William Chase: From posh crisps to best potato vodka

After the success of Tyrrell's crisps, it's good to be experimenting again, a serial entrepreneur tells Sarah Arnott

"I keep telling people, it's not poteen," says William Chase with considerable frustration. "It's not moonshine that's going to make you go blind or mad, it's the best vodka in the world."

As the maker of the only English potato vodka in the world, he would say that, wouldn't he? But he has some cause. Chase Distillery's flagship vodka was voted the best in the world at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition last March. And after just three years, the business is turning over £1m and shipping its products worldwide – even to Russia.

Mr Chase lives a life dominated by potatoes. Hailing from a family of Herefordshire spud farmers, he is best known as the man behind Tyrrell's, the posh crisp brand sold to private equity for £30m in 2008.

The key to Tyrrell's was the story of crisps home-grown and hand-fried on a single farm. So too with Chase Distillery. As far from Smirnoff as white-sliced is from home-baked, Chase vodka is a connoisseur's drink so pure you don't get a hangover, says its effusive creator.

"Mass-produced brands taste like nail varnish remover because all the nasties are left in," Mr Chase explains. "People like us are trying to produce something for people to sip, we don't want people wolfing it down like you see on EastEnders."

Quality is an intensive business. Chase vodka is made in a Heath Robinson-style distillery, bubbling homegrown Lady Claire and Lady Rosetta spuds through a traditional still with hand-controlled steam valves and a 70-foot copper rectification column. Intensive also means expensive. A single bottle of Chase – packed with up to 150 potatoes – sells for more than £30.

So far at least, there is no shortage of buyers. In its first year, sales reached £140,000. Two years on and the distillery is turning out 3,000 bottles each week and forecasting £1m in turnover. Next year, the plan is to crank up to more than 6,000 bottles, taking turnover up to £3m.

Potato vodka is still the company's biggest seller, but the distillery also makes apple vodka, apple gin, and a rainbow of fruit liqueurs. Everything is local. The potatoes all come from the combined 1,500 acres of Mr Chase's two Herefordshire farms, as does all the fruit for the liqueurs. The apples are grown in his 200-year old orchards. And after the first batch of marmalade vodka proved such a runaway success, there are now plans for citrus trees in polytunnels. Mr Chase is even trying to buy the Malvern water company from Coke, although the lack of response to his enquiries suggests that they don't really want to sell, he says.

Mr Chase is a man absolutely fizzing with ideas, rarely finishing a sentence before shooting off in another direction. Possible future products – from apple brandy, to parsnip vodka, to "home-grown" cosmetics made from distillation by-products – jostle for attention. As do a whole string of green schemes, such as using stillage to irrigate the fields (which is happening now) and building a bio-digester to power the distillery from potato peelings (which will be up and running next year).

Ultimately, apples might even replace potatoes altogether at Chase Distillery. The business logic is that apples do not require replanting every year. But there is also a personal angle. "I should say that I love potatoes, but I don't," Mr Chase admits. "In fact I could quite easily say I hate them: potatoes have upset me, made me cry, and given me a bad back."

Although Tyrrell's was ultimately a stellar success, there were plenty of tears along the way. Mr Chase's efforts as a potato farmer as a young man ended in bankruptcy. And though he clawed his way back to solvency by setting up a potato-dealing business, it was hard work with increasingly scant margins. "I got back on my feet again from nothing, and I am proud of that," he admits. "It was hard, but it taught me the basics in business of being aggressive and making every deal add up."

The experiences have left Mr Chase scornful of the "me, me, me" of celebrity entrepreneurs. "Those people on Dragon's Den are arrogant and superior but they've just been lucky," he says. His own biggest stroke of luck – or judgement – was to have the idea of turning rejected potatoes into upmarket crisps just at the time when farm shops were taking off and customers had the disposable income to pay extra for provenance.

The final break with Tyrrell's came with the sale of Mr Chase's remaining minority stake just before Christmas. It felt like another divorce, but "the business has to keep growing and I'm not a mass-market person", says the man who refused to sell his crisps in Tesco so the brand premium would not be undermined by discounting.

In the early days, Tyrrell's fried everything from parsnips to aubergines, just to see what happened. Now Chase Distillery has a similar ethos, making limited edition batches using anything and everything that can be grown on the farms. "The economics don't work but it's nice playing around," Mr Chase says. "That's what you can do with a small business – there's no need for a boring strategic plan, we can go where the market takes us."

With its distillation equipment capable of making 10 times what it does now, the company can grow without any major structural changes. And Mr Chase is in no hurry this time around. "I see this business as taking a long time to get established," he says. "Once we get good people in other countries to do the marketing and selling, we can just get on with making the bottles look cool and the vodka taste delicious."

Chin! Chin!

Chasing the dream

* William Chase started in business as an independent potato farmer at the age of 20 with a bank loan of £200,000 (now about £2m).

* Scoured by early bankruptcy, Mr Chase set up a potato-dealing business before launching Tyrrell's in 2002, turning rejected spuds into upmarket crisps.

* The main motivation was personal. "I was in a relationship with someone I didn't want to be with, running a business that I hated, and I was so hungry to get out of a hole that I would have done anything," he says.

* It worked. After a £30m payout from private equity buyers (and a six-year divorce), Mr Chase is now remarried, with a young son.

* His two older sons, aged 20 and 22, are both in the business.