ABOUT US

We are Emma & Graham, the distillers, bottle washers, labellers and general gin obsessives behind Walnut Tree Distillery.

Emma's family has been farming in Norfolk for over 100 years but can be dated back over 5 centuries in local parish records. Graham has been living and working in Norfolk now for just over 20 years (so he's just about considered a local!) having moved here from North Yorkshire to work as a research chemist at the UEA.

The farm's relationship with gin started 3 generations ago, with the advent of Emma's great grandmother's sloe gin recipe.  As was the case for many agricultural labourers of the time, the hedgerows provided a different kind of harvest, to that of the fields, and we still pick our sloes from the same trees and bushes that our predecessors did. 

Whilst we have branched out in some of our gin production, our sloe gin is still made in the same way as it always was, all those years ago, in the family farmhouse, hence its name.

OUR GIN PRINCIPLES

We wanted to make a gin that incorporates some of the best ingredients Norfolk has to offer but that also reflects where it is made and the history of the farm building in which it is produced. For that reason we make all of our gins in small batches within our farm based distillery, located in our old dairy building. Every bottle of gin we create includes botanicals sourced on the farm (and hand picked by us) and our spirits are distilled in our custom built milk churn stills, each named after some of the cows originally milked there.