Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Barney Wilczak spent the first part of his career as a conservation photojournalist, building a media library of habitat restoration for botanic gardens around the world, and then, in what he calls his first midlife crisis, walked away from it to convert the lean-to greenhouse of his childhood home in Cirencester into Capreolus Distillery.
In this episode we sit just outside that greenhouse, going deep on what happens when you commit entirely to representing fruit rather than making alcohol: wild fermentation with no cultivated yeast or added enzymes, hand-grading tens of thousands of kilos of fruit a year on a sorting table his father welded together, and cutting away roughly nine times the volume of heads a conventional producer would keep — judged by nose and palate alone, with no meters. We talk through the arithmetic behind that obsession: a thousand kilos of raspberries yielding just eighteen litres of finished spirit, sixty-two kilos of fruit compressed into a single litre of elderberry eau de vie, and a thousand-variety orchard that ended up, improbably, in King Charles's Coronation cake.
We get into what it actually feels like to have thousands of pounds of irreplaceable fruit sitting in a still, twenty seconds from ruin, and the philosophy underneath all of it — why Barney sees his own inadequacy as a producer as the whole point, why tasting notes can miss what actually makes a drink profound, and why art that's built to be consumed rather than preserved on a wall might be the more honest kind.
Along the way we taste through raspberry, apple, quince, damson, blackcurrant and elderberry eau de vie.
00:00:00 Introduction: at Capreolus, in Barney's dad's garden
00:00:46 True Cotswolds: Cirencester and an embarrassment of fruit
00:01:23 The pivot: from conservation photojournalist to distiller
00:02:16 Building a media library for botanic gardens in 118 countries
00:02:47 Turning 30 and the first midlife crisis
00:04:11 Starting a fruit distillery before gin was even a category
00:04:45 Converting the childhood greenhouse; launching with 500 bottles
00:05:59 Dawn Davies and The Whisky Exchange name the gin Spirit of the Year
00:06:34 Family history: Polish-English roots and a culture of preserving things
00:08:14 Why fruit, when everyone else was making gin or whisky
00:09:22 Self-taught: translating German, Austrian, Italian and French texts
00:10:18 Every apple, pear and rowan has as much right as any grape
00:11:31 The realisation of his own inadequacy as a producer
00:14:18 Questioning inherited wisdom: why raspberry "shouldn't" be distilled
00:15:26 A thousand kilos of raspberries, hand-sorted, for 18 litres of spirit
00:17:13 Violet, rosewater and citrus: what actually comes through
00:18:10 Perry pears that smell like standing under a 300-year-old tree
00:19:07 Why every distillery defaults to Williams pear
00:21:09 The size of the cuts: nine times a "good" producer's heads cut
00:22:23 Hannah's nose for heads compounds
00:24:01 Guess the ABV: 82.6%, and it still tastes like fresh fruit
00:26:37 Distilling with a winemaker friend: slow process, fast flavour
00:28:15 Eau de Vie tasting of blackcurrant leaf
00:30:58 62 kilos of fruit for a single litre
00:32:04 The Thousand Trees orchard, and the King's Coronation cake
00:35:05 Vintage variation, magnified 20-60x
00:36:01 Planting 252 quince trees
00:38:19 Quince: 14 hours to clean by hand
00:41:16 The wooden sorting table his dad built
00:43:38 Fermenting in January with no cultivated yeast
00:45:23 Three million raspberries touched in three weeks
00:46:47 Why he stopped buying cultivated yeast and enzymes
00:50:14 Wild fermentation as a relay race
00:53:07 Damson eau de vie: 60-120 year old trees on the Severn
01:02:28 Damascene plums: 2,000 years old and disappearing
01:03:36 The tasting note: "it smells like a baby's head"
01:07:40 Why plant flavours can't be described as single notes
01:08:13 Unpacking "inadequacy": stepping out of the way
01:19:57 The Fruit Machine seminar: cocktails as reconstructed fruit
01:22:50 Blackcurrant eau de vie: 24kg to the litre
01:26:54 The telescope analogy
01:28:18 "What's the succession for this?"
01:29:24 Art that's designed to be consumed, not preserved
01:35:36 The seven-year hiatus on elderflower
01:37:38 Elderberry: 2,000kg of fruit, 16 litres of spirit
01:39:49 Pricing: fruit, labour and yield, nothing else
01:51:14 Closing thoughts
📷 Follow me on Instagram - instagram.com/tristanstephenson
📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - thecuriousbartender.com
Barney Wilczak spent the first part of his career as a conservation photojournalist, building a media library of habitat restoration for botanic gardens around the world, and then, in what he calls his first midlife crisis, walked away from it to convert the lean-to greenhouse of his childhood home in Cirencester into Capreolus Distillery.
In this episode we sit just outside that greenhouse, going deep on what happens when you commit entirely to representing fruit rather than making alcohol: wild fermentation with no cultivated yeast or added enzymes, hand-grading tens of thousands of kilos of fruit a year on a sorting table his father welded together, and cutting away roughly nine times the volume of heads a conventional producer would keep — judged by nose and palate alone, with no meters. We talk through the arithmetic behind that obsession: a thousand kilos of raspberries yielding just eighteen litres of finished spirit, sixty-two kilos of fruit compressed into a single litre of elderberry eau de vie, and a thousand-variety orchard that ended up, improbably, in King Charles's Coronation cake.
We get into what it actually feels like to have thousands of pounds of irreplaceable fruit sitting in a still, twenty seconds from ruin, and the philosophy underneath all of it — why Barney sees his own inadequacy as a producer as the whole point, why tasting notes can miss what actually makes a drink profound, and why art that's built to be consumed rather than preserved on a wall might be the more honest kind.
Along the way we taste through raspberry, apple, quince, damson, blackcurrant and elderberry eau de vie.
00:00:00 Introduction: at Capreolus, in Barney's dad's garden
00:00:46 True Cotswolds: Cirencester and an embarrassment of fruit
00:01:23 The pivot: from conservation photojournalist to distiller
00:02:16 Building a media library for botanic gardens in 118 countries
00:02:47 Turning 30 and the first midlife crisis
00:04:11 Starting a fruit distillery before gin was even a category
00:04:45 Converting the childhood greenhouse; launching with 500 bottles
00:05:59 Dawn Davies and The Whisky Exchange name the gin Spirit of the Year
00:06:34 Family history: Polish-English roots and a culture of preserving things
00:08:14 Why fruit, when everyone else was making gin or whisky
00:09:22 Self-taught: translating German, Austrian, Italian and French texts
00:10:18 Every apple, pear and rowan has as much right as any grape
00:11:31 The realisation of his own inadequacy as a producer
00:14:18 Questioning inherited wisdom: why raspberry "shouldn't" be distilled
00:15:26 A thousand kilos of raspberries, hand-sorted, for 18 litres of spirit
00:17:13 Violet, rosewater and citrus: what actually comes through
00:18:10 Perry pears that smell like standing under a 300-year-old tree
00:19:07 Why every distillery defaults to Williams pear
00:21:09 The size of the cuts: nine times a "good" producer's heads cut
00:22:23 Hannah's nose for heads compounds
00:24:01 Guess the ABV: 82.6%, and it still tastes like fresh fruit
00:26:37 Distilling with a winemaker friend: slow process, fast flavour
00:28:15 Eau de Vie tasting of blackcurrant leaf
00:30:58 62 kilos of fruit for a single litre
00:32:04 The Thousand Trees orchard, and the King's Coronation cake
00:35:05 Vintage variation, magnified 20-60x
00:36:01 Planting 252 quince trees
00:38:19 Quince: 14 hours to clean by hand
00:41:16 The wooden sorting table his dad built
00:43:38 Fermenting in January with no cultivated yeast
00:45:23 Three million raspberries touched in three weeks
00:46:47 Why he stopped buying cultivated yeast and enzymes
00:50:14 Wild fermentation as a relay race
00:53:07 Damson eau de vie: 60-120 year old trees on the Severn
01:02:28 Damascene plums: 2,000 years old and disappearing
01:03:36 The tasting note: "it smells like a baby's head"
01:07:40 Why plant flavours can't be described as single notes
01:08:13 Unpacking "inadequacy": stepping out of the way
01:19:57 The Fruit Machine seminar: cocktails as reconstructed fruit
01:22:50 Blackcurrant eau de vie: 24kg to the litre
01:26:54 The telescope analogy
01:28:18 "What's the succession for this?"
01:29:24 Art that's designed to be consumed, not preserved
01:35:36 The seven-year hiatus on elderflower
01:37:38 Elderberry: 2,000kg of fruit, 16 litres of spirit
01:39:49 Pricing: fruit, labour and yield, nothing else
01:51:14 Closing thoughts
📷 Follow me on Instagram - instagram.com/tristanstephenson
📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - thecuriousbartender.com
