A Bonn start-up, a bathtub gin and a hero from the Rhine.

Siegfried Rheinland Dry Gin is the founding product of Rheinland Distillers, a company in Bonn started in 2014 by two friends, Raphael Vollmar and Gerald Koenen. Shanken News Daily described the Bonn business in August 2020 as founded in 2014 by the pair, and the German trade site about-drinks named both as co-founders and managing directors in 2022.

The company’s own history page traces the idea back a little further. It says the founders first steeped a so-called bathtub gin — botanicals left to soak in spirit rather than distilled — in April 2013, and that about a year and a half later they had their final recipe, fixing the strength on 24 September 2014 at 41% vol, halfway between the two strengths they could not choose between. about-drinks reported in June 2016 that the gin had been on the market only since early 2015, and in 2022 that the company’s first product had launched in 2015.

The name and the recipe were chosen together, the company says. Looking for botanicals and a name in 2014, the founders settled on the Nibelungen saga, which is set partly in the Rhineland and, in the company’s telling, right beside their home ground at the Drachenfels. In the legend a linden leaf matters at the moment Siegfried bathes in dragon’s blood, so linden blossom became the gin’s lead botanical. about-drinks described the gin in 2016 as made with 18 herbs and spices plus linden blossom as its signature; the company today sums up the taste as juniper, linden blossom and orange.

A name broken over three lines.

The look came early. The company says the decisive label design came from Bence, a Hungarian graphic designer, and that although the label has changed considerably since that first version, the name broken over three lines — SIE / GFR / IED — is still the key visual of the brand. It credits a second collaborator, Phil, with guiding the later steps. The first batches, including one called Early Bird, were labelled and packed by hand in the founders’ living room, the company says.

That stacked name has since served as a canvas for special editions. The company says it worked with the marker brand edding in 2019 on a colour-it-yourself edition built on its Wonderleaf label, and in May 2021 released 361 bottles sprayed by the graffiti crew 1UP, each hand-numbered. In May 2022 about-drinks reported a limited design edition made with Circus-Theater Roncalli, with a lottery ticket hidden under each cork seal for one of three Roncalli experience days. The company also lists editions with Underberg — 333 bottles, with botanicals from both brands in the distillate, it says — and with Domino’s Pizza, and it says it engraves corks to order with its own laser and screen-prints its own merchandise.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all German gins: Siegfried, Ferdinand’s, The Duke, Elephant, Gin Sul, Windspiel and Skin Gin. Gin brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies that still distil and bottle their own spirit to labels made under contract at another distillery or now owned, in whole or in part, by much larger drinks groups, and a single gin can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A gin’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a bottle, a label and the place it names, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. 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.

From an April Fool to an alcohol-free range, an investor and a railway.

The brand’s biggest turn began as a joke. The company says that on 1 April 2016 it announced an alcohol-free Siegfried as an April Fool, that the response persuaded it to start development in spring 2017, and that Siegfried Wonderleaf, a distilled alcohol-free botanical base for mixing, launched on 24 August 2018. about-drinks reported in 2022 that Wonderleaf followed in 2018 and a darker variant, Wonderoak, in 2021; the company calls Wonderleaf Germany’s first alcohol-free alternative to gin. Later came Siegfried Classic Low at 20% vol and, in 2025, ready-to-drink cans of Siegfried and Wonderleaf with tonic made with the mineral-water producer Rhodius, the company says.

Outside money arrived in August 2020, when Diageo’s drinks accelerator Distill Ventures took a minority stake in Rheinland Distillers, Shanken News Daily reported; the amount was not disclosed. The same report described a digitally focused business whose brands were sold across Germany and in selected European markets. Export had begun early: in June 2016 about-drinks listed twenty countries for the gin, from Ireland and Denmark to Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. In March 2024 Rheinland Distillers and Deutsche Bahn announced that Siegfried would be served in the railway’s roughly 450 onboard restaurants and bistros, about-drinks reported.

The company has also given the brand physical homes. It says it moved into its first office at the start of 2017 and fitted it with a bar that opened to the public every Thursday evening until pandemic rules closed it, that it ran its own pop-up shop in Terminal 1 at Cologne Bonn Airport during the pandemic, and that it has packed and shipped its own orders since summer 2018, from its own logistics hall since early 2020. In England, about-drinks reported in 2016, the gin was at first sold exclusively through the Hakkasan Group.

The name needs a little care online. Siegfried is also the name of many unrelated businesses; the gin’s own site is hellosiegfried.com.

For a design guide, Siegfried shows how a name from a Rhineland legend, a botanical taken from the same story and a wordmark cut into three short lines can carry a start-up gin from a Bonn living room to a national railway. Compare Monkey 47, the Black Forest gin in an apothecary bottle, and The Duke, another German craft gin. For this guide we use linden green, Rhine slate and blossom cream with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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