Every collection has a first page. In the Bereshit Series of Tannenblut, that page is fifty bottles long. Numbered one through fifty, set aside before any later tier is released, the Founder’s Tier is not the most ornamented part of the edition, nor the most ceremonial. The Rebbe bottle stands apart at the apex, the Holy Numbers Edition carries the Hebrew documents. What the first fifty carry is something quieter and, for a certain kind of collector, more valuable: the signature of a beginning. They are the opening movement of a work that will never be recomposed.

Fifty as a Threshold, Not a Decoration

The Bereshit Series consists of exactly 3,000 bottles, distilled once and never reproduced. Within that closed universe, the number fifty is not a marketing figure. It is the threshold at which a new house becomes legible as a house. The first fifty bottles of any serious edition are the ones that later collectors wish they had held. They are the proof that the project existed before it was known, before it was written about, before allocation lists were closed. To hold number seven or number twenty-two of a three-thousand-bottle series is to hold documentary evidence of an origin.

This is the reasoning behind the Founder’s Tier Tannenblut designation. Numbers one through fifty of the Bereshit Series are treated as the founding archive of the brand. They are not reprints of a later idea. They are the idea, bottled in the order it first left the still. The matte-black glass, the copper distillation in the Black Forest, the wild fir and blackthorn: all of this was first committed to these fifty vessels. Everything that follows, within the 3,000, refers back to them.

The Handwritten Certificate as Counter-Gesture

Each of the first fifty bottles carries a handwritten authentication certificate, signed individually. This is a deliberate counter-gesture to the industrial habit of mass-printed provenance. In most luxury categories, a certificate of authenticity is itself a mass product: a serialised template, printed by the thousand, signed by a machine that imitates a pen. It authenticates nothing except the efficiency of the printing process.

The Founder’s Tier refuses that shortcut. The certificate is written by hand, dated, and signed. The ink sits on the paper the way ink sits on a ledger from the nineteenth century, which is the century in which Jakob Ferdinand Nagel shipped twenty-three million litres a year from Hamburg and accepted the Gold Medal at the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873. Tannenblut does not pretend to reconstruct that house. It acknowledges a lineage and, in acknowledging it, adopts its habits. A handwritten certificate is slower, more exposed, less scalable. It is also, for that reason, harder to falsify and harder to forget. Fifty certificates written by hand is a commitment. It is the commitment the Founder’s Tier makes to its first fifty owners.

Rabbinical Blessing Within the Chabad-Lubavitch Tradition

The entire Bereshit Series is produced under rabbinical supervision within the Chabad-Lubavitch tradition, with kosher certification. The Founder’s Tier sits inside that framework with a specific addition: each of the first fifty bottles is individually blessed by the certifying rabbi. The name of the certifying rabbi is not disclosed in public materials. Allocation documentation is delivered privately to each collector.

This reticence is intentional. A blessing is not a marketing credential. It is a moment between the one who pronounces it and the object that receives it, held within a tradition that has its own rules about how such moments are spoken of in public. The Chabad-Lubavitch tradition, with its lineage of thought around intention, concealment, and the dignity of practice, is treated here as a living framework rather than an ornament. The Rebbe bottle at the apex of the series carries the explicit reference to 770 and the Rebbe Dollar. The Holy Numbers Edition carries the Hebrew documents referencing the Tanya. The Founder’s Tier carries, in its quieter register, the personal blessing that was given before the bottle left the distillery.

A Tier for Early Patrons and Family Offices

The Founder’s Tier is positioned for a specific kind of collector: the early patron. In the architecture designed by Dr. Raphael Nagel (LL.M.), Founding Partner of Tactical Management, the first fifty bottles are reserved for those whose participation is itself part of the founding record. Family offices with an interest in cultural provenance, private collectors who enter a house in its first chapter, patrons who understand that the value of an object is often inseparable from the timing of its acquisition.

There is a financial dimension to this, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Edition economics are well understood: within a strictly closed run, the lowest numbers tend, over time, to carry disproportionate weight. But the Founder’s Tier is not sold as an instrument. It is offered as a position. The holders of numbers one through fifty are, in a precise and documented sense, the first fifty names associated with Tannenblut as a collector project. The handwritten certificate names them. The blessing accompanies them. The matte-black bottle, hand-filled in the Black Forest, arrives with the quiet confidence of an object that knows exactly where it stands in the sequence.

The Ritual Does Not Change

A Founder’s Tier bottle is still a bottle of Tannenblut. It is still copper-distilled from fir resin, spruce, wild juniper, and blackthorn. It still refuses artificial flavouring and refuses mass production. It is still meant to be poured slowly, served alone or with a single sprig of pine, and drunk in the register the oath describes: not to forget, not to escape, but to remember, to feel, to return.

What the Founder’s Tier adds is documentary weight. The ritual does not change. The gin does not change. The glass does not change. What changes is the position of the bottle within the closed architecture of the 3,000. A standard collector bottle belongs to the series. A Founder’s Tier bottle belongs to its opening. For a certain kind of patron, that distinction is the entire point. They are not buying a flavour profile. They are buying a place in a ledger that will not be reopened, printed by a house that has chosen to begin in ink rather than in toner.

Every collection has a first page. In the Bereshit Series, that page is fifty bottles long, written by hand, blessed under rabbinical supervision, and closed once the last of the fifty has found its collector. After that, the rest of the 3,000 continues. The Rebbe bottle waits at the apex, the Holy Numbers Edition carries its Hebrew documents, the Early Collector and Premium tiers take their places. But the opening chapter of Tannenblut will have been written, and the names of those who hold it will already be in the ledger. Allocation is by private invitation only, through the Collector List at tannenblut.co/collector-list.