Trevethan Distillery

Trevethan Distillery
Norman Trevethan epitomised this type of inventive and resourceful rural personality. Born in 1906 in Tideford, Cornwall, being a traditional Cornish family, the Trevethan’s had their own recipe for a range of the Counties best loved food and drinks.

In his early career, Norman was a chauffeur to Earl and Lady St Germans and regularly took them to society events in what was then 1920’s London. It was during this heavily influential time, when gin cocktails were the height of fashion that Norman decided that the Trevethan family recipe for Gin needed to be perfected!

The original Trevethan Gin recipe was the essence of the Cornish hedgerows. An amalgam of skills and knowledge that had grown out of Norman’s experience of country brewing crafts and the influence of his time in ‘Roaring Twenties London’ as a high society chauffeur.

Fast forward to 2015 when his grandson Robert Cuffe, an engineer, and his friend John Hall, a chemist, decided to breathe life back into an old family tradition and Trevethan Distillery was re-born.

It was traditional in Cornwall to celebrate the changing of the seasons with home brewed alcohol. The bounty from the hedgerows, field and woodland would change from season to season and so did the recipes. Parsnip wine, blackberry and elderberry wine, marrow rum, plum brandy and blackthorn plum and sloe gin were common and families had their particular specialities and secret recipes which had been passed down the generations.

In fact, the true essence of craft stems from the ingenuity and creativity of rural communities who would recreate products, food recipes and drinks that were only readily available to those in the big cities.

Trevethan Distillery