Greensand Ridge Distillery.
It's a bit of a mouthful. And a nightmare for graphic designers.
For me it perfectly captures what we're building here. It's not so much about location, although the distillery is just outside the village of Shipbourne in Kent, which sits just under the ridge and through which the Greensand Way footpath passes.
But it is about place. The Greensand Ridge is a line of hills which surrounds the Weald of Kent and Sussex. This is the area where we want to source our ingredients and capture flavours. The fields, orchards, nutteries and hedgerows. The ridge encircles and contains these flavours and gives us a focal point for our quest for great flavours and lost ingredients.
The Greensand Ridge, encircling the Weald of Kent and Sussex, shown in light blue in this terrible photo of a geological map. It's the remainder of a layer of greensand deposit which has been eroded away until just the edges remain; the north and south downs (mustardy-green) are a similar remainder, but of the layer of chalk that was laid above the greensand in the Cretaceous period.
I like the way the name reflects our ambition to build a truly sustainable business. That in itself has been a long journey and a steep learning curve but we know in pursuing it we are building with integrity and learning lessons about sustainability that we can pass on to other distillers.
Lastly, I grew up bezzing around on the Greensand Ridge so for me it's also a very personal name. But personal in another way - the ridge shares its profile with another escarpment in Shropshire, Wenlock Edge. It was on those hills that generations of my forefathers lived, and from where we got our family name, Edge.
So a bit of a thing for ridges, you might say.