Sherwin Acebuche, Gin Producer
TARSIER SPIRIT
Stockport, Manchester
In the crowded craft gin market, it can be hard to make a splash, but with Tarsier Spirit, Sherwin Acebuche and Tim Driver have created something original, distilling the culinary flavours of their beloved Southeast Asia to shake up the usual botanical offering. Inspired by a backpacking trip in 2014, and with precisely zero gin-making experience between them, the pair started out recipe testing from their Manchester kitchen table. Swapping traditional cardamom and lemon for the likes of Thai basil, galangal and calamansi, they have created an award-winning London Dry style now exported around the world and which helps fund conservation efforts to protect the endangered tarsier – a tiny leaping primate found in Sherwin’s native Philippines and which gazes back out at you from every bottle.
“I was born on Negros island, the sugar capital of the Philippines. It’s the next island along from Bohol, where tarsiers are found. Growing up in the Philippines, you know about the tarsier – it’s on the money as an emblem – but I’d never actually seen one in real life until we went to the sanctuary on Bohol and learned about their plight. Tarsiers can only be found in Southeast Asia, they’re about 50 million years old, and there are only a few thousand of them left.
One of the gins we love is Elephant Gin, and it has the conservation element, so we thought, that’s what we want to do: name our product after the tarsiers, because they are so synonymous with Asia, and commit 10% of our profits to the Philippine Tarsier Foundation in Bohol.
We started from our home kitchen in Didsbury in Manchester. I had been working for Diageo during the emergence of Chase Distillery and Sipsmith, and I said to Tim, we need to do a gin because that's gonna be the next big thing. He was like, ‘Well, I don't know how to distill – how the hell do we start a gin?’ But when he got made redundant, it kind of gave him a kick up the arse to go right, I would like to do something.
In December 2014, for about six weeks, we went to Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. We both love cooking and were going through the recipes in Rick Stein’s book about his travels around Southeast Asia, so it was like reliving that journey – we went into the markets, the orchards and ate a lot. Obviously, one of the great things about Asia is the street food. And it just kind of blew our minds, thinking that there are so many botanicals that lend themselves to spirits and why isn't anyone using these to, you know, put some sort of innovation into the drinks industry.
At that time, there was Bombay [Sapphire] East gin and Tanqueray Malacca, but they were only really scratching the surface of flavours and botanicals within the region, so we thought, you know what, let's do something quite different. While we were developing the recipe, craft gins were coming out left, right and centre. But they were still kind of missing a trick in terms of Southeast Asia.
“we did about 74 batches of recipes before we settled on the one we wanted – a gin to tell the story of our backpacking adventure
”
Sherwin Acebuche
So we bought our first 2-litre still. Tim is good at researching, going through forums and distiller groups online. He was talking to other facilities, especially in the US, because they're quite transparent in their process compared to the UK. The first 20 batches were awful, but they were tested on our friends and they helped us fine-tune the recipe.
We thought okay, Southeast Asia: we need lemongrass, and we need kaffir lime leaves. And we distilled them. The lemongrass just tasted really fake; the freshness goes away and it tasted like pear drops. And the kaffir lime leaves – again, you lose that freshness and it made the gin taste a little bit bitter, and it’s got that kind of potpourri smell and soapy taste to it.
But we knew from the plethora of ingredients that we had discovered what we wanted. We knew that we wanted calamansi to start with – that this was the citrus we were going to go with. It tastes a little bit like a mandarin and a lime together and has such a specific taste to it. It's predominant in a lot of Filipino cooking. When you go and have your barbecue, or your lechon, which is roast pork, you will get this dip that has soy sauce, chilli, ginger, garlic and calamansi squeezed in.
Then we experimented with galangal, which we’d found in a clay-pot dish in Vietnam and is used in a lot of Thai cooking. And from Thailand we took Thai sweet basil. Last but not least, kampot pepper from the Kampot region of Cambodia. It's the world's most expensive pepper. We didn't know that until we started experimenting with it – it costs about £70 per kilo and that's wholesale! – but it’s just got the most amazing taste. It's so good with beef or seafood.
We did about 74 batches of gin recipes before we settled on the one we wanted – a gin to tell the story of our backpacking adventure. So we went to the Philippines – that’s the citrus you get at the beginning. Then you land in Thailand and Vietnam – that’s when the Thai sweet basil should hit you, in the mid-notes, along with a gingery kind of spice. And you end up in Cambodia, with a long, peppery finish.
Then we thought, okay this is ridiculous, we can’t keep doing it from [the kitchen table]. So we moved to the back of a pub in Cheshire near Manchester Airport and turned that into a distillery, and now because of export and increasing capacity we’ve moved to Stockport. We’re exporting to about 13 countries at the minute and are about to go into Australia, where they really understand these flavours.
We started with two 60-litre copper pot stills – they are the traditional style of stills that have been around for many centuries and are named after my Filipino grandma and grandad, Florencia and Graciano – and we’ve now got a bigger still on order. I’m naming this third one Christian, after a friend who sadly passed away last year and was a big supporter of our brand. It’s more of a modern still, which I guess is similar to Christian because he liked new technologies and anything shiny.
In terms of production, we use the London Dry method for our Southeast Asian Dry, which has specific rules as to what you can and cannot do. It has to be made from a neutral spirit base that's at least 96% ABV to start with, and then you put that neutral grain spirit in the still. Some people dilute it down to 50% ABV; ours we dilute down to 37.5% because we have very delicate botanicals. At 50%, we found that with the pepper, for example, it hardens the skins, and the same with the citrus that we were using, the calamansi, so it doesn’t give out its flavour, its essential oils, easily. With the London Dry method, you can't add anything post distillation except a little bit of sugar to soften the spirit if you like, but not too much; we don’t add anything to ours.
Our Oriental Pink Gin is a distilled gin which is pretty much distilled similarly to London Dry, but at the end of the process you put in your essence – like cucumber, the way Hendricks does – because you can’t distill it or it goes mushy. We infuse it with the fruits straight after production.
The Southeast Asian Dry Gin is what I guess you’d call a ‘gin’ gin because everything, all the flavours, that you're putting into it, tend to come from the distillation itself. Whereas the Oriental gin is more about the addition of the fruit afterwards and the sweetener.
We put a little bit of natural sugar into our Oriental Gin because that's what consumers expect as a modern interpretation of a pink gin. In the height of summer, it’s very easy drinking and goes really well with a mixer, whereas the Southeast Asian Dry is a classic, best served in a cocktail such as a dry martini or negroni.
We’re now developing recipes for a Southeast Asian spiced rum. Rum is fast becoming a big category so we’re hopefully going to have it ready as we head into the darker months, when it’s dreary and miserable here. That’s when it’s good to go back to that part of the world.
For more and to shop the online store, visit tarsierspirit.com
Photography: Tarsier Spirit
@tarsierspirit
In their element: Tarsier co-founders Sherwin Acebuche (left) and Tim Driver