Sacred Gin - Sacred Spirits Company

S AC RE D
SPIRITS
You don’t get much more ‘cottage industry’ than Ian Hart,
who makes gin, vodka and vermouth from his home in a leafy
street in Highgate, north London. Now selling direct to
around 50 bars across the capital, the craft distiller is
producing 1,000 bottles a month, and has started shipping his
spirit to the US. Having spent much of his career in finance, on
Wall Street and in the City of London, his new-found success
in the spirits world has come as something of a surprise.
Words: Simon Difford & Ian Cameron Pictures: Dan Malpass
an Hart admits to having been “completely naive” when he started distilling
and infusing botanicals to make a gin. In fact, he’d only really been mucking
around with equipment that he’d been using to ‘re-engineer’ his vast
collection of fine wine. It was only when a group of G&T ‘guinea pigs’ in his local
pub, The Wrestlers, gave it the thumbs up that he realised he had a viable
commercial operation from the crude still he’d set up in his living room.
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That Ian found himself playing with his wine collection at all was merely the
latest manifestation of a series of wacky inventions and experiments that he
pursued in a bid to forge a new career for himself. Caractacus Potts-style, he
envisioned tapping into – no, creating! – new markets for products that
people didn’t know they yet needed. From portable radars that the police
could use to detect knives to creating a low-cost source of wireless electricity,
his pursuits betrayed the presence of a fantastically intellectual mind and a
struggle to create something tangible following an ultimately unsatisfactory
career in the world of financial services.
After studying natural sciences in the 1980s at Cambridge, Ian began his
life in the real world running his own mobile phone company. This was back
when phones were huge, brick-shaped – and only just about mobile – status
symbols. At one point, the company was selling 25 per cent of all the cell
phones in London. Unfortunately, amid the recession of the 1980s, the
under-capitalised, highly-geared company went under and Ian thought that if
he was going to pursue a career at all associated with business, he had better
get some solid financial knowledge under his belt.
He decided on an MBA, and in 1992 headed to the University of
California at Berkeley, San Francisco, where he majored in ‘financial
engineering’. Today the city is home to a number of respected craft distillers,
but back then it was better known for its craft beers, though gave little thought
as to its potential impact on his later life. “I remember being impressed with
its micro-breweries – Sierra Nevada was beginning to be something and
Anchor steam was quite small. I remember the brewing equipment being on
display in bars. But I’ve been a wine collector since I was 18 and I think I
thought if I ever exited the financial world, it would be wine, not beer, and I
never thought I would be in spirits.”
While some of his fellow graduates went on to academia, or to start
wineries in nearby Napa, Ian headed back east, settling in New York as a
trader on a hedge fund on Wall Street. “It was great fun,” he recalls. “There we
were, a lot of young, fun, intelligent guys playing with large amounts of
money, sometimes as much as $500m – a bit like Gordon Gekko I suppose.”
His expertise in a world of government bonds, exotic options and credit
derivatives saw him return to London in the late ‘90s, headhunted to work as a
trader for a Japanese bank, trading using practices now outlawed as unacceptably risky. “Everything we were doing then has just been banned. I left way
before the problems but even then I knew what exactly was going on and the
management didn’t always know the huge gambles people were taking. We all
had many dicey moments. The most I lost in a day was £2.5m, though others
would not know when to quit and on occasion you would see someone’s desk
taken over and find out they had lost £25m or £30m. It was very disturbing
and that’s why I left trading in the end.”
He continued in finance for the next four years, through to 2007, when the
recession began to bite and found himself out of a job, and it was then that he
decided he needed a new career unconnected to the cyclical uncertainty of
the world of finance. Returning to his family home in Highgate, the inventor
inside emerged, and he began to tread what looks like a decidedly strange path
towards the world of alcohol.
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First was the world of Tesla coils – the means to ‘broadcast’ or transmit
electrical power. At this stage it was more a question of experimentation for its
own sake, not quite knowing where it would take him. He recalls assembling a
coil that created an 11kW field – when he switched it on, all the bulbs in his
house began to glow. One can only imagine how Ian’s neighbours regarded his
experiments – perhaps something like Doc Brown from Back to the Future?
Next came his idea of using microwave electronics to develop a hand-held
‘knife radar’ for police that could detect pieces of metal between 5cm and 15cm
within a 20-30m range. He taught himself to make circuit boards but realised
his level of engineering was not good enough. Unwilling to return to university,
he looked now to the collection of wine he had accumulated over the years.
Looking for inspiration to the garagistes of Bordeaux – a group of
innovative wine-makers who endeavoured to create less tannic wines that were
palatable with less aging – he set about attempting to re-engineer his vintage
wine, breaking it down into its constituent parts and then carefully reassembling it. In particular this was about reducing its water content.
“I had a hunch that there was something that could be done,” he says. “The
garagistes were using vacuum apparatus to evaporate water off wet grapes prior
to fermentation, and arguably 99 per cent of wine suffers from this.”
Assembling a refrigeration conditioning pump, a crude vacuum chamber,
automotive vacuum tubing, an argon gas canister and a £15 aquarium pump, he
assembled a crude still (“I had never heard of rotavaps,” he says) where he
could separate out methanol (which carries the bouquet of all wines), ethyl
alcohol, other vaporisable aromatics and the water from 20-plus year-old wine.
“It had the most amazing result when I tried it with sweet white wine
(Sauternes) and vintage port. From a 750ml bottle of wine you can take off
200ml of water, then recombine the bouquet and alcohol and the syrup left in
vacuum chamber. It was absolutely stupendous.”
Again, however, he hit a brick wall and couldn’t work out how to make the
operation commercially viable. More out of blind curiosity than anything else,
he began playing with neutral spirit and some botanicals that he had
accumulated. Just when he was not expecting it, and through a process of trial
and error, he happened on a formula for gin that proved popular.
The unique selling proposition of Sacred Gin, and the inspiration for its
name, is the inclusion of frankincense among the botanicals. “I can’t quite
remember when exactly it came in to the mix, but I recalled its fantastic
fragrance from church services. It wasn’t deliberately gimmicky or anything, I
just found it an uplifting fragrance and flavour, a perfect resinous note
balancing juniper and citrus.”
Having won the approval of his fellow drinkers at The Wrestlers, the
landlord put it on the back-bar in late 2008 and Ian, realising how he might have
finally created a new career for himself, began working through a list of about
30 venues around London that he thought might take his gin.
“This was just before the recent gin craze really took hold,” he says.
“Sipsmith were only just setting up for instance. We got the cold shoulder from
quite a few places, so we were totally surprised when we walked into Dukes
Hotel and Alessandro Palazzi agreed to take a bottle off us. We’d never been to
Dukes and didn’t really know about its Martini history. And we didn’t even
order a drink. But a week later, he rang back and asked for six more and has been
a great supporter ever since.”
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Having taken soundings from Beefeater’s Desmond Payne and others, [including
CLASS’s Simon Difford], Ian adjusted the pricing of his premium product,
dropped the inverted magnums he had been making for his pub buyers, stuck to
regular-sized bottles and concentrated on creating a wholly more premium brand.
He acquired the bureaucratic necessities needed to work his still at home – duty
stamps, a compounder’s licence and a warehouse owner’s licence and a municipal
safety certificate – and began operations in earnest.
All distillates and infusions are created from the living room at the back of his
house, and all blending takes place here too. Initially he would distribute bottles
himself, but now bottling is the responsibility of Thames Distillers or Hayman
Distillers. Ian tends to hire a van and take batches of gin or vodka to them in 25-litre
kegs. Coe Vintners distribute the spirit.
Today, he produces 1,000 bottles a month from his Highgate house, where a
daily struggle takes place in order that the family home is not totally obstructed
with piles of cardboard boxes, labels and scientific equipment. His first shipment to
the US is currently being distributed to 35 states.
“I know that some people would characterize me as eccentric, but I think it's
only because I have the ambition to do things that other people have not done
before - inventor, yes, but I have been studying sciences, alcohol and business for a
long time. I look up to James Dyson, Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal for
example! It’s that combination of engineering, technology and food and drink.”
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PRODUCTION
The quick answer to how Ian makes Sacred Spirits is that he macerates
botanicals in wheat grain neutral spirit before diluting that spirit with distilled
water, then uses reduced pressure distillation to produce highly concentrated
botanical flavoured spirits. These are blended and hydrated to make products
such as Sacred Gin, and/or sold as ‘varietal’ botanical spirits. All quite
straightforward? Perhaps. That is, apart from what ‘reduced pressure distillation’ is and that fact that this operation takes place in his living room.
So what is reduced pressure distillation? Separating ethanol from water
and other chemicals is possible due to their differing boiling points. At normal
atmospheric pressure alcohol boils at around 78.5°C and water boils at 100°C,
thus alcohol is more volatile than water and will escape from the body of the
boiling liquid more readily than water. Hence, ethanol vapours can be
separated and condensed to produce liquid ethanol.
Often referred to as ‘vacuum distillation’, reduced pressure distillation
works on the principle that the lower the pressure the lower the boiling point
of liquids, including water and ethanol. Thus the use of a vacuum pump allows
you to reduce the pressure and so distil at temperatures barely warmer than a
hot summer’s day. Ian distils each botanical separately under a vacuum
ranging from 1/12th atmosphere to 1/6th atmosphere. He says reduced
pressure distillation “results in distillates that taste fresher when compared to
the result of traditional distillation where delicate botanical aromatics have
been damaged by heat”.
There is also a ‘negative activated carbon effect’ from distilling botanicals
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separately. When botanicals are distilled together, as in traditional gin distillation, the
presence of just one single absorbing element will affect the entire gin as it will absorb
flavours from its neighbouring botanicals.
Thus reduced pressure and reduced temperature of Ian’s distillation method also
means three dimensional terpenes such a limonene, geraniol, pinene, eucalyptol and
terpenoids such as citral, menthol etc. do not have the opportunity to stereoisomerise
into their more ‘stewed’ versions, which would be recognised as ‘marmalady’ and bitter
flavours, often prevalent in gins distilled at higher temperatures.
Ian’s set up starts with a two-stage rotary vane vacuum pump of the type usually used
to prime refrigeration systems. When it runs this throws out an oily mist which covers its
immediate environment, so it has been consigned to what used to be his children’s
wendyhouse in the garden. A pipe into and out of this vacuum pump runs into the living
room through the window, then into and out of the distilling equipment spread out on
the dining room table.
Ian distils at 25˚C to 50˚C depending on the botanical being distilled. He has found
that 40˚C is the maximum temperature that botanicals which are sensitive to heat can
be distilled at without denigration of flavour. Above this, the molecules in the
botanicals’ essential oils are liable to be damaged by the heat. The same is true of human
beings: if you have a fever over 43˚C then your protein molecules would be fatally bent
out of shape.
Ian’s system is basically a series of laboratory glass chambers connected by glass and
silicone piping. Within this there are three different boiling points, each a glass chamber
still in water baths of distilled water heated using laboratory style controllable electric
heaters. A magnetic stirrer in each vessel ensures the heat is evenly distributed to avoid
what Ian calls ‘bumping’ in the still.
Each of the three still chambers is connected to a condenser cooled by a cooling
system powered by a domestic central heating water pump and water tank. Blocks of ice
made in the family’s chest freezer are placed in the water tank and the cold water is then
pumped around the system. The distilled spirit condenses and fills glass collecting
chambers linked to each condenser. Ian used to also use CO2 cooling in the system but
no longer uses dry ice as he found it to be of little extra benefit, as liquid nitrogen
captures all relevant distillate that the water cooling lets escape.
Around the system Ian has isolator valves so he can close off any of the three still
chambers, and what he calls indicator chambers after each of the still chambers. If one of
these fogs up then it means not all the spirit vapour is being caught by that condenser
and he needs to turn down the heat on that still to slow distillation, otherwise vapour
could travel round the system and damage the vacuum pump. A liquid nitrogen cold
finger at the end of the system also helps protect the vacuum pump by catching any last
vapour in the system. This has the benefit of also catching and collecting fascinating
volatile elements with low molecular weight, such as light ethers and esters.
Pumping air out of the system minimises oxidation damage, particularly important
when distilling fragile botanicals such as tomato stalks. To do this Ian first fills the
system with CO2 and then pumps most of the CO2 out again using the vacuum pump.
By this process any possibility of damage by oxygenation is removed.
This Heath Robinson-style laboratory distilling equipment may sit on the dining
room table of a suburban family home in north London but rest assured it is fully
licensed. Ian starts with a high quality English wheat neutral spirit distilled in
Manchester, which he buys duty paid (rather than under bond). He is not actually
making alcohol, just redistilling it with botanicals, so there is no additional excise duty
payable. Also as the base spirit is of such high neutrality there is no danger of health
threatening methanol in his finished distillates.
Ian stores the results of each distillation separately, blending them together to make
his gin. This highly concentrated mix of botanical distillates is sent to the bottlers where
it is diluted with wheat neutral alcohol and purified water.
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Sacred Gin
Sacred Gin is what led Ian Hart into being an award winning micro distiller. He
continues to uses reduced pressure distillation to separately distil each of the
twelve botanicals (in English wheat spirit), which include juniper, cardamom,
nutmeg and Boswellia Sacra (aka Hougary Frankincense) from which the
product name is derived. He then blends batches of each botanical distillate to
create the concentrated botanical spirits which he then blends according to his
own tried and tested recipe to created Sacred Gin.
Tasting: Crystal clear. Subdued, pine-fresh juniper-led nose with delicate violet
and estery aromas. Dry, piney juniper, pilau rice and peppery spiced palate. Long
spicy finish with lingering pine, juniper, red pepper corns. 4/5
Sacred Spiced Vodka
40% alc./vol.
Flavoured with seven individually macerated and then reduced pressure
distilled spices, including Indonesian cubeb berries, angelica, nutmeg, frankincense (Boswella Sacra) and hand cut fresh citrus. Each bottle of this unique
vodka, made from the same English wheat spirit, is individually numbered. No
sugar or sweetener is used, but incorporates three citrus wholefruits – the pips,
juice and peel of oranges, lemons and limes.
Tasting: Crystal clear. Clean delicately spicy nose with faint aromas of fennel,
nuts, dill and aniseed. Superbly balanced, very delicately spiced palate. The spice
notes are present in levels low enough to add interest and delicate flavour while
integrating with grain spirit notes rather than dominating. Flavours of pine
needle, lavender and brazil nuts. Peppery spirit spice sits well with the peppery
cubeb berries. Yes it’s spiced but delicately so. Cleansing, strangely sweet
lingering peppery finish with cleansing aniseed and eucalyptus. 5/5
Sacred Open Sauce Botanical Collections
I like to take some credit for the creation of Sacred’s Botanical spirits as it was
something I suggested Ian launched when I first saw his distilling operation back
in August 2009. Each of the spirits is made by steeping botanicals in organic
grain spirit and then distilled each separately under vacuum at low temperatures.
They are all 100% organic and approved by the Soil Association.
These are available as two ‘collections’ consisting of six 20cl bottles of
botanical distillations, the ‘Traditional Collection’ allows one to blend a gin
using flavours found in old London dry gins, while ‘Contemporary Collection’
has flavours found in modern gins. Obviously the all essential juniper is one of
the six flavours in both collections.
The booklet which accompanies the collection suggests tasting each of the
botanicals and then blending a bespoke gin by mixing 25ml juniper with 10ml
citrus or pink grapefruit and then adding 1-2ml of other sectioned botanical distillations, tasting as you go.
Open Sauce botanicals are also useful when conducting gin tastings as a
comparative way of helping to determine the botanicals flavours in the gin being
tasted. Many bartenders will also see Open Sauce as being the ultimate range of
herbal and spiced vodkas.
The ‘Traditional Collection’ comprises one 200ml bottle of each: juniper,
mixed citrus, angelica, cardamom, liquorice and coriander. The ‘Contemporary
Collection’ contains one 200ml bottle of each: juniper, pink grapefruit, nutmeg,
star anise, orris and cassia. As well as part of these two collections, many of the
Sacred botanical spirits are now available as stand-alone products.
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Sacred Pink Grapefruit
Botanical Distillate
40% alc./vol.
Flavoured by steeping hand-cut organic Spanish Citrus Paradisi pink
grapefruits (peel, pith, juice and pips) in English wheat spirit and then
delicately low-pressure distilled at low temperatures. Each distillate has
water and some extra wheat spirit added, to prevent finished spirits
appearing cloudy and with citrus oil droplets floating on the surface.
Tasting: Crystal clear. Subdued, clean nose with grainy peppery spirit
aromas as evident as sweet, delicately fruity grapefruit. Delicate sweet pink
grapefruit flavours fight for attention on a peppery spiced palate. Cracked
black pepper and citrusy grapefruit alternately feature in the long, fresh
finish. 3.5/5
Sacred Juniper Organic
Botanical Distillate
40% alc./vol.
Flavoured by steeping organic Bulgarian Juniperus Communis berries in
English wheat spirit and then delicately low-pressure distilled at low temperatures. Again, water and some extra wheat spirit is added, to prevent the
finished spirit appearing cloudy and with citrus oil droplets floating on the
surface.
Tasting: Crystal clear. Fresh, clean, slightly ‘green’, pine forest nose with
white pepper spice. Equally fresh, clean herbal palate with citrus bursts.
Like having your mouth spring cleaned with and sprayed with pine-fresh
cleaner. The polar opposite to soapy water, this is the kind of cleansing
you’ll come back for more of. Lingering dill, green, fresh-breath finish with
black pepper spice. A great gin. 5+/5
Cardamom Botanical Distilled Spirit
Sacred Angelica Botanical Distillate
40% alc./vol.
Flavoured by steeping organic Bulgarian Angelica Archangelica Root in English grain
spirit and then delicately low-pressure distilled at low temperatures. Again, water
and some extra wheat spirit is added.
Tasting: Crystal clear. Delicate mushroom-like, musky nose with powdered almond
and cracked black pepper aromas. Nutty, pine, aniseed and soft woody flavours sit
with cracked black pepper palate. Finish starts with soft almond, works through
aniseed and ends with lingering peppery pine freshness. 4/5
40% alc./vol.
Flavoured by steeping organic Guatamalan Elettaria Cardamomum pods
in English grain spirit and then delicately low-pressure distilled at low temperatures. Again, water and some extra wheat spirit is added. Tasting:
Crystal clear. Fabulously aromatic crushed cardamom nose with pine
freshness and slight cracked black pepper. Clean, strangely sweet, invigorating full-flavoured cardamom palate with black pepper bite and faint
aniseed flavours. Extremely long, fresh cardamom finish. (Would be great
as a ristretto Arabic coffee). 5/5
Sacred Spiced English Vermouth
Sacred Licorice Botanical Distillate
Ian has a naturally experimental and inquisitive mind, so it is perhaps not surprising
given his love of wine and years of distilling individual botanicals spirits that he would
eventually get around to making a vermouth. In actual fact his vermouth began by
accident as he was actually trying to make a mulled wine for Christmas using sugar,
wine, distillates and maceration. He realised the result was something close to
vermouth and now two of his white vermouths (an Extra Dry and an Amber), based on
English Chapel Down wine, are used to make those ever so famous Martinis and
Vespers at Dukes Hotel, while a dark, rich Spiced English Vermouth is commercially
available – though is still under development and changing slightly from batch to batch.
40% alc./vol.
Sacred Spiced English Vermouth Batch 2
Flavoured by steeping organic Spanish Glycyrrhiza Glabra root in English
grain spirit and then delicately low-pressure distilled at low temperatures.
Again, water and some extra wheat spirit is added.
Tasting: Crystal clear. Earthy, sweet, aromatic liquorice nose with cracked
black pepper corn aromas. Bitter-sweet palate with rich liquorice flavours
fighting for dominance with spicy black pepper. Tongue coating liquorice
finish with lingering black pepper spice. 4/5 Tasting: Clear, Light tawny brown. Attractive orange studded with clove and poached
pear nose with rich Christmas cake, menthol and dark chocolate. Strong clove flavours
dominate the palate with and concentrated orange flavours and a bitter hint of green
pine needles. Clove lingers on the finish with bitter wormwood, zesty orange and the
faint floral lavender. Clove dominates throughout. 3.5/5
www.sacredspiritscompany.com Producer: Sacred Spirits Co Ltd, Highgate, London