Made in London: Sacred Gin

Ian Hart takes me into the sitting room at the back of his and his wife Hilary’s beautiful house in Highgate to show me the vacuum glassware kit he uses to distill gin. By kit, I really mean an unbelievably complicated-looking contraption consisting of spindly glass cylinders and bulbs, with blue and silver tubes twisting and turning around them. Inside these is where the first bit of magic happens, as on a normal day there would normally be liquid flowing through them.

Hart, who studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before working in headhunting and later designing hand held radars before turning somewhat accidentally to gin making, begins to explains the process by which he ends up with the distillate. The contraption is something he designed himself and using it appears to be as complicated as it looks – to me at least - although he describes tn in surprisingly accessible terms.

Next we wander into the garden, pass his daughter’s old Wendy house, which holds the other end of the system’s vacuum pipe, and then to the garden shed which is now home to large quantities of botanicals. Quietly infusing inside white plastic containers, each one covered in black scribbles, numbers and dates, are orris, cubeb pepper, cinnamon, wormwood and stone fruit. It’s quite something, and I forget for a minute that we are in a north London back garden. Nevertheless, this is the HQ of the Hart’s Sacred micro distillery, in which award-winning spirits have been made. In the coming weeks, the Harts will begin their fourth bottling of the year – around 6000 bottles of vermouth.

How many products do you make?

We make eight to nine gins, including a London Dry Gin and six single botanical gins, which are extra high juniper, cardamom, grapefruit, coriander, liquorice and orris. We also do a Rosehip Cup, three vermouths which have done extraordinarily well for us - one of which is served exclusively by Alessandro Palazzi at Dukes Bar in St James’s - and two vodkas: an organic one and a London Dry Vodka. This year I’ve also produced 48kg of Christmas pudding and we’re about to bottle 3000 bottles of the Christmas pudding gin. We have a bottle-aged negroni, an organic sloe gin with juniper, and three whiskies on the way.

How did the business come about?

I had been trying to make hand held radars to see if I could make a living out of it, but the idea wasn’t working. I then began looking into seeing if you could remove the water from good quality vintage wine to intensify it. I ended up researching vacuum distillation for wine and bought a rotovap (rotary evaporator, the same one that people like Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria or Tony Conigliaro might use) to break it down. After various experiments separating it and separating it again, and lots of trial and error, it led me to do the same with gin. In terms of the vermouth, bit by bit we’ve changed the proportions to make our ‘master blend’.

When did you first make gin?

It started in 2008 but we began our first commercial bottling in 2009. I started distilling things together, keeping my findings on spreadsheets, and rapidly prototyping new recipes. I eventually found that recipe 23 was the one. We took it to the local pub, and the landlord said he’d put it on the bar if we bottled it up. At that point I had a tiny little glimmer of hope that this could be something I could make a living from.

How many products have you sold since you started?

I decided to make 2500 bottles first off. I put the label together myself, scanned it, sent it off to a printer – and actually we have just re-designed it. We even made an inverted magnum, but quickly realised it was the wrong image for a premium high-end product! In 2014 we sold 34,000 bottles in total (up from 24,000 in 2013 and 18,000 in 2012). We now export to 17 countries, and we’ve just taken on a new person in London, one in Ghent and one in Antwerp, which are big markets for us.

What has the reaction been like?

We tend to test things out on friends and relatives and family, then give samples to bars and retailers to get feedback. There is prototype 1 and then prototype 2, people will keep them and then vote on their favourite.

Where do the botanicals come from?

The Juniper is from Tuscany or Bulgaria, the cloves from Madagascar, cardamom from Guatemala, the citrus predominantly from Italy. A lot of the stone fruit, like apricot, cherries and plums, is from Gloucestershire, and for the vermouth we use an English wine from Three Choirs Vineyard in Gloucestershire. We are also soil association organic, too. We don’t say so, but sometimes people want to know.

Can you describe a typical day?

I get up at 5am so I can handle sales from the Far East, say in Japan or Taiwan. I go back to bed, and get up again at 9am. Then I might reconcile my accounts and invoices then get down to straining botanicals and distillation. I can leave it to some extent, though. I’ll switch it off around 5.30-6pm, and then three to four evenings a week we’ll be out with customers. Typically I do most of the physical straining and blending, with occasional help from my son or nephew, and Hilary does the orders, invoices and the publicity.

How important to you was it to produce something in London?

Being in London is important for this, although we have a bonded warehouse in Barking. We can bottle 100-200 bottles a day here but for larger bulkier liquids, for example our sloe gin, we take it to Barking to be bottled. If you imagine the quantities, it’s not possible to do everything here. But the distillation is all done here quite happily. I don’t want uncontrolled expansion. I’d like quality control.

What’s it like running a business in London?

There is no government support. We pay £10 of duty and VAT on every bottle so say you do 60 bottles a day that’s £600 a day on duty and VAT. And because you pay in credit, you need to be able to finance that for 80 days. It’s a real restriction on growth. We were on our own when we started. The other way is to run with investment but we didn’t want to do that because we can oversee everything ourselves… we’re at an advantage because we live in my mother’s house and I’ve been here since 1971, and don’t really have any employees or rent – but the capital is in gridlock.