Forty litres at a time

A copper pot still on a farm outside Prince Albert. Four gins, a tasting set, and a pair of glasses worth drinking them out of.

See the bottles

We work at night

The still goes on at about eight in the evening and comes off somewhere around two in the morning. That is not romance, it is physics. A copper pot still in a Karoo afternoon fights you the whole way — the condenser never gets properly cold, the run races, and you are into the tails before you have decided where the cut should be. After sunset the temperature drops fifteen degrees inside an hour and everything settles down. The run slows, the copper behaves, and you can stand at the parrot and taste your way down to the cut instead of guessing at it. We take about forty litres off in a night, four nights a week from February through to winter, and in eleven years we have never once managed to hurry it.

Eight things, weighed on a brass balance

Juniper is the only thing we buy in, and it comes from Macedonia, because nothing that grows here does that job. The other seven are inside an hour of the gate — coriander seed off a farm in the Koue Bokkeveld, kapokbos and renosterbos cut on the werf, naartjie peel from Citrusdal, angelica root out of Wellington, cardamom that arrives in a paper bag from a spice shop in Durban, and pink peppercorns off the tree beside the water tank. Every one of them is weighed to the gram on a brass balance that came out of a chemist in Beaufort West, and written into a book. The book is how we know the recipe is not fixed. Renosterbos cut after a wet January is softer than the same bush in a dry one, so the weight moves, sometimes by ten or twelve grams in a forty-litre charge. We would rather move it and keep the gin tasting like itself than hold the recipe still and let the year decide for us.

Forty litres at a time

We work at night

The Swartberg at four in the morning, on the way home

What comes off the still

Eight things, weighed on a brass balance

Tasting room open Thursday to Sunday, Prince Albert