Richard Hammond shifts gears into gin
Former Top Gear and Grand Tour co-host Richard Hammond spoke to us about his move into the spirits industry – and why he’s not just putting a name on a bottle.
Following in the footsteps of his former colleagues, Jeremy Clarkson and James May, Hammond is the last of the trio to bring out an alcohol range. However, he suggests that perhaps he is the best placed to do so with gin.
“I’d long been thinking that I want to do a gin because I really do drink this stuff. I don’t mean to be rude to my colleagues, but they don’t,” he tells The Spirits Business. “But I suppose that also meant I was going to be a bit more fussy and hard to please when it came to doing one.”
Hammond’s appetite for gin is well-documented to those who’ve followed him through his career, and he considers himself to be “pretty demanding” around the spirit. He says: “I love it for its complexity and subtlety. Because I do enjoy drinking this stuff, it can spark a discussion, and you can taste what’s there. You can sense the difference in mouthfeel from one gin to another. It’s a very expressive drink.”
To create his Ratio gin and Iron Ridge whisky, Hammond has buddied up with Hawkridge Distillers. The Berkshire-based producer worked with former England rugby players Mike Tindall and James Haskell on their gin brand, Blackeye.
While Hammond had already been exploring potential partners, Hawkridge approached him with the suggestion of making a gin. From there, “it was grasped very enthusiastically,” says co-founder Phil Howarth, who works alongside James Gurney and Robin Horrex. “When you’ve got a client who wants to have their personal thumbprint on the finished products and craves feedback from the market, it makes it an easy project and a real pleasure to work with.
“We’ve done a number of different products for other celebs and high-end venues, but I think out of all of them, Richard has most certainly been the most hands-on with the development of these products. His love and enjoyment of the spirits have been really clear throughout the process – not in an unhealthy way, of course.”
Lake District influences
Hammond has creative freedom on Ratio, which means more than just writing his name on the bottle. “Making the stuff – god, it’s taken a while. There were a lot of initial conversations about what matters to me and how we make this something distinctive.”
As such, he has turned to his favourite place for inspiration: the Lake District. “In the PR stuff, I say I’ve taken a London Dry and pulled it through a hedge. I want to make a bloody good gin, so we needed some inspiration for that, which is why I went towards the countryside. I’m very much a country boy.”
The next piece of the puzzle was picking the botanicals, many of which come from the Lake District, reminding Hammond of some of his fondest spots in the area.
“I don’t want to claim all the credit, but some credit I will claim,” he says. “I came to Hawkridge with the idea of bilberries because of Bleaberry Tarn. I was up there yesterday. It’s a hill that overlooks Buttermere – my favourite place in the Lake District. Bilberries grow there; they’re not that common, and they do have a very specific place.”
Other local botanicals include gorse flowers, which grow abundantly on the Newlands Pass route near Keswick, and stinging nettles.
To figure out a profile befitting the Lake District, the Ratio gin team worked through the botanicals individually, breaking them down into their own distillates to figure out the perfect ratio, before combining them for a final distillation.
Hammonds says: “Bilberry has a citrusy forwardness to it, but it is bitter. It’s not a full, fizzy, bright, vibrant type of citrusy. It’s something with an edge to it, but it has a fullness.
“The gorse is much more complicated – almost pineapple-ly, but then sometimes grapefruit, but there’s almost a buttery softness to it. It’s a really complex flavour, and then the nettles bring an earthiness. What I needed was to sense all of those [notes].”
A dryness was essential to the gin’s profile, he says. “I didn’t want anything too fruity and floral, but I didn’t want to lose those notes. I’m absolutely chuffed to bits at what we did, and I know the guys are because they rang me the next day and said: ‘Oh my god’.”
He compares the final testing process to – surprise, surprise – cars. “I’m sure Ford did it with the Fiesta ST,” he says. “I suspect the Ford engineers drove it and had that same reaction: ‘Oh my god, how did we make it that? That’s absolutely bang on’.”
The future of the portfolio
Line extensions have been discussed, but any new products will tie into the name Ratio. Hammond says: “We’ll play with the ratios and take it to other places, but it’ll always come back to this base. I called it Ratio, simply so that we can adjust it. We could make it very different without adding anything else, but equally, I think we will.”
The plan is first to let people get familiar with the flagship expression. “What I really want is a customer to try it, love it, drink it, and then when we do another version, they go: ‘Oh, I wonder where they’ve taken it’. Whether [you’re] a really educated drinker or not, you can enjoy it and tell the difference.
“That might be a heavily flavoured gin. We might introduce really powerful notes, or we might just play with what we’ve got. I used to work in radio, where you’ve got a big desk full of faders and you can position things very differently. We’ve got that here.”
Howarth echoes the sentiment: “I’m pretty confident this will be well received, and a natural progression will be to evolve to flavours. Like Richard says, let’s get this first one out and see what people think – but, undoubtedly, there are going to be more in the range.”
Old colleague and now fellow gin maker James May has harnessed the power of YouTube and some creative campaigns to market his gin. Hammond is also keen to give Ratio a push, but in his own way.
“I like making content I own and operate. I may go down a specific channel route, like James has. I don’t know, but I certainly want to make content around it.
“I might return to the Lake District and get to grips with the botanicals that define Ratio. I filmed that because I think it would be great fun. If you enjoy drinking gin, you want to know how it’s made. We should all know how it’s made. It’s a craft skill. So I’d love to make content celebrating that.”
Supermarkets will eventually be part of the retail strategy, says Howarth, but the first batches of Ratio will be available through Cotswold Fayre, meaning they will be sold in farm shops and garden centres.
Being in the craft market, therefore, Hammond notes the importance of the product over branding. “The answer is to make a really good gin and then push that,” he says. “That’s why I spoke to different distillers to help me; I wasn’t going to make something that’s just my name written on a bottle of gin. It’s got to be that if you turn the bottle around and can’t see the label, you still think it’s a really fine drink.”
Launch events will take place at the Salon Privé car show at Blenheim Palace on 27 August, and at the DriveTribe Live event in Bicester Heritage on 30 August.
“We thought: let’s do that because we’ve got ready access to a lot of people. We can have a bit of a shindig and a bit of a party. More than anything else, we want to sit with people who’ve tried it and hear what they’ve got to say. I want to hear from people, and you can only do that face to face.
“That’s the whole point of these drinks. They are not in isolation. You could drink them in a completely empty room – but it wouldn’t be the same. It’s about place and people in time.”
Iron Ridge whisky
Ratio isn’t the only spirit Hammond is creating; he’s also got Iron Ridge, an English single malt whisky that will launch in tandem with the gin.
The journey to creating Iron Ridge was very different to the Ratio process, where Hammond could lead and experiment with botanical choice. “There are choices to be made around the source of whisky, and we’ve gone with an English whisky,” he says. “Then there’s the finishing and the casks.
“But there’s less opportunity for experimentation at my stage and level. It’s more about sitting with the distillers and discussing. There are fewer levers to pull, but they have no less significance and effect.”
Hammond’s whisky drinking precedes his love of gin. “I tended to drift towards The Macallan,” he says. “I like richness and a bit of spiciness – something that’s warming and comforting. I can happily go the other way and drink a more peaty whisky. By starting with an English whisky that’s finished in American Bourbon barrels, you end up with something tremendous, but also not overbearing.
“It really opens up after 20 minutes in the glass. Personally, I would put just a single, small cube of ice in a glass. Even I can tell the difference 20 minutes after. All of a sudden, it’s got a lot more to say for itself: the sweetness, the spiciness, all that from the Bourbon casks is there.”
Howarth believes the first reserve of Iron Ridge whisky will appeal to a broad spectrum of fans. “It’s got lovely complexity to it, like Richard says. It’s got a sweetness and slight spiciness from the Bourbon [casks]. While a novice whisky fan will love it, I do think it will go down well for the more discerning palate as well. But there’ll also be some that we just cannot please.”
Hammond will be working with Hawkridge for the foreseeable and has no plans to own a distillery of his own. “In the same way I run my television production company and DriveTribe, it works best when I’m involved at the creative level and pushing ideas with open ears. I’m cognisant of the fact that not every one of my ideas is brilliant.
“I want to be in a forum where I can drop those ideas in and we discuss them, knock them about, bring the expertise and experience into it, and emerge with something that’s more than a sum of its parts.
“I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have turned out right if I tried it on my own. My kitchen table is not going to be producing that.”
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