High Spirits at Highbank: Ireland's Smallest Distillery

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High Spirits at Highbank: Ireland's Smallest Distillery

Still Launch December 2014 (c) Keith Bohanna

Rod and Julie Calder-Potts of Highbank organic farm have just launched a range of spirits, made on their own farm in Kilkenny.

Oliver Moore: Unusually Rod, you grow organic apples in Ireland. Is that the main crop on site?

Rod Calder-Potts: Well we have 55 acres, 20 acres are in apples. On the rest we grow tillage – porridge oats for flahavans - and we have some horses. There are 14 beehives in the centre of the farm too. We leave about 5% of the land to wildlife. We like having the wildlife, the natural element, but we now know its incredibly important for an organic farm. You need trees or other elements will suffer, the fungi in the soil, the birds, bees and other insects. You need a mix, so a more agroforestry approach is important. Its not just trees in the orchard, its trees roundabout.

I've been organic since the mid 1990s, and I feel I'm getting better at growing this way. So I've another five or six acres of apples due to come on soon. We have seven cider varieties here.

OM: What do you produce from this?

RCP: We are trying to develop this idea of the orchard as Ireland's answer to a vineyard. We're always trying trying to discover apt, Irish twists to put on things.

Production is fairly diversified. There's a juice, a syrup and a range of ciders. Our main cider is extremely dry, so we also produce a sweet cider, which we add an organic honey to.

My mother always said, when giving us a slice of apple with a slice of cheese, that an apple without cheese was like a hug without a squeeze.

So a third of our cider is aimed at the cheese market, we call it our dessert cider - its to accompany a cheese board. Its not for glugging, as you would a pint of cider on a hot day. This is a small, chilled, 330ml bottle, to be shared with people over cheese.

In Ireland we should be doing innovative things, we shouldn't be copying the French or whoever, we can get pointers from them, but why copy them? We should be taking advantage of the wonderful stuff we are growing and think of innovative ways of using it.

OM: As well as what you call a driver's cider – one with no alcohol - you have gone to the other extreme. Tell me about what you do with that incredible looking Albert Holstein Still you imported from Germany.

RCP: well we had to complete the circle, diversification is good as we don't have to try to compete with the industrial ciders.

We produce loads of apples with blemishes on them. So people wouldn't buy them to eat in the shop, as they aren't pretty. But I'm not interested in pretty I'm interested in processing the apples. Microorganisms live in a symbiotic relationship with the tree, the soil and each other. Once they are balanced, and haven't been sprayed, haven't been messed with, everything will thrive. Its not in any parasites interest to destroy its host. But of course the apples are often blemished, due to the weather and the lack of spraying.

So to deal with surplus cider, we bought a small still with 253 litre capacity.

We're producing specifically Irish versions of drinks. There's Highbank Organic Apple Schnapps, strait off the still no sweetening or additives, its a clear spirit at 40% abv. We also now produce

Highbank Organic Orchard Spirit, with our syrup in it, also Orchard Liqueur. We'll have an

apple gin by February.

The great thing is we can produce based on demand and need. All the spirits start from the same point, a beautiful clear schnapps.

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