In Episode 3 of Season 4 of BITE BIG, Amber Bonney travels to Girvan on the southwest coast of Scotland, and into one of the most extraordinary creative spaces in the world, The Gin Palace, to sit down with Lesley Gracie, Master Distiller and the pioneering creator of Hendrick's Gin.
Lesley's story is one of the most unlikely in business. A Hull chemist who started her career making medicine taste less awful. A woman who moved to Scotland in 1988 to marry her husband (always called 'the current husband') and walked into a job that, twenty-something years later, would change the way the world drinks gin. Inspired by her dad's lifelong advice, 'if you want it, go for it', Lesley has spent 38 years at William Grant & Sons building something that simply didn't exist before she made it.
In this episode, Lesley and Amber get into the real story behind Hendrick's, the vague brief ('make something totally different'), the months of failed botanical combinations, and the day the marketing team revealed a short, black, dumpy bottle that looked nothing like anything else on the back bar in 1999. Lesley's response? 'What?'
They go deep on what it actually means to hold a brand's core identity steady while letting innovation run wild at the edges, and why Lesley believes the consistency of Hendrick's is one of its most powerful assets. The recipe hasn't changed. The bottle hasn't changed. And yet every limited edition tells a completely new story, built from her botanical obsessions, from greenhouse experiments, from a cacao flower garnish on a cocktail in Mexico that sent her down a months-long rabbit hole.
They talk about the Venezuelan rainforest, where Lesley lived with a tribe for days and distilled in the jungle with a 10-litre still. The next generation of distillers, and why the 'what if, what if, what if' mindset is what she tries to keep alive. The smoked salmon and strawberry sandwich that proved her wrong. And what it means to wake up every morning genuinely excited to go to work.
Lesley Gracie has received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Hull. She's been inducted into the Gin Magazine Hall of Fame. She's one of only four people in the world who knows the full Hendrick's recipe. And her granddaughter thinks she's 'seriously weird.' She takes that as a compliment.
Strip away the titles and the accolades — what Lesley Gracie most wants to be known for is this: she enjoys what she does. And it shows.
As part of Bite Big's commitment to supporting causes our guests care about, we've donated $250 on Lesley's behalf to Guide Dogs — because, as Lesley says, it's hard to be curious about the world if you can't experience it.