The Story

Born on the Dorset coast, Shanty Spirit was created to capture the song of the sea in every sip. After years filming food and drink around the world, we discovered the extraordinary depth of flavour in British seaweeds and set out to celebrate them.

From our own distillery by the shoreline, we hand-craft award-winning spirits with seaweed at their core. Our Seaweed Botanical Vodka brings clean, coastal umami and bright citrus lift; our Barrel-Aged Seaweed Spiced Honey Rum is warm and complex, mellowed in bourbon oak with raw Dorset honey, cacao, ginger and seaweed.

Every bottle is distilled and bottled by hand on the coast — real provenance, responsible craft, and flavour that sings whether sipped neat or stirred into a Martini.

Hugh Lambert, founder of Shanty Spirit

The Process

We take each individual botanical and precision vacuum-distil them in an organic grain spirit to extract the freshest flavours from the ingredients. We found that after much testing and comparing, this was hands down a far superior method to traditional copper pot distillation when extracting the delicate notes.

These remarkable essences are then blended by hand and added into the remaining grain spirit.

Finally, we cut our botanical vodka down to 40% ABV using the purest water, re-mineralised with a pinch of Dorset sea salt.

The Bottle

The bottle is reminiscent of a ship’s decanter; squat and sturdy, because no-one would want to knock over a bottle of Shanty! It has beautiful seductive curves and a punt at its base that suggests the seabed or a wave.

The artwork on the bottle was created by a local Dorset artist, Emma Brownjohn. This complex image wraps around from the back of the bottle so that when viewed from the front, the image is magnified and distorted as if being underwater. The bottle is designed to be explored from all angles: and in the centre of the image, we find the Spirit of the Sea.

It’s a bottle not to be thrown away, but to be cherished. To make sure that it retains its good looks after repeated uses, the artwork is fired in a kiln and therefore becomes a part of the bottle itself.

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