Sue's book is a tonic for gin lovers

Sue Telford knows a thing or two about gin. It’s fair to say that she genuinely loves it.

“I’m not a lush though!” she exclaims in the neat kitchen of her home at Acle, between Norwich and Great Yarmouth. “I have just always drunk gin, even when I was going out in the 1990s with friends and they were drinking violently coloured alcopops.”

Then, Sue happily enjoyed the standards of the gin world, like Gordon’s, Bombay Sapphire and Beefeater, but a decade ago the gin world exploded when craft distiller Sipsmith took on the big guns and the law was changed, allowing small players to acquire the base spirits and equipment needed to join the party on a micro-scale.

And so Sue decided to join in as well – not as a commercial player, but just for the fun of it. She bought herself a tiny air still and some botanicals, got herself licensed by HMRC, and started experimenting – effectively turning her little nine-foot-by-nine-foot kitchen into a weekend gin distillery! At the time, she knew nothing about distilling, although she was a keen home cook and loved experimenting with flavours.