We were tasked by Hardenberg in Germany with creating a brand from name to finished bottle that championed the very best of Irish and German distillation and botany. The result is a gin produced in Ireland that borrows botanicals from the famous Von Haller’s Botanical Gardens in Gottingen. It was Von Haller’s decree in the late 17th century that his gardens were to be used for the benefit of others, and so today botanicals are still shipped from here throughout the world.

Albrecht Von Haller – physician, poet and above all, botanist – was a towering figure of the German enlightenment. In 1736 he established the famous Göttingen botanical gardens – the same gardens that today send their rarest botanicals to Ireland, where they are slowly transformed into this rarest of Irish gins.

Count Carl Hardenberg’s love of Ireland was nurtured during the formative years he spent in the rugged west of the country. At The Shed distillery in Drumshanbo, he discovered Irish botanicals and distilling with copper pots – a method unchanged since medieval times.

On his return to Germany, Carl began to dream of a gin that would combine the meticulous approach of his homeland with the freedom and inventiveness of Ireland. He began at the Von Haller Garden. He hand-picked his German botanicals, then brought them to be distilled slowly with wild Irish angelica at The Shed distillery. 

The outcome is a remarkable gin born of two traditions: wholly German, fully Irish, altogether unique.