A milking shed beside a spring-fed lake.

Silent Pool takes its name from the spring-fed lake beside its distillery in the Surrey Hills. The company was started by Ian McCulloch and James Shelbourne, according to The Moodie Davitt Report, which in September 2023 gave the founding year as 2014. Sources differ on the date: the company’s own website says the distillery was founded in 2013 by a group of friends, and a William Grant & Sons press release of May 2024 says 2015.

The Gin Guild says McCulloch had spent close to 30 years as a commercial director at ITV before turning to gin, and that Shelbourne, whom he met in Guildford through a mutual friend, “knew a lot about marketing and distribution.” McCulloch approached the property arm of Northumberland Estates, the Gin Guild says, and the pair rented a disused milking shed and farm buildings beside the pool and had them converted.

The site is on the Albury Estate, owned by the Duke of Northumberland, the Guildford newspaper The Guildford Dragon reported in April 2015. The company says its copper still was hand-built by the Arnold Holstein company in the Lake Constance area of Germany and is powered by a restored vintage wood-fired steam boiler; The Guildford Dragon described that boiler as a 1970s Barford Invicta Major, reportedly rescued from Liverpool Docks, burning wood from the estate. Its head distiller at the time was Cory Mason. The first spirit made there, the newspaper said, was a gin called Albury Limited Release, sold locally and at Alnwick Castle.

Twenty-four botanicals and a local legend.

The flagship is Silent Pool Gin, a London Dry Gin that William Grant & Sons describes as made with 24 botanicals and locally sourced honey, bottled at 43% ABV. Its May 2024 press release names local lavender, chamomile, elderflower and linden among them, with honey from beehives behind the distillery; The Guildford Dragon in 2015 added kaffir lime and bergamot, and said the gin is made with water from the Silent Pool spring. That year the newspaper reported the gin had been chosen for the maiden voyage of P&O’s cruise ship Britannia.

The bottle is the brand’s best-known image. The London design consultancy Seymourpowell created the brand identity, packaging and bottle for the distillery’s first national spirit, the design site Dexigner reported in May 2016. Seymourpowell’s case study lists brand strategy, the brand name and marque, design guidelines and the bottle among its work, and gives the brand essence as “Instinctive Precision.” The glass and stopper take an aqua-green tone from the water of the pool, and copper illustrations — inspired, Dexigner said, by the copper Holstein still — weave all 24 botanicals together with the local legend of a maiden pursued into the water by Prince John. Seymourpowell describes the result as “an intricate and precise pattern woven from the 24 botanicals of the gin recipe.” The Guildford Dragon had described the first bottles as teal with copper-embossed botanicals. Neil Hirst, Seymourpowell’s director of 3D branding, called the collaboration “totally complimentary.”

The range has since widened. The Gin Guild lists a Rare Citrus Gin, also at 43%, built around Buddha’s Hand, Natsu Dai Dai, Hirado Buntan and green Seville orange.

The English gin revival.

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.

A paper bottle, then a Scottish owner.

In April 2021, to coincide with Earth Day, Silent Pool released Green Man Woodland Gin in a paperboard bottle made by the packaging company Frugalpac, The Spirits Business reported on 22 April 2021. The bottle was made from 94% recycled paper with a separate recyclable pouch. The gin used 25 botanicals meant to evoke the woods of Surrey, the magazine said, and the distillery’s main still ran on biofuel. By June 2022 the gin had been renamed Green Man Wildwood Gin, TRBusiness reported, adding that Silent Pool had signed with Duty Free Global in September 2021 to represent it in travel retail. Country & Town House later described a Green Man Wildwood Vodka as the line’s second spirit.

William Grant & Sons, the Scottish family company behind Hendrick’s, announced in September 2023 that it had fully acquired Silent Pool Distillers, The Moodie Davitt Report reported on 14 September 2023. Production stays at the distillery in the Surrey Hills, the report said, with William Grant acting as global supply-chain and distribution partner and planning expansion into Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. McCulloch, then managing director, said: “Over the past nine years we have built a distillery that creates a unique product.” In May 2024 William Grant announced wide distribution of Silent Pool Gin across the United States, where it had previously been available only in limited markets; Jefferson Kohler, its director of innovation brands, called it “the next chapter of Silent Pool Gin’s story.”

For a design guide, Silent Pool shows how a single bottle can carry a place, a recipe and a legend at once. Compare Hendrick’s, its stablemate at William Grant & Sons, and Sipsmith, another gin of the English distilling revival. For this guide we use aqua, copper and a deep woodland green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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