Twenty Years of Potatoes, and Then They Made Vodka: The Morghew Potato Story

Morghew Park Estate has been growing potatoes for more than twenty years. That is a long time to get to know a crop - its varieties, its soil preferences, its personality - and Morghew has used that time well. Every year, at least twenty varieties are grown across 35 acres of prime Wealden ground: heritage types alongside conventional ones, the exotic alongside the familiar. The estate supplies local businesses and wholesalers, sells direct from its honesty stall, and has built a quiet reputation as the place to go if you want a potato that actually tastes of something.

It was probably inevitable, then, that someone would eventually wonder what would happen if you distilled one. The idea of a Morghew potato vodka had apparently been circling for some time before the right moment presented itself - a surplus of Yukon Gold in 2022, a variety they had long suspected might perform well under pressure. The result proved the suspicion correct. The vodka is clean, crisp and distinctly fruity: a refined spirit that carries something of the quality of the raw material that went into it. It is, as Morghew put it with characteristic restraint, "the most natural development in our potato story."

The vodka joins a product range that speaks to the depth and seriousness of what this estate does. Flour milled from their own wheat, rye and spelt. Oil cold-pressed from their own rapeseed. Wild garlic hand-picked in spring from the estate's woodlands. And now spirits distilled from their own potatoes. The logic connecting all of it is the same: exceptional raw materials, grown or harvested on this particular piece of Kentish land, processed and sold as directly as possible to the people who will eat or drink them.

Both the potatoes and the vodka are available to order online for nationwide delivery, or to collect from the honesty stall off Smallhythe Road in Tenterden, seven days a week.

Explore Morghew's potato range and vodka here: https://morghew.com/