A Gin Of One’s Own

A bright May afternoon in the market town of Bicester, Oxfordshire. Inside the Sky Wave distillery, surrounded by the copper stills, some serious gin tasting is going on. A group of Berkley Fernhill House residents has gathered around a table laden with bowls of ingredients and small glass bottles. Each contains a different botanical: juniper berries, coriander seed, angelica root, citrus peels, liquorice.

Andy Parsons, Sky Wave’s master distiller, watches as everyone unscrews caps, brings them up to noses, all commenting, sharing and debating what they think might work the best.

One resident, Pamela rolls a juniper berry between thumb and forefinger. She has lived in the part of the country where juniper grows wild, so she knows about its qualities. She also confides, with a grin, that she’s been drinking gin for many long years now. But what she didn’t know, and what she admits she is learning today, is just how much she didn’t appreciate about the making of this most ubiquitous of British spirits.

“I find it very interesting, the use of the different botanicals in gin,” she says. “Because although you think ‘I know about juniper’ you find out that you don’t.”

How Berkley residents created a bespoke gin

Pamela has been a resident at Berkley for more than a year. And she is, on this particular afternoon, doing something that no care home resident has done before: she is helping to create a gin. Not in a token way. Not in a ‘we asked our residents what colour they liked for the label’ way. But in a real way. She is tasting. Smelling. Holding botanicals up to the light and deciding, with the accumulated wisdom of eight decades, what belongs in the glass and what doesn’t.

The gin being created will be called Golden Hour. And when ready, it will be, as far as we know, the first spirit in the world ever created collaboratively by residents of a care home.

“We’ve made a number of gins for very prestigious clients over the last couple of years,” Andy says. “But this was especially fun and very special, because we made it based on the opinions and inputs of the residents. It wasn’t one manager’s view; it was a whole plethora of views, and we had to distil those views into a real product. Quite literally.”

Why Berkley wanted a house gin

To understand how and why a bottle of gin ended up as the centrepiece of a Berkley Care Group story, you need to understand that Berkley doesn’t think like any other care company. Its teams think like the kind of place where care is so woven into the fabric of daily life that it becomes invisible. What is noticed instead is the quality of things like the artisan coffee, dining from restaurant-trained chefs, the space and places and the range of incredible activities. The fact that someone remembered a resident loves Werther’s Originals and so left a bag of them by the bed, without being asked to.

The idea for the house gin came to Laura Perry, Berkley’s CEO, a few months earlier. “Gin is a drink that is obviously really important to an awful lot of our residents,” she explains. “There is something distinctly British and wonderful about having a lovely gin and tonic. So, we thought: why not create a house Berkley gin that residents have actually contributed to?”

Why Sky Wave?

But in a country with over 800 gin distilleries, why choose Sky Wave as a partner? The innovative gin company was founded by Rachel Hicks and Andy Parsons, a couple whose backstory reads like something from an adventure novel. Rachel has a BBC journalism background. Andy was a mountaineer leader in the Royal Signals. They started distilling because they couldn’t find the perfect gin – which is the kind of origin story that sounds a bit neat, until you taste the result and realise they meant it.

The first gin they created in 2018 was instantly named the world’s best at the World Gin Awards. They now have a great reputation for high-end collaborations, including with Blenheim Palace. When Berkley approached, Andy admits that something about the brief felt different this. And they couldn’t wait for the challenge.

“Sky Wave are local and really close to one of our homes in Oxford,” Laura explains. “They’re renowned for their artisan gins. They’ve won loads of awards. They have a really beautiful brand, one that we felt was really similar to Berkley in terms of quality and philosophy.”

“It was really important to us that we worked with a distillery where we could take our residents and they could experience trying the different botanicals, putting their own flavours together, discussing the balance and the profile, creating a really bespoke Berkley gin that was of beautiful quality, delicious and different,” says Laura.

From distillery visit to finished gin

On the spring day they visited, the residents spent hours at the distillery, campaigning for their own particular favourite combinations, politely disparaging the others. Once the tasting was complete and the core components had been agreed, the real work began. Rachel and Andy took the residents’ preferences back to the still and started to create. Golden Hour was not made overnight. It was worked on, adjusted, refined. Every decision filtered through the original brief: this had to be the residents’ gin. Their palates. Their preferences.

The name came naturally. Golden Hour speaks to that soft-focus window of late afternoon when the light turns warm and the day starts to slow down. It is a photographer’s term, but also a feeling we can all relate to. The clink of ice in a glass. The first sip on a terrace as the sun drops. That particular contentment that can’t be manufactured but can, with care and the right ingredients, be bottled.

“The gin and tonic is a quintessential British drink,” Andy says. “Hot summer evenings, the most refreshing drink you can imagine. Even in the winter in front of a roaring fire, it just ends any day perfectly.”

The perfect Golden Hour serve

Naturally, Andy is a man who pours dozens of gin and tonics a week… in a professional capacity, of course. He once mixed 3,000 G&Ts in a single Saturday night at a college ball in Oxford. So, the perfect serve is something he’s given a lot of careful thought to. “I’m always being asked, why gin and tonic? What’s so special about gin and tonic?” he says. “And I always give the honest answer — it is just such a versatile drink.”

So, what’s the magic formula? “Firstly, start with your choice of gin. There’s such a wide variety, some simple, some complex. The botanicals change the flavours completely. You want something balanced, something that doesn’t display one botanical too prominently. Mix that with a quality but subtle tonic, and it elevates it to a new level. It’s so refreshing. Then try it with all sorts of different garnishes to add a bit of theatre. Grapefruit, dried citrus, juniper, for instance.”

Despite this versatility, his recipe for the perfect Berkley gin and tonic is precise: “Just take lots of ice in a nice, large cut glass. Add one decent measure of Golden Hour gin. Two measures of tonic, a slice of lemon and a couple of juniper berries, and you have it.”

Golden Hour cocktails

And the multi-layered complexity of Golden Hour means it isn’t just incredible in the classic gin and tonic. “Oh, it’s fabulous in cocktails,” Andy says. “It’s amazing in a Martini, a Gimlet, maybe even an Army and Navy — the taste of the gin will really shine through.”

One cocktail that’s become particularly popular across Berkley homes brings together the two drinks residents most often request: Golden Hour and Berkley’s house English sparkling wine. The French 75 is light and refreshing; perfect for summer evenings.

Lives lived beautifully

For Laura, the real satisfaction of Golden Hour comes not from the technical achievement of creating a bespoke gin, but from watching it being enjoyed. “There’s nothing more special than leaving a home in the evening on a beautiful summer’s day and seeing residents enjoying a gin and tonic with their family,” she says. “It is a really bonding experience, over an incredible gin that we created with our brilliant residents, and it makes me so very proud.”

Andy shares that pride. “We are absolutely thrilled that this gin is going to be enjoyed at the end of every day by a discerning group of people. They know their gins, and they will enjoy it day after day, evening after evening. And that means the world to us.”

Drop into a Berkley home for a visit or a look around and you’ll no doubt see a bottle of Golden Hour being opened and poured. From a distance, it looks like the best gin and tonic you’ve ever seen. Up close, it is something even rarer and it represents something even more special: lives being lived beautifully and on their own terms, right up to the very last drop.

To try (or even buy a bottle of) Golden Hour gin, drop in to any Berkley Care Home and ask at our bars. You can also visit Sky Wave Gin in Bicester, Oxfordshire here.