Hepple Spirits

Hepple Spirits was founded in 2014 on the Hepple Estate in Northumberland. The project brought together estate owner Walter Riddell, chef and naturalist Valentine Warner, bartender Nick Strangeway and distiller Chris Garden, who had previously spent five years at Sipsmith. Cairbry Hill was also closely involved in the technical development of the distillery’s early extraction system. The first Hepple Gin was commercially launched in October 2015.

The distillery is located on the 4,000-acre Hepple Estate inside Northumberland National Park. Local ingredients harvested from the estate have included wild juniper, Douglas fir, blackcurrant leaves, lovage and other plants. Hepple combines traditional copper pot distillation with low-temperature vacuum distillation and supercritical extraction, using the different techniques to capture different aspects of botanical flavour.

The range developed from gin into vodka, sloe and hawthorn gin, aquavit and other expressions. In 2020 Hani Farsi joined the company as chairman, while the wider Hepple Estate subsequently developed a large-scale wilding programme alongside its spirits production. The legal company operating the distillery is Moorland Spirit Company Limited.