A new brand from an old Warrington gin house.

Opihr is a spiced London dry gin made in Warrington, Cheshire, by G&J Distillers and owned by Quintessential Brands, which has owned it since its launch in 2013. Drinks International reported on 4 July 2013 that Quintessential had unveiled Opihr Oriental Spiced Gin at the London trade show Imbibe Live the day before, launching it in the United Kingdom with Spain to follow later that summer.

The distillery behind it is far older than the brand. English Wikipedia says Thomas Dakin built a distillery in Warrington in 1760 and made his first gin the following year, that the Greenall family took over the business in 1860, and that the gin house became known as G&J Greenall. English Wikipedia, citing Insider Media in August 2011, says the De Vere Group, successor to the Greenall brewing business, sold Greenall’s Gin that year in a management buyout backed by private equity, and that Quintessential Brands, founded that year by the former Gruppo Campari chief executive Enzo Visone, took over the business, which now trades as G&J Distillers. After a fire in 2005 destroyed much of its older site, the distillery moved three years later to Birchwood in Warrington, according to the same article.

The gin itself is the work of Joanne Moore. The Spirits Business reported in April 2014 that she joined G&J in 1996 with a degree in biochemistry and was appointed the company’s first female master distiller in 2006. In that interview she described Opihr, launched the previous July, as an attempt to recreate the feeling of walking through a spice market, “those big, powerful smells and vibrant colours,” with soft spice from cardamom and cumin. Drinks International described its ten botanicals as having an “oriental slant,” naming coriander from Morocco, black pepper from India and cubeb berries from Indonesia. The company today lists cardamom from Tanzania, ginger from India and orange from the Mediterranean among the rest. Moore is also the creator of Bloom, the floral gin from the same stable.

A legendary land, a spice route and a pair of elephants.

The name is the brand’s first piece of storytelling. The company says it hints at Ophir, a legendary region of King Solomon’s time that sent cargoes of gold, silver and spices, and whose location remains unknown; the brand spells its own name Opihr. Everything else is organised around one idea, which the company calls the Ancient Spice Route: the sea lanes along which merchants carried spices between Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The pack translates that idea into colour and ornament. When The Spirits Business picked Opihr for its list of ten notable gin bottle designs in October 2014, it described colourful elephants emerging from behind a royal blue label and a red tassel at the bottle’s neck, packaging that it said reflected the gin’s Asian theme.

The line has since grown by region. The company now sells three Regional Editions alongside the original: a European Edition built on aromatic bitters, an Arabian Edition with black lemon, and a Far East Edition with Szechuan pepper, bottled at a higher strength. The company says each edition draws on flavours from a different stretch of the spice route, and it also sells a ready-to-drink gin and tonic range.

Advertising took the travel theme to the street. In June 2023 Quintessential Brands announced Opihr’s first out-of-home campaign, “Let the Taste Take You There,” placed on carriages, in tunnels and on digital screens across the London Underground, with what the company called big, bold, colourful ads nodding to the spice route. The release quoted Charly Smith, global brand manager for Opihr, and paired the campaign with a travel competition run with the tour operator Abercrombie & Kent.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all English gin names: Chase, Warner’s, Silent Pool, Bloom, Opihr, Portobello Road and Hayman’s. English gin brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family distillers and farm businesses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single gin can be sold everywhere from a supermarket shelf to a cocktail bar.

A gin brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit itself than by a bottle, a label and the place it names, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its distillery or had its gin made under contract somewhere else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its gin is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its gin is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One gin within a Warrington portfolio.

Opihr sits inside a wider group. Quintessential Brands lists among its brands the gins Greenall’s, Bloom, Berkeley Square and Thomas Dakin, alongside Irish whiskeys such as The Dublin Liberties and The Dubliner and the Irish cream liqueur Feeney’s. The group’s site describes it as a family of distribution, production and brand-building companies, and it presents Joanne Moore as one of its in-house experts.

Travel has also been the brand’s route into film. The company says Opihr joined The Last Overland, an expedition led by the filmmaker and explorer Alex Bescoby that retraced an overland journey between Singapore and London in a Land Rover, and that the flavours encountered along the way helped inspire its Regional Editions.

The name needs a little care online. Ophir, with the letters in the usual biblical order, is also the name of places, mines and companies around the world; the gin’s own site is opihr.com.

For a design guide, Opihr shows how a single story, a legendary land at the end of a spice route, can be carried by colour, ornament and a pair of elephants on a bottle made at a Warrington gin distillery. Compare Bloom, Joanne Moore’s floral gin from the same owner, and Brockmans, another English gin built around a distinctive flavour. For this guide we use royal blue, tassel red and spice gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Opihr’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.