WILL’S STORY

“I grew up on our family farm Tyrrells in Herefordshire. Wanting to be a farmer from a young age, to grow fresh produce enhanced with the magic earthy smell of planting potatoes into fresh soil in spring was to be my dream career.

Having struggled to make ends meet for many years in my twenties, trying to build a business doing what I loved; farming, I eventually found it best to focus on one thing. I chose potatoes, for good or for bad, trading them to supermarkets to make a living but little more. Life was difficult as a trader. The phone was ringing all day but with constant problems, mainly as a result of the supermarkets pressure to reduce price.

I was one day struck with the eureka idea of turning our home-grown potatoes into crisps, aided by the original team on the farm (and some common sense) we established a brand onto the market and Tyrrells was born. As the brand quickly grew (along with my waistline!), I started to look for the next challenge.

Previously on a Tyrrells export trip I discovered a distillery making vodka purely from potatoes and I couldn’t believe how good it tasted. I learnt that gin is made from vodka (well, a crude vodka called neutral grain spirit), so I thought that if we could make our gin, not from NGS, but from our homegrown vodka, we would become the first real single-estate gin.