Our Field to Bottle Process

“Why Chase? Well, we make our spirits entirely from scratch. Our family has a passion for farming, we grow potatoes and apples which we distil into our range of spirits. In our Chase Original Potato Vodka 250 glorious British potatoes go into every bottle! The quality of our products isn’t by chance. It takes meticulous dedication, craftsmanship and passion from our team. This approach, entirely from field to bottle, really makes us different and it is something you can taste in our spirits.

We start by peeling our potatoes (our cattle get the peelings!) then we smash them into a pulp before transferring into our mash vessel. We heat the potatoes using steam and add some enzymes to help us break down the potato starch into sugars. We let our potatoes cool for a while and at exactly 27C we add our own special distillers yeast and pump it all into our fermentation tank.

Our mash is left to ferment for between 36 and 48 hours at a constant temperature, leaving us with around 9% ABV fermented potato mash. After this we separate the alcohols from the potato mash leaving us with low wines spirit at around 86% ABV. Our potato mash is then used as field fertiliser on our farm. At this point, the spirit has reached the dizzying heights of 96% ABV and is well on its way to becoming Chase Vodka.

After distillation, the spirit is tempered with water drawn from a source at the heart of the farm. We’re a stone’s throw away from the Malvern Hills – the home of the Queen’s favourite water. Once it’s reached a much more drinkable 40% abv, we bottle on site. The whole process, from field to bottle, takes up to two weeks.

Unlike most distilleries, we make our gin from scratch rather than buying in a readymade neutral grain spirit. People care about the terroir of their wines or the barrel aging of their whiskies, so why shouldn’t they care about the traceability of their white spirits?

In our bespoke copper gin still, Ginny, botanicals are added both into the belly of our still and vapour infused through our carter head chamber giving different complexities to our gin. Most distilleries are trying to use botanicals to mask the base spirit in their gin, whereas we use our botanicals to draw out the best aspects and our botanicals compliment the mineral earthiness found in our spirit. For our GB gin we infuse juniper to ensure that we distil the driest gin possible, followed by cinnamon, ginger, almond, coriander, cardamom, cloves, angelica root, liquorice root and lemon peels to ensure a distinct, full-bodied flavour.