A cup of tea with Seedlip

Interview by Emilie Forsythe (née Holmes)

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to share a pot of tea with Ben Branson, founder and inventor of the world's first non-alcoholic spirit, Seedlip. In just two years, Ben's botanical creations have gone from garage experiment to lining the shelves of the world's best bars, filling an important gap in the drinks market in the process. 

We meet at their soon-to-be-outgrown Marylebone office, where, under the watchful eye of a stuffed badger (Ben enjoys taxidermy in his spare time), I learn about the art of distillation, why we're all boozing less and how homegrown, natural ingredients will always be best...

Tell us a bit about how it all started.

Seedlip began from my love of doing arts and crafts at home. My family have been farming in North Lincolnshire and Yorkshire for 320 years so I was lucky enough to grow up understanding what it means to get a potato onto your plate. I got into growing my own plants and food at home but I eventually got bored. I had mastered growing rosemary, my mint had taken over and it led me to think about the plants and farming techniques that had been forgotten. So I went looking to nature for something of the things we’d lost. I love old things too, so spend quite a lot of time pouring over old cookery books and reading about the things people used to grow. It started with herbs, and then I found myself learning about Nicholas Culpeper and other botanists - it was a whole new world for me. I found a copy of a book on distillation that someone had scanned in online which talked about alcoholic and non-alcoholic remedies and the idea of using plants as medicine and that piqued my interest. It was from 1651 and had about 200 ingredients listed in it, so I thought I’d give distillation a go.

[Ben now owns one of the very few hard copies of The Art of Distillation]

So what is distillation and how did you start doing it at home?

Distillation is just a form of extraction, much like brewing tea is a form of extraction. People always think of alcohol when we talk about distillation but we get numerous products via distillation - essential oils, orange blossom water, rose blossom water. You find distillation used in pharmaceuticals and in the oil industry. It’s just a process but we tend to associate it with only alcohol.

So I’d read this book on distilling herbs and plants for medicinal purposes and my work background was design, working with spirit brands where I’d learnt a little about distilling, so I decided to bite the bullet and try it myself. I went online and bought myself a copper still and had different ingredients in my garden, so I set about copying some of the techniques I’d read about. Just like I’ve always wanted to learn taxidermy, and in the same way as I enjoy pressing flowers, it began from an interest to learn and try my hand at something new...or very old, in fact!

I took a load of fresh mint from my garden, I put it in the copper still with water and I put the pot on a hot plate to heat that up. As soon as it starts to get to the boiling point, all of the compounds, the oils, all of those flavour molecules release from the mint. They then turn to vapour and you have to catch them so that you can turn them into a concentrated liquid. What I was left with this super minty essence. It lost its flavour and went cloudy after two days, so I still had some work to do to turn it into a safe product...

So at what point in your experimentation did you realise that you had made something delicious?

I kept playing around with my still, chucking in all kinds of potential ingredients from all spice, berries, oak chips and citrus fruits to the extremes where I was trying to distil soil and stones.

This is probably a good time to say that I don’t make Seedlip anymore, but I did at the start! I have always thought that ingredients should be viewed as individual things. The way that a pea is genetically structured is different to, for example, how hay is structured, and a mint plant is comprised of different compounds to a lemon and so on. So that influenced my experimentation with the copper still and I began to learn how each of the ingredients produced their best flavour at different boiling points.

We now have six distillates in each of our drinks and that means that we distil everything individually. It’s not the simplest process - it takes us six weeks to make one bottle - but it’s incredibly important that we capture the best flavour every time.

You said it wasn’t originally intended to be a business. Does that mean it was circumstantial that you found yourself at the heart of this non-alcoholic trend?

Yes, definitely. I was just mucking around with stuff at home, and then I found myself going out one evening and realising that the options were shit if you’re not drinking. Then in late 2013, when Jamie Oliver waged war on sugar, we started seeing all of the comparisons between soft drinks and piles of sugar. Then the same comparisons were drawn with alcohol and the dots started to connect. I figured out that as a society we were drinking less alcohol and less sugary soft drinks, smoothies and juices, but at the same time people were willing to spend more on craft spirits etc. All these things happening all at once sparked the idea of creating Seedlip.