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Meet the Distiller | Sipsmith With a nod to the past and a look to the future, Sipsmith continues doing what it does best
distillery – the rebirth of craft gin is a recent development. This is almost hard to believe considering the hundreds of craft gin distilleries today in the UK – or the hundreds that used to exist in the 19th century.
New HMRC figures show a record number of distilleries were registered in the UK in 2020 – growing by over 124 in 12 months – for the first time, with Covid-19 failing to put the brakes on the distillery boom. This figure is up 28 percent on 2019, doubling the number of UK distilleries in four years, for a total number of over 560.
Remarkably, the number of distilleries in England has almost tripled since 2016, which was the same year that the gin boom helped the number of English distilleries overtake Scotland for the first time, according to the Wine & Spirit Trade Association.
In another first, England’s distillery numbers have now passed 300, with 311 registered distilleries in 2020. Scotland has increased its number of distilleries to 214, and Wales and Northern Ireland saw distillery numbers grow too.
“Personally, I think that gin is simply recovering its own position in the market,” says Brown. “If you look at the enduring dominance of whisky, gin at one time was up there and then gin fell out of favour.
“Today, gin is simply returning. When we started, there were 12 distilleries making 20 brands of gin in Britain. “This is the spirit of England – born in London – and there were only 12 distilleries making it! Think of that in IPA terms. Imagine a time in the history of IPA, when there were only a dozen breweries making it.”
Doug Hunter, Sipsmith’s head of operations in London and formerly of Fuller’s, agrees with Brown. “Sipsmith is now becoming a much more established brand, but I think what Sipsmith captured when they started was the reintroduction of gin as our national drink. That had been lost somewhere,” says Hunter.
“Gin was incredibly unfashionable; that was simply because people weren’t drinking very good gins at the time. That’s where Sipsmith can take a great level of credit, in that they captured the essence of making the best gin that you could in a traditional method.”
One of the reasons for the higher proportion of new gin distilleries opening, compared to other spirits, is that gin is relatively easy to make, requires no longterm barrel aging and – depending on one’s ambitions – investment is generally lower for gin.
Outside of the big players and a small number of craft distilleries, the base alcohol or ‘neutral spirit’ is made elsewhere. In theory then, gin makers are more ‘redistillers’ than distillers. You can take a gin distillery class in the morning and literally be drinking your gin by the evening. But, while making gin is a breeze, making good gin is anything but.
Which then begs the question: What makes a good gin?
LEAD FLAVOUR
“Ah…first it has to lead with juniper, but that’s a bit like saying wine is made with grapes,” says Brown.
According to the master distiller, gin has to be made with juniper from the north Mediterranean. While the juniper plant grows sub-Arctic to sub-tropic all the way around the northern hemisphere, only in the north Mediterranean do you have the terroir that produces that particular flavour of soft pine, sweet citrus that comes up in good gin.
“I’ve worked with juniper from Britain, it tastes like moss. I’ve worked with juniper from the American Rockies. It’s intensely sweet, almost a bubble gum, with that particular flavour underlying. So for me, I will only work with juniper from the north Mediterranean.
“But what more broadly makes a good gin, the satiation point in the glass?” says Brown. “I can make a product that will blow you away on first sip. “But you can’t get through a glass of it. And so, I always want the satiation point to be somewhere just below the stem of that glass, or just below the bowl, just at the stem. “So when you finish that, it seems like it
might be a good idea to just have one more, that your taste buds haven’t been overloaded and washed out and blown away.”
“What makes a great gin is a gin built on the classic structure of gin. You can make amazing spirits, the sky’s the limit in creative combination of botanicals. “But if you want to call it a gin, then there is structure to that. A bit like the difference between modern interpretive dance and classical ballet. And when you want ballet, you don’t want them busting out with garbage can lids and doing Stomp.
“So that’s really what I personally strive for, is to build on the wisdom of the collective generations of the master distillers who came before me,” says Brown. “What I quickly found out that making gin is like conducting an orchestra of botanicals. Brass, woodwinds, percussion and violins, and getting them in harmony. This is the toughest thing I’ve ever done in distillation.”
To accomplish this, Brown and his wife Anistatia Miller poured over gin recipes from the 19th century and earlier, to define in taste what exactly is gin.
Recipes that Brown and his wife found in the Distiller of London, (published in 1639), were written in two different codes. Even with her Masters in History at Oxford and a second in paleography and cryptography, it took Miller a year to decipher, thanks in no part to someone translating it in 1667 and getting it wrong.
One of the recipes has juniper berries, lemon peels, orange peels, and spice supported. As Brown says, it’s practically modern London Dry Gin except after distillation, it was rested on raspberries and strawberries and sweeten a touch.
What Brown finds exciting about this recipe is that it predates the idea that gin came to England via English sailors serving on Dutch ships during the Thirty Years War. Sipsmith has followed this recipe and created a pink gin that had a “One of the rules that I’ve had both in the distillery and as judge of countless cocktail competitions around the world is, when you feel like you’ve nailed it, schedule an evening, sit down with a friend and have three,” says Brown.
“Have a good beer. People who go to a pub, they’ll have three of them. A cocktail, people will go to a bar, they’ll have three. If you can’t drink three of what you’ve created. “What was the point in creating it? If you can’t get past that first sip and that first sip is truly amazing, find me a success where it will only ever be that one sip.”
SELLING-UP OR SELLING-OUT
In talking with Logan Plant, founder of Beavertown Brewery in London, he explains it as simply of this. Beavertown could continue on as it was and in a good few years, he’d have enough revenue to finally do with it what he always dreamed – creating a new brewery and visitor centre in the form of Beaverworld. Or, he could bring in Heineken as a minority partner and the dream could happen now.
As logical as that decision was, some beer fans called the brewery a sellout and some bottle shops made the decision to not stock Beavertown beer Indeed, in looking at buy-outs around the world, there seems to be a fine line as to whether selling part or all of a craft company to a major player is the kiss of death in quality, or simply makes a product more available to more customers.
With Sipsmith, as they drove around the streets of London making gin deliveries off the back of a scooter, they must have thought there had to be a better way.
The dream the founders had was fairly simple: To be available in a meaningful way throughout the gin-loving world, and to be around in 200-years’ time. By 2016, Sipsmith had 35 staff and was growing at 60 to 70 percent a year, with exports at 30 percent, but the perception was Sipsmith was failing at the international market, having had difficulties with three distributors.
To get to where they thought Sipsmith should be, in 2016 they sold a majority stake for a reported £50 million to Beam Suntory.
At the time of the sale, Jonny Forsyth, global drinks analyst at the market analysts Mintel, said it was no surprise that Beam Suntory had bought Sipsmith as the major spirits producers recognised they faced a challenge from fast-growing craft brands. “Millennial consumers, in particular, really value small-batch heritage spirit brands rather than big brands with a more mainstream audience. “It is a lot like the craft beer where we’ve seen big brands say ‘it’s time we bought these brands before they become big competition’.” The outcome? In an informal survey, Distillers Journal could find no long-time fans of Sipsmith who noticed anything different over the years except that it maybe got better. And, it’s a lot easier to find Sipsmith elsewhere in the world.
“I think a lot of credit goes down to the founders of the business,” says Hunter. “There were a lot of people interested in buying Sipsmith at the time I think every
major spirits company was interested in or they expressed an interest at some point or another.
“But what the guys did was that they picked a partner [Beam Suntory] that they felt would allow them to have a level of autonomy. And the important thing about Sipsmith is, Sipsmith is run as an autonomous business unit. It has its own board. “The reporting structure is still the founders. One of our founders, Fairfax, is the managing director or CEO, and Sam is the chairman. Jared is still very, very much on board from a liquid perspective and being really one of the major faces of the brand.”
“They allow us to run the model as we wish to…if anything, they encouraged us to keep doing what we’re doing,” he says.
CRAFT OR MAINSTAY
If you ask Jared Brown if Sipsmith is still a craft gin or become mainstay, you should go to the toilet first, pour yourself a coffee – or gin – and get comfortable because you’re in for a long answer.
However, it can be summed up in this. From the beginning with Prudence, Sipsmith could have making 9,000 liter batches but they choose to make only 300 liters. In the 1870s, Brown says that distillers worked out how they could be making more money, cranking out the 9,000 liter batches at the expense of quality.
“But we stuck with what they had settled into in the 1850s, which to me is when gin was perfected, when gin hit that pinnacle of quality that we aspire to,” he says.
Although Prudence has been joined by two other ‘sister’ stills to increase production, there has still been days where they can’t produce enough gin to meet demand. Considering that you find Sipsmith on the top row of shops, with a price tag to match, this says a lot to how gin drinkers perceive Sipsmith.
According to Hunter, spirit consumers are much more discernible today. Looking back at the gin range from 20-years-ago, gin was pretty bland, the same as with beer.
“What we’ve seen now is that [the industry] has exploded, and that’s a good thing because consumers have choice,” says Hunter. “They’re looking for different things, but what they’re looking for more than anything else is the quality of the spirit that they’re drinking to be as good as it possibly can be and they’re prepared to pay a premium for that.
“If you’d have told me, as someone who worked at brewery 15 years ago, that someone will walk into a pub in London and pay 10 pounds for a pint, I would have laughed at you.
“But the reality is, that is the case. And gin is no different. People will pay an appropriate price for a very, very good liquid.”
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