Our journey from historic vodka production to hand sanitiser.

200 years ago, my great, great, grandfather Mate Salamashvili, was famous within his community as an expert of making vodka to be used as a healing agent.

He treated and saved many people’s lives, with his own distilled alcohol-based “medicine” back in the 1820s, when healthcare and medicines were not highly available.

In the second world war, my grandfather, Nikoloz Salamashvili took his treasured family tradition to the front line and helped to care for many people’s lives.

During the last 200 years, my family created a premium vodka brand based on our family’s traditional recipe.

I travelled from Georgia to Great Britain with a dream to make our vodka recipe a successful vodka brand and I set up a small vodka distillery in the beautiful countryside of Ardeley, based on a small farm in Hertfordshire.

Over the years, I am proud to see the success and growth of our brand, and we have won many awards, such as the Great Taste Gold Star award in 2018 and 2019.

Due to the current situation, we have had to postpone most of our future plans for Old Vodka. As a small business, we wanted to make the most of this situation, and do something positive and beneficial for the community and the wider world.

I never thought that the day would come when my ancestor’s recipe would be used again to protect people’s lives. We were one of the first vodka distilleries to be offered HMRC and Hertfordshire Trade standard qualifications on 4th March 2020, to let us create 80% alcohol-based hand sanitiser.

200 bottles of our first batch were donated to our local village Ardeley, and were distributed to every household free of charge with the support of Ardeley Parish Council.

Since 6^th April 2020, we have produced 25,000 1L bottles of 80% alcohol-based hand sanitiser, and will continue to do so to help and protect.

We are proud to be helping our community and protecting the NHS.

Merab Salamashvili (Founder)