Seeds of change
The A-list’s new favourite tipple was dreamt up in a Lincolnshire kitchen garden–and it’s completely non-alcoholic. Emma Hughes gets the inside story on Seedlip
WILDERNESS FESTIVAL, August 2017: the great and the good have descended on Oxfordshire for a weekend of high-end hedonism. Benedict Cumberbatch is reading bedtime stories, Thomasina Miers is throwing a Mexican banquet, David Cameron is being snapped in the smoking area and, in a tent near the main stage, VIPS are swigging… mocktails, made with what was being billed as ‘the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit’. What on earth is going on?
For the answer, you have to go back 300 years to north Lincolnshire, where Ben Branson’s family built their farm. Three centuries on, they’re still there—and it’s where the drinks whizz learnt a profound respect for Nature. ‘I grew up knowing exactly how long it takes to grow the potato that gets turned into your chips,’ he says. With his bushy beard, horn-rimmed glasses and tattoos, he looks like a cross between a pirate and, appropriately, a medieval apothecary.
In 2013, he was running his own design agency, working with the likes of Glenmorangie and Absolut Vodka. At the same time, he was rediscovering the pleasures of his family’s kitchen garden. ‘We had four different types of mint, rosemary and thyme, but I was curious—what had we forgotten about?’ he remembers. Turning to the internet, he tracked down lost botanicals that Ophelia would have recognised: rue, agrimony and hyssop. ‘I ended up looking through a book someone had scanned in called The Art of Distillation from 1651, full of herbal remedies made in a copper pot still. I knew the basics of distillation, but I’d never heard of it being used in a non-alcoholic context before.’
Curiosity piqued, he bought a still of his own and started playing around with it in the kitchen. What started as ‘just a bit of fun’ quickly gripped him. ‘It’s a magical experience when you take plants from your garden and capture their character in a liquid form,’ he explains. However, the penny didn’t drop until a few months later, when he and his fiancée were having a romantic dinner in London. Mr Branson, who doesn’t drink, asked the waitress for a non-alcoholic cocktail. ‘She came back with this pink, fruity monstrosity,’ he shudders. ‘I remember thinking how bizarre it was that we could put someone on the Moon, but didn’t seem to be able to come up with a decent, grown-up alternative. Then I wondered if what I was doing at home might be the solution.’
It took him two years to perfect a distilling process and two distinct, nonalcoholic ‘spirit’ blends. The first was a warm, aromatic one, flavoured with allspice from a farmer in Jamaica, cardamom and citrus peels. The second had a dominant note of peas from his garden, complemented by herbs, hops and hay. The first 1,000 bottles of Seedlip Spice (named after the type of basket used by his family to sow seeds in the 17th century) were filled and labelled by hand before he drove them down to Selfridges, which he’d persuaded to stock them. They sold out in three weeks, but the next 1,000 were gone in three days—and the third batch sold out online within half an hour. It wasn’t long before The Savoy and Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck came calling, keen to use Seedlip as a base for their non-alcoholic cocktails.
‘I didn’t want anyone to feel like they were missing out and I think what’s important is the ritual: getting a nice glass and filling it with ice at the end of the day. You don’t get that sense of occasion with soft drinks,’ Mr Branson says.
It wasn’t long before The Savoy and Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck came calling
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that a bottle of Seedlip costs in the region of £25—the same as a craft spirit. What would he say to people who tut at the price? He stresses that each bottle takes six weeks to produce ‘and it’s made like a spirit. We use alcohol in the distilling process, so we’re responsible for all of the related taxes and duty and restrictions upfront. But we don’t pass that on to buyers because what we’re selling isn’t an alcoholic product.’
There’s now a third Seedlip variety in the works, plus a top-secret ‘dark spirit’, a bit like a non-alcoholic whisky or rum. ‘You’ll be able to drink it neat,’ he confides. ‘But we’re not quite there yet. We’ve had two failed bottlings.’ Today, Mr Branson has 50 employees spread across seven countries, so he spends a lot of time on a plane, forcing a relocation to Amersham, where he shares a cottage with a dalmatian called Poppy, Kiwi the Jack Russell and dozens of Kilner jars. Even within touching distance of the M25, he’s found a way of staying connected to his kitchen garden: the fingers of his right hand are tattooed like a prizefighter’s, but instead of reading ‘LOVE’ or ‘HATE’, the letters on them spell out ‘PEAS’. Seedlip (www. seed lipdrinks. com)