you can find in the fridge of the nice bar who are hosting you), garnish with basil and a lemon slice.

Invented just before the doors opened by Mel Seasons, this was the success of the night, polishing off the whole bottle of Galliano Balsamico (which was weird but nice and blagged by Huw Gott, Hawksmoor bossman. There may be some more up for grabs in the auctions soon…) and most of the vodka. It took several iterations to iron out the alcoholic punch to the face (ably assisted by official drink guinea pig and 1/2 of the music for the night, Julian of Georgia Wonder) and in the end it was an interestingly sweet and savoury drink, nicely complimented by the flavours of the garnish.

Anyways, the Blaggers’ Banquet fund raising machine continues, adding to the nice pot already netted for Action Against Hunger, with a set of eBay auctions for some more blagged stuff. There may be some booze appearing on there, depending on eBay rules and whether we had anything auctionable left, but as of now there’s tea at the Ritz, a visit from a chocolate van and a REALLY BIG PIE amongst other things. Bid on the shiny, you know you want to.

The bar team were me, Mel Seasons, Dan, Ben Bush, Tim Hayward and Elly