How to Drink Buck & Birch with Tom Chisholm, Co-Founder

Sometimes you don’t realize that all paths have led you to where you end up. Think about it – it could be true for you. It is for our guest – he’s right where he was meant to be all along.

For Tom Chisholm,  all those dead ends and missed starts made sense when Buck & Birch was born. Founded in 2016 by Tom and his partner Rupert Waites when they joined forces to share a deep bond created back in their respective childhoods growing up in nature, surrounded by exhilarating wilderness landscapes. 

The duo began hosting pop-up dining events in the 2000’s, with a focus on wild and foraged Scottish ingredients. Their wild elderberry liqueur proved insanely popular with all and Buck & Birch was on its way.

Follow along with us on Tom’s path from Norway to Scotland and how he found himself the co-founder of a drinks company!

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Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Tom. Just remember that I own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of Lush Life podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as my right of publicity. So if you want to use any of this, please email me!

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Susan: Well, it’s really great to have you on the show. I’m so thrilled to have someone from Scotland.

Tom: Brilliant. Yes. Delighted to be chatting to you about Buck & Birch. A rare day. It’s a nice sunny day outside just now, actually.

Susan: As well in London, except the one time I went out today, it started to rain and I was like, hmm, I’m back in the UK after being in the US for a while.

Tom: Well, that’s what makes it exciting about being in the UK, right?

Susan: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, we always start at Lush life with going back before we go forward. Why don’t you introduce yourself then let’s get into where you grew up, because I believe it’s in a different country, and how you got to Scotland.

Tom: Okay! My name is Tom Chisholm, Co-founder and Creative Director at Buck & Birch. Buck & Birch is a craft spirits company celebrating the wild flavors of Scotland. But, as you rightly said there, I grew up in a different country. I grew up in Norway on the outskirts of Oslo, up in the Villmark, translated as the wilderness.

It’s just on the outskirts of Oslo, but beautiful, wild forests and fjords and all sorts of things. Very idyllic. Picking berries with my grandmother and chasing the occasional elk out of my garden and climbing trees and all sorts of things. It was a lovely way to start my formative years and build my relationship with the landscape, if you like.

Then when my parents separated, my mom was from Scotland, so we moved back to Scotland again when I was about nine. I moved to Portobello, so just in the outskirts of Edinburgh this time, so Seaside, which was lovely. Quite a culture shock, obviously going into a cities of life rather than rural but enjoyed that.

Then eventually went to art college where I studied fine art in Aberdeen. Then as most artists, in inverted commas, end up doing, you go into hospitality. I worked a lot of years in hospitality – bar, trade, restaurants, and all the rest of it. Eventually ended up at Brown’s Restaurant on George Street in Edinburgh.

Susan: Before we get any further, there’s tons to talk about. You grew up in Norway and you were nine. No wonder the Norwegian accent has left you and it is purely a Scottish accent now.

Tom: No, people often ask me, in Scotland, where is your accent from? Because I’ve got a slight Norwegian twang, little bit of Aberdonian in there and Edinburgh. It’s a bit all over the place, but I quite like that.

Susan: Oh, my goodness. I do not hear the Norwegian, but I am not Scottish, so my ear isn’t really in tune to it. So, you were brought up there and number one, I love that the town was called Wilderness. It was meant to be.

Tom: Yes, so the place rather than the town. I grew up in a place called Holmenkollen, but the area is called Villmark, like I say, and that translates as the wilderness and it’s beautiful.

Susan: It’s just sounds like it is, as I said, meant to be that you would be doing what you do now.

Tom: Yes. Yes. I mean it’s one of those where sometimes you don’t realize that all paths have led you to where you end up, right? You feel like there are dead ends and missed starts and all sorts of things. Finally, to go, oh, it all was leading me to this place. so, it all made sense when the Buck & Birch started.

Susan: Yes, absolutely. And you said that you used to go foraging or berry picking with your grandmother. What kind of things were you picking, then what were you doing with them?

Tom:  It is funny that you mentioned foraging and I say picking and that I find that there’s a difference. We pick berries, raspberries, wild strawberries, mulberries, bits and pieces, just purely for making jams and things like that to fill the cupboards at home.

It wasn’t for a business or anything. It was done because it just made sense. It wasn’t seen as something special or hipster or trendy to do, which foraging has become now. It was just, why not? It’s free food, essentially and it’s delicious. So yes, that was the sort of things we did. Then occasionally mushrooms, but mostly the fruits in summertime out in the sunshine, enjoying it.

Susan: Did your grandmother ever make any spirits from it?

Tom: No, no, no, no. No. Didn’t come until later in my life.

Susan: That would have been too much of a…

Tom: At least not that she shared with me anyway. I don’t remember that. But no, it was mostly jams. In Norway, you get Norwegian waffles, and I always remember having those. It’s like sour cream made waffles with fresh strawberry jam on it, and you’re just like, you can’t get better than that. It was amazing. And those food memories, they live with you forever, right? They’re very evocative. You remember them and I think that’s what I love about food and drink.

Susan: I love that. Now, you said you came over and you moved to Aberdeen, and you were going to study art. Were you planning or thinking of being an artist or what kind of art were you interested in?

Tom: So, growing up I was always really into drawing and painting and all this sort of stuff, and so going to Art College was really following that. What I enjoyed about it and, the weird thing about going to art college was having to contextualize everything I was doing, as opposed to just enjoying it.

It took away the thing that I liked about it. Even while there, I recognized that I didn’t want to have the sort of solitary life of an artist. I need people round about me. I was always my worst critic as well, so I could never figure out when I was finished things. Selling my products was horrible. Standing there feeling very exposed at exhibitions and things. But utilizing that creative mindset and thinking design wise is what I’ve sort of brought from that into the Buck & Birch side of things.

Susan: And as you rightly said, some artist students go into bartending to fund some of their life. What were your first experiences in the bar?

Tom: Well, the first experience was actually working as a KP kitchen porter, back bar person at age of about 15 or 16. Ironically, Rupert and I worked out that we worked at the same place at the same time without knowing each other, at Henderson’s in Edinburgh.

It was quite intimidating to go in there but also loving the hustle and bustle and speed and craziness of it all. Then later, yes, going into a bar and pouring pints, traditional pub then and getting fascinated and again terrified by the cocktail making and holding the real bartenders out there on a pedestal

What they were doing was amazing. I wish I could do it, but being too frightened to get involved because thinking it was… I don’t know what the fear factor is with cocktails, but that was kind of it. Then just slowly building up my knowledge and experiences through various bars and all the rest of it.

Susan: When you look back, do you think, I was afraid of nothing when all I needed was little knowledge and little by little I got there, and it shouldn’t be so terrifying.

Tom: Definitely. And actually, it’s funny. There are two other things that I would put in the same bracket as the fear that you don’t need to have. Modern art. People are always terrified to tell the truth when they look at modern art, the standard answer by people is, “Oh, I don’t understand it. I don’t know.” And it’s actually how it makes you feel that it can’t be right or wrong. And the other one is whisky. People are very scared to tell the truth about what they think of a whiskey, good or bad or indifferent because they think they’re being judged if they get it wrong.

That’s the same with cocktails. I think actually the more you get to learn, there isn’t right or wrong. There are nuances and preferences within it, and actually the skill of a bartender is recognizing that from their customer or whoever and saying, well, if you prefer sweet things, then I’ll work towards that. Or more savoury or stronger, more spirit led. That’s the skill of a bartender.

Susan: A few bars are having smaller cocktails so that people don’t feel so intimidated to try a whole one. You’re going out for one night, you’re not sure if you like whisky or gin, when I’m sure any bartender, if you don’t like your drink, they’re going to take it back and they’re going to get you something that you do like. But having flights of cocktails so you can try things that are different. There’s a bar here called Archive and Myth, and they’ve just started doing smaller cocktails. And a friend of mine just wrote a book on mini cocktails and I think it’s a great way to try different things, so I completely agree with you. Absolutely.

Tom: Panda & Sons in Edinburgh, which is one of the World’s 50 Best Bars, and Iain McPherson, who’s a great champion of our products, which is fantastic. But they just recently did something for Gray Goose where, and it was exactly that, a trio of mini martinis. It was the traditional classic martini. Then there was an orange blossom one. Then the third one was an umami one using our Birch Botanical Vodka and the Gray Goose in there. People are much more looking for experience-based drinking opportunities now, rather than drinking for the sake of getting alcohol, as much alcohol as you can.

You know, and that mantra of drink less, but drink better is definitely a cultural thing that’s happening. I advocate it and I think it’s a good thing.

Susan: Oh, a hundred percent. Sadly, I haven’t been up to Panda & Sons recently. It’s funny that you should mention them because the last time I did see them, they were at Archive and Myth.

Tom: Yes.

Susan: Yes. Doing a guest shift. That’s kind of funny, but back to you. When you started to learn a bit more, did you think this could be something that I potentially could have a career in?

Tom: No, if I’m honest, I was bouncing about going what’s the career path that I’m looking for. And I’m, not wasting my time, but I’m losing time here by working in hospitality and all these sort of things. I briefly went into advertising for a while, but realized that, so from one extreme of the fine art thing of having no boundaries and nothing to advertising, which was very corporate, and I didn’t like either of those things.

Then I realized that actually the hospitality side of the food and drink industry is what I enjoy doing, like speaking to customers and introducing them to new things and all the rest of it. The fact that Buck & Birch, and we’ll go into this, the fact that Buck & Birch is a drinks company, we didn’t start as a drinks company. We started as a popup dining experience. The drinks were born out of that. It is more about that hospitality connecting people to their environment, the natural environment that we’ve got around us through flavour and ingredients and experience. That’s what my driver is, if you like.

Susan: Well, why don’t we go into that, how you came about starting Buck & Birch, and how you met your co-founder, Rupert.

Tom: Yes, we met working at Brown’s restaurant on George Street in Edinburgh. One of the big Brown’s chain restaurants. Rupert was the head chef there. I worked front of house as a waiter and a bartender. So typically, front and back of house, there’s always a bit of friction between the two and maybe they don’t get on, but I was always, without sounding condescending to him, but I was always really impressed by how Rupert ran this really super busy kitchen.

It wasn’t shouty, sweary, aggressive, domineering kitchen space. It was all very calm and people knew what they did. It wasn’t intimidating to go in, but also the types of specials that he put on for the restaurant. His relationship with suppliers meant that he got really fresh seafood and various things and quite different to what the normal menu of Browns was, and quite out the comfort zone of most of the guests who would come in.

I would really enjoy persuading people to have the specials. Yes, you’ve ordered a steak pie, but we’ve just got some fresh langoustines in from Skye. They’re as fresh as you can get. Now have them, you’d appear with a squid ink risotto and the langoustines and see this look of fear or worry on people’s faces then they try it, and they’d go, wow, that’s amazing. Thanks for pushing me into that space. As I said earlier about food memories on that level. They stay with you. They’re very evocative.

We both worked there, then left, went our separate ways. Rupert had his second child, and I was getting married and pretending that I was grown up, going to grow up and get out of the hospitality trade. About a year later, 18 months later, I started seeing these posts that Rupert was putting on Facebook and it was of these amazing wild ingredients and recipes and things that he was making. Elderflower champagnes, and lots of foods and jars and pickles, that brought back my memories from going out, picking stuff with my grandmother.

I got in touch with him and said, look, we should really do something with this stuff that you’ve got. I had access to a venue in Portobello, so I took him out in Edinburgh out in November evening, plied him with alcohol until he went, okay, fair enough. I’ll do it. You know, I’ll sign up to do two of these pop-up dinner things. Then we held off doing the first ever dinner until the following April. That was in April 2012 because we wanted to serve pure birch sap as the table water rather than just water.

Then we served up a five or six course taster menu, ultra local, seasonal, foraged on a day. Local gamekeeper. We called him up and said, what have you got? As opposed to creating a menu based on things that we wanted to serve. It was what was available and all wild. Then got 20 unsuspecting guests around the table. Didn’t give them a menu beforehand, didn’t give them a choice. They needed to trust us quite a lot to see what would happen and. And they loved it, and we loved it. But we didn’t want to be a restaurant. We carried on the pop-up dining experiences for two years because we were like, there has to be some business idea within this wild forage-y thing that that’ll come from.

And as part of the dinner, the first ever dinner we served, because it was a bit of a delay between the starter and the main course, I think, Rupert said, look. I’ve got this elderberry liqueur stuff I’ve made. Send that out and I say, okay. We took that out and at the end of the meal people sort of came up to us and asked what that black drink was? So, it became a mainstay on the menu and after two years of ignoring people saying we’d like to buy it, we thought, well, maybe this is the business idea. Then launched 200 bottles of Aelder in 2016, I think it was.

Susan: Hold on, hold on. Before we get to there, back to Facebook. You saw him doing all these things. Were you also making stuff and going out there and picking or foraging?

Tom: No. I’d lost that connection to the stuff around me which was not something that I realized I missed until I saw him doing it and was like, oh, yes, I remember doing things like that. Actually, it was the birch tapping thing. I remember proudly at the time saying to Rupert, I know where some birch trees are down the road from my house.

He came out and I said, right, it’s just down this path. It’s like 200 yards down there. And before we even got off onto the path, he’s like, oh, that’s Jack by the hedge. You can eat that. Oh, these flowers here, they’ll come out in May. You know, we can use them. You can dry the petals to do this or make jam. It took us 20 minutes to walk 200 meters because he was pointing all these things out. When your eyes are open to that, it’s inspiring in so many ways. That green space that you walk through all the time, you realize is bursting with stuff and changes all the time. It’s properly exciting.

Susan: Well, we’re going to talk about the birch water in a second, I don’t want to forget about that, but I listened to the podcast where you took the journalist foraging. Or Rupert took the journalist foraging and that was so interesting. All the things that I had never heard of, but he’s like, but watch out for the mushrooms, just know what you’re doing. But like your grandmothers knew all that inherently, and you…

Tom: We’ve lost that.

Susan: We’re relearning it.

Tom: We are relearning it. And that’s what we are trying to do in a modern way, right? With our drinks and stuff, it’s not necessarily about telling people to go out foraging for everything they need and all the rest of it, but it’s just highlighting that these things are out there, then packaging them up in a modern, sophisticated way because those flavors and those ingredients, they deserve to be celebrated in that way.

Susan: Yes, absolutely. I was once at Manoir aux Quatre Saison for a tea and they took us around their incredible garden, and I tasted an oyster leaf for the first time

Tom: Oh, amazing.

Susan: I could not believe that it wasn’t an oyster, really. You know, it is just tricks your mind and that they’re like, oh yes, it’s everywhere, you know? It was everywhere. Everywhere. I was like, where is this? I want to find it.

But back to the birch water. Why did he want to serve that and how did he know about it? How did you know it? I know nothing about birch trees. Is there only one kind of birch tree that you knew was the one that was on your property? 200 yards down the road?

Tom: I mean, yes, so there’s lots of different types. There’s Silver Birch and Downy Birch and Copper Birch and lots of different ones, but they all produce sap. Like lots of trees produce sap, maple being the most famous one and most obvious one, right.

Susan: I do know that one.

Tom: Yes. Yes, yes.

Susan: And mastiha…

Tom: Yes, exactly. There are quite a few tree spirits coming out there. So, to go back to Birch – I mean, Rupert’s knowledge, as you mentioned earlier, his fascination with all this stuff. He was given a book when he was about 13 called “Food for Free” by Richard Mabey, and that blew his mind.

He grew up in the north of Scotland and just went out and started investigating things. He loved to find all these different ingredients and old stories. Birch tapping is an age-old tradition in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and North America. And actually, in Scotland, birch trees are steeped in folklore as well.

It’s the first letter of the Gaelic alphabet – “Beith ” is birch. That’s where it comes from. And again, we’ve probably lost that connection to it, but birch water is just the cleanest, smoothest, most delicious refreshing water when it comes out of the tree. I think people assume that sap is like resin, so it’s going to be thick and sticky and bitter.

Susan: I totally assumed that.

Tom: Yes, so the sap is not that. When we harvest it, it comes out of the tree, and it looks like crystal clear water. Pours like water, looks like it, tastes like it, other than it’s got a subtle sweetness to it. Birch sap is 1% natural sugar. It’s full of lots of minerals and things that are very good for you actually.

We just wanted to highlight this resource that we have. There are 250 million birch trees in Scotland. There should be way more actually, but for our birch vodka, we are working with landowners to grow more trees. And yes, we were just thinking, well this is a resource that we can, if you pardon the pun, tap into and use.

It’s such a simple process in many ways, but it’s a bit of forest magic. You know, it never ceases to amaze me. Today is actually the first day Rupert was out tapping the trees. It’s super exciting. It’s the first day of the season, and that’s why we started using it.

Susan: This is why now I wish I lived up there so I could try it. I immediately want to try it. So then fast forward again to the elderberry liqueur. Was that just something that he had made a lot before and had around the house and thought, okay, this is a good thing to serve people in between a meal?

Tom: He’d made an elderberry cordial, again, off the back of finding an old recipe for elderberry cordial. He was like, well, I’m going to fortify it with some brandy and some whiskey. It wasn’t a conscious decision other than he’d picked lots of elderberries, then went and researched it and thought, what can I do with this?

That’s how it came about and made a small batch. This was before we were anything really. And like I say, we served it up, Actually, the way that Rupert makes things is not, we are not a typical distillery, right? We’re not conventional in any way. Arthur Motley, who’s one of the directors at Royal Mill Whiskeys, which is up in Scotland, where we first got our product, their description on their website, and I still love it, is “these are drinks not made in a distillery, but crafted in a kitchen.” I think that’s spot on, and it is the crossover between food and drink, which is the exciting bit for us.

Susan: Then you said you made 200 bottles.

Tom: Yes.

Susan: Where did you take those?

Tom: I was living in Haddington by this stage, so East Lothian, where we’re based and there’s a shop there, a whisky shop. I went in there and again, it’s funny to think that how much I hated selling my own artwork, but the drink was very different, right? I had no problems knocking on the door and walking in and getting Shiva who runs the shop to taste it.

It was near Christmas time, and he went, “Right, okay, we’ll do a barrel top tasting. You come and stand in here, sell the stuff.” I think we sold some like 60 bottles in two days or something, which was pretty mind blowing. I was like, “Wow, this is brilliant.” And Shiva, so he was delighted, and I was delighted and the fact that he’d put faith in us in that way was really cool.

Then some local farmers markets and stuff, we sold some bottles. Rupert was working for a care home at the time, so we sold some bottles to make money for doing up the gardens there. Whilst he was the head chef, but off his own back, he did up the gardens and put in a polytunnel and tried to make it more of a living space for the residents rather than just a sort of green dead space. So made some money for that.

Then, like I say, we gifted some bottles to friends of ours, literally for Christmas and just “go and have a taste.” And off the back of that, they were the ones coming to us and “I would put this on my menu actually,” or “I would put it on my shelf for…” And that was when we suddenly thought, well actually maybe, maybe this is the business idea. Then maybe that’s how we move forward.

Susan: Was the bottle that you have now the same as the original bottle?

Tom: The original bottle was a ceramic bottle with a black label with black writing on it, which sounds mad, right? In my head I thought, one, I want people to be able to pick it up to be able to read the label. They’d have to go like this and get the light to catch on the writing, then they’d see it with ceramic and go, “Oh, I want to discover that ceramic. I’ll buy a bottle.” Which when dealing directly with customers is great. Actually, it’s stuff that we’ve had to learn along the way, but at markets, that’s fantastic because I can explain what the product is. When it’s sitting on a shelf, people go, “I don’t know what it is. I don’t want it.”

Susan: Right. Yes. I can’t see the label. What are they hiding?

Tom: Yes, it’s been through various iterations, but the name has always been the same. The new bottle now is glass, so you can see the liquid, which is quite nice. It’s completely black in color – the amount of fruit, there’s about three and a half thousand elderberries per bottle. Our mantra is “flavor first, seasoned with spirit.” We don’t want it to be the alcohol that you taste. We want it to be the fruit and the botanicals, then the alcohol to give depth and seasoning at the end of your experience, but not leave the lasting flavor as being alcohol.

Susan: Now after that was such a success and you sold out and you’ve gifted, were you like, “Okay, well that’s done”? Or “Oh my God, we’ve hit on something here and now let’s think of some other spirits?”

Tom: I mean, yes, the 200 bottles gave us the confidence to move ahead. So that was 2016 that we started that. By 2018, we’d tested out a few more markets, gaining confidence, and wrote a business plan and got a little bit of investment into the company to say, “Look, we want to grow this.”

And to begin with, we thought Aelder’s going to be the global dominating new Baileys. You know, like give us three years and we will be dominating, conquering the world through this spirit. Then the more we did it, the more you recognize you need other things for people. We started developing other products.

Amarosa, which is a rose hip spritz liqueur, and Ana, which is a birch syrup caramel liqueur, came out next. Then again, like I said earlier about us being back to front, we do things differently. Most distilleries will start by creating a pure spirit. Then they might add botanicals, then they might bring in a liqueur down the line. We did liqueur first, then the botanical spirit, but then we went into spirit, so Birch and we also have a Rum and Cake, a cake infused rum. They both came out in 2021.

Susan: How did you decide to go from the elderberries to the rose hips? Was it just what you had around, and it seemed like a logical progression?

Tom: Yes, I mean, it is quite a funny story with that one. Rupert had made a batch of the rosehip rum years before. I think it was a 10-litre barrel of it. And just again, experimenting – rosehips are part of the apple family. Apple and rum go really well, but he’d forgotten about it.

It was years later we’d been for a walk at the coast here in East Lothian and I was chatting to somebody on the phone actually, as we got back to the car, and Rupert handed me a cup with a cube of ice in it and this little bit of liquid in it, but didn’t tell me what it was. I tasted it and was like, “Oh my, wow, what is that? That’s delicious.” And he says, “Oh, it’s the rosehip rum liqueur that remember I made?” And I was like, “Oh, yes, I remember that. Where was it?” And he said, “So I found it under my kids’ trampoline in the back garden.” I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

Susan: How long was it sitting there?

Tom: Two or three years I think, it’s trampoline aged liqueur. But the point was that we then – Rupert mainly, but we then had to go back to try and recreate it. One of the things that you find is when you start doing things on scale, things change, right? It’s not as easy as just, well, we need four kilos of rosehips and a hundred litres of rum or whatever. So, it took us quite a lot of iterations to get back to a flavor profile that was similar to the one that he’d had before. But that’s where that came about. It was a product that he’d been experimenting with.

With the Ana, the birch syrup caramel liqueur at the time. So around about 2018, 2019, two things dominated the market at shows and events, gin being the biggest one, then sort of toffee vodka type of stuff.

We were finding that people were frightened. It’s actually interesting to see how much it’s changed from then, even till now. But people were scared of elderberries. “I don’t know what they are. Rosehips? No, no, no.” You know, and when you think you’re not going to like something, you don’t like it. Like children eating vegetables. They’ll tell you they don’t like them before they’ve even tried it. We thought, well, let’s bring out, without devaluing our credibility, bring in a liqueur that’s maybe a bit more accessible to people, right?

At the end of our dinners, we used to serve these amazing birch syrup caramels as a little petit fours at the end. I said to Rupert once, “Why don’t we try and put that in a spirit?” And he was like, “Right, okay.” Then we had to figure out how to infuse that into the spirit to make this accessible drink that we thought.

We thought it’ll be at shows and events for all the people that are too scared to try the other stuff. What’s really interesting, we didn’t see the on-trade being interested in it at all really. And what’s been really interesting is not quite the opposite, but the world has shifted now where the general public are far more open to try elderberry, rosehips, birch sap, whatever. And actually, the bartenders love the caramel liqueur thing for use as a modifier for cocktails.

Susan: How funny. And you said you don’t have a distillery, so how does it work with the liqueurs? Before you started making your own vodka, what did you use?

Tom: We source all the spirits from other distilleries. To us, the important bit for us in our expertise, if you like, is always about the wild ingredient side of it. Now we could in theory, set up our own stills and start producing things, but actually what we are looking for is a spirit that’s going to have consistency. By getting that from other distilleries who do it on a larger scale, that’s better for us to get that.

There is a cost implication to that as well, obviously. Even just in terms of licensing and all the rest of it for few here. We do have our own production facility, but we don’t distil our own spirits from the raw ingredients – we buy them then infuse them or compound them with the fruits and the botanicals that are there.

Susan: After the birch caramel, were you thinking, “Ooh, the birch could be on its own now?” As you said, you do things backwards. You did the liqueurs first.

Tom: Yes, we’d go to shows and events and see the absolute explosion of craft gin. It felt like every week we’d go to a new show and a new gin would be there and crowds surrounding their stalls. The temptation was always a little bit like, should we bring out a gin?

We always held off from that because we were a little bit like, we say our products start with a walk in the woods and the one thing that doesn’t grow abundantly in Scotland is juniper, certainly not commercially. So, we were like, “Hmm, we could…” Whether it’s our own stubbornness or whatever it was, we never went down the route of doing it.

Actually, I’m quite glad looking back on it now, because we’ve carved out a space for ourselves as opposed to being in amongst everyone. We also recognize that there must be some white spirit alternative that would be reflective of the Scottish landscape. That could be like a gin, or similar to a gin in terms of how you enjoy it.

It was during lockdown that we suddenly had this eureka moment of literally going, well, birch trees, they’re everywhere around us. They’re in our name. We waited to do the dinner for the birch sap. Why don’t we do a product that utilizes birch sap? Then we went, “Well actually, why don’t we use the other parts of the tree as well, the botanicals that come from it?”

Everything in that bottle that you just held up is straight from the birch tree other than the pure alcohol. So, 40% ABV, just shy, but 60% is pure, raw, fresh birch sap, harvested every morning during the season. Rupert’s just about to start that epic journey for the next four weeks, then rested with high ABV spirit, brought down to 40%, then seasoned with the botanicals.

Susan: Yes, because it seems so funny that the thing that brought you together was that first walk to a birch tree to get the birch water, and that—you said that was 2012 or something that first got and you know, it took another…

Tom: Another 10 years to get to this. We say that the birch tree has led us into all of this stuff. It’s funny how it’s sort of come to that and we do see birch as the sort of spearhead of our portfolio now, despite being one of the last products to come out.

In reality, we could create new products every week. That’s the exciting thing that I always remember Rupert saying: “Exotic is not pineapples. It’s not mangoes, bananas, coconuts, these things are available in every supermarket, more or less in every corner of the world, you know? And any time of year, the exotic is actually what’s growing right under our noses that we’ve forgotten about.”

When you start looking, you realize that you’ve got hundreds of flavors on your doorstep from, like you said, the oyster leaf earlier, which has got that sort of umami, salty, briny flavor to it. You’ve got spice from clove root; you’ve got hogweed seeds that have got this orange zesty thing. There’s so much stuff there to discover and we’ve got to hold ourselves back a bit and go, “Nope. We’ve got a range of five products now, core range that we need to get out into the market and shout about before opening the doors and bringing the other hundred products out.”

Susan: Yes, absolutely. I write a luxury travel blog, and I always say luxury is getting something someplace you can only get in that place and that’s definitely echoing your whole mantra as well.

Tom: Yes. We see that with the clients that we work with, so the likes of Gleneagles, we’ve just finished a project with them, to make up bespoke vermouth for their American bar. Panda and Sons, like I mentioned earlier, the Johnny Walker experience, so this is like big companies, Diageo backed companies, that recognize that their customers and their guests demand a local point of difference, right?

We give credibility to them. It’s fantastic exposure for us as well. But the fact is it’s led by us as consumers, which is great, but that’s what we want. We want local provenance integrity. Craft or independent is a big thing. Then sustainability is another big buzzword that everyone wants to use, you know? We fit nicely into that mold, not because we looked at a marketing sheet and saw that those were the trends. This is what we do, and we’ll continue to do it forever. But it just so happens that the world is kind of catching up with us, which is great.

Susan: Yes. And it’s funny you going back to birch. I was going to say something we didn’t even discuss was your name, Buck & Birch. Why did you decide on that? Obviously, the birch part is obvious.

Tom: Yes, well, so it was that first ever dinner that we did, and we served venison sticks. We call ’em venison sticks or venison flowers. It’s cured venison ham served with a dandelion caper on a lot of twigs. It’s a little canapé. We also had a rabbit soup, Two bucks there. You’ve got buck from deer and buck from rabbits. That’s where the buck came from. Then birch started and finished the meal. You had pure birch water at the beginning, then you got the birch caramel at the end. It was my wife that sort of came up with a name.

She goes, “Well, why not Buck & Birch?” It’s funny how these things happen, but it made perfect sense at the time, and it stuck. When people hear me say it for the first time on the phone, you get some people, “I beg your pardon? What did you say?” “Buck & Birch,” you know, but yes, it’s good.

Susan: Also, the names of your other two liqueurs, the Amarosa and the Ana, the Aelder is pretty obvious, but Amarosa, is that the name of the rosehip?

Tom: I would say that to Aelder, which obviously you’ll see it’s got an A at the beginning. áed is the old Anglo-Saxon word for fire. It’s a whiskey that’s the base spirit in here, which gives a nice warmth, hence that sort of glow of fire. Back in the day, people used to use the hollow birch branches as sort of bellows for fire. Take the pith out the middle and blow through and stoke the fire. That’s where the name of that one comes from.

Amarosa, so rather than using sort of local spice like we have in birch, we’ve used some delicate bitter herbs in there, and so taking the loose inspiration from Italian style digestives, amaros.

Then Rosa—Rosa rugosa—is the Latin name for native rose hips. Ana is the Celtic goddess of spring. Birch sap rises in the spring, and the birch is known as the mother of the forest. That’s where the name comes from.

Susan: Got it. Now, since you’re an artist, let’s talk about the bottle design. How come you guys decided to use this type of bottle and talk me through what everything means on the label.

Tom:  The whole principle of all of our designs across all the different bottles is we are intrinsically a Scottish company. but we wanted to avoid the usual clichés like tartan, bagpipes, and shortbread. While those things are great, we believe that what we are creating and what Scotland can be and should be is more refined and take ourselves more seriously and celebrate ourselves more.

It’s contemporary, possibly slightly Scandi influenced design from my upbringing as well, specifically with the Birch bottle. It was to try and be as striking and minimalist like the tree itself. In the forest, they’re black and white, they stand out a mile, tall and quite thin. That’s why the bottle’s that shape.

The adding of the twig is this statement. The twig makes up the botanical essence that we use to season the product with, but it really was to prove that everything in there is from the tree and not put through a still and stripped of flavor.

Distilling is great for lots of things, but it does also leave behind lots of character of the ingredients that you use, right? We are all about saying we want to celebrate the ingredient in its purest form., so the twig in there is a little visual representation of that organic, nature driven ethos that we have behind the product.

Susan: And of course there’s a buck on it.

Tom: Yes, so actually case in point, when we launched Aelder, we only had one product, right? We were looking at how we can tie our brands together because at the moment they all sit on their own, if you like. You can see when you put them together, the font and the text and the way the label’s been put on. Similar. But we didn’t think ahead enough to go, actually we need some continuity about the brand. Putting that swatch strap on all the bottles is something that we will be doing.

Susan: And the beautiful colors, which come to mind bring to mind the birch tree.

Tom: Exactly, black and white, like the bark, and then gold, inspired by the copper-colored leaves in autumn.

Susan: And you have some cocktails on the back too.

Tom: We do have some cocktails on the back. We’ve done that with all the products. I think the idea of introducing a new product into the market is that we get lots of comments that, “Wow, we’ve never seen anything like this.” Which I take as a compliment, but it does also cause issues because people go, “I don’t know how to drink it.” The idea of giving some suggestions in the back is a little guide.

Susan: The bottle is so pretty by the way. I think it’s gorgeous. Now the big question, are you working on anything new?

Tom: We are always working on new things. We’ve got some exciting potential collaborative projects that I can’t talk about, with some pretty major players, which is quite exciting. The one that I can tell you about for example, is the Gleneagles project that we did. The vermouth for them was really exciting project to tie into. It’s a twist on a Rob Roy is the cocktail that they’ve done. They worked with Glenturret for the whiskey then we were challenged to make vermouth using Scottish botanicals. And it is delicious. Like if you ever get the chance to go to the American bar, have the Amber Stem, as it’s called. It’s so good.

Susan: Can you tell us a little bit more about that? The wine that you used and what the botanicals are in it?

Tom: Rupert’s the real mastermind behind the whole thing It’s primrose wine, primrose and Japanese knotweed actually. Then that’s sweetened with a little bit rosehip, then there’s sea wormwood. It’s been fortified with our birch spirit as well. There’s tansy, there’s yarrow, there are about 15 or 16 different herbs in there. The predominant one is the wormwood, obviously. And yes, it’s beautiful. It’s like a sort of sweet red vermouth, but that real bitter twang at the end.

Susan: Yes. You know I’m nodding going, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.” I don’t even know what half of those are and I will look them up afterwards.

Tom: You don’t necessarily need to. I would say that if somebody asked you the botanicals in Cocchi you wouldn’t know either, right? I don’t think you have to, but it’s enough to for somebody to be told.

I think if you’re sitting in the bar up there, it’s all about hospitality. I think another thing that I find interesting in the bar world now is pre-batching. It used to be seen as a negative, as a cheat way of doing things. But actually, now it’s seen as the right way to do it so that you can spend more time talking to your customer and explaining to them what they’re having rather than throwing 15 bottles about and doing everything that way. Yes, so I think it’s that hospitality thing of being able to say, “We’re not using that vermouth that you’ve maybe seen before. We’re using this. You’ll never have seen this before we created it.” “Wow. That’s amazing.”

Susan: Can you imagine the young you who was so fearful of talking about himself and his artwork now, being out there, talking about everything?

Tom: No, and I catch myself that we’ve done quite a few, or I’ve done quite a few events for large groups talking about our journey and our products and things like that. It is funny actually to look back on that and go, yes, there is a confidence there and whether that’s because it’s shared with Rupert. I don’t see any of the products as mine.

We work very closely together and so Rupert will normally come up with something new and will invariably come and ask me to taste it. At which point I might go, “Oh yes, it’s great, but it needs a bit more of this or that, or whatever.” Similarly, when I’m designing the labels or whatever, or the text or anything like that, then I get it to a certain point then take it to Rupert for a bit of confirmation, and he goes, “Yes or no, or I don’t think so.” We work quite well in that way, but I do recognize that I think it’s my excitement for it. I enjoy talking about it.

Susan: A true partnership.

Tom: Well, it’s a partnership and it’s hard work. It’s hard to get into the drink’s world, not having been in it before. You realize, one, how competitive it is and two, how saturated it is to tell your story, to get your story out. That’s really difficult. That’s the challenge.

Susan: And what a singular story you have. It’s nice to be the only ones doing what you are doing.

Tom: Yes. And chatting to lovely people like you, hopefully will get the message out to a few more people. Once people see it and hear it and taste it, they do largely fall in love with it. They understand where it’s coming from, which is heartening to see. I think we intrinsically are yearning for that connection back to our landscape. The more technology we have the more of innovation we have, the more we go, “I still quite want to get my hands dirty and stuff.”

Susan: Yes, absolutely. And knowing how delicious your spirits are, I can’t wait to come and visit you and try the actual birch water by itself.

Tom: It is honestly in the forest, fresh in the morning, we hang these five litre buckets on the trees, and you’ll get about two and a half, well, about two to two and a half litres per day per tree. Even the idea of taking the lid off to see how much is in there, and some will be more yielding than others. And you’re there early, so the birds are just waking up. It’s still cold outside and you pour this into a little glass and taste it, and you just go this can’t get better than that, other than a Birch Martini obviously sitting in a bar somewhere, but that’s the next best thing.

Susan: That is, and what a way to end. I have to admit you’ve made it very easy. Thank you so much for being on the show. This has been great. Thank you, Tom, for taking the time to speak to me about all your delicious stuff.

Tom: No, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.

Susan: And I am going to get myself up to Scotland to try them in situ too.

Tom: Well please do. Yes. Or pop to Panda and Sons or whatever. But please come and see us. Yes, it’s lovely to show you. We’ve got a tasting room here with, we call it the Weird Wall of Wild, which is just jars of pickles and ferments and weird bits and pieces that have all been foraged around where we are actually. It’s a small snapshot of what’s out there, but it’s quite inspiring to go, “Wow, okay.”

Susan: Can anyone come to that?

Tom: Yes, we do tastings on a weekly basis on a Saturday. It’s quite intimate, so up to eight people around one table. it’s much more about the ingredients and where we harvest them and stuff in the process, they are very different to most distillery tours.

Then alongside that, you get little wild canapes and snacks that you can sit and immerse yourself in the East Lothian countryside while we tell you about a little journey through our drinks.

Susan: Next time I have to come live to do the interview I ever have Rupert on the show. All right. I’m coming up there.

Tom: Absolutely.

Susan: Alright, well thank you again and I’ll see you that up there.

Tom: Perfect. Thank you very much.

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