We wanted to champion a sense of time and place and Hazel showcases the transition through the dormancy of winter to the awakening of spring in our own forest.
We coppiced the hazel in December, slowly roasting it to give us vibrant notes of fresh-cut wood and a soft, nutty character, and foraged hazel leaf buds and catkins in early spring. Harvesting oak and silver birch in February and distilling unmalted rye gave us the perfect blend to create a vibrant spirit balanced with our distillery’s signature warmth and complexity.
This obsession with trees and technique is both head-scratchingly painful and immensely exhilarating. Everything we’re doing is a learning curve because it’s never been done before. We could’ve been a research company that never released any products or we could’ve waited years before launching something but with no idea whether anyone liked it. Instead, we have chosen to learn live, like a public experiment, where everything we discover you can taste, and I am enjoying how direct and responsive our feedback loop is as this quest to explore the taste of trees continues.
Ben Branson founded the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit brand, Seedlip, in 2015 and three years later Diageo bought the majority share. Since then, Branson has launched Seasn cocktail bitters and runs a successful charity podcast about neurodivergence called The Hidden 20%. His most recent project, Sylva, uses advanced technology to create the effects of wood ageing on non-alcoholic spirits.
