2017... A year of change, a year of Gin!

2017 - what a year!  A crazy year full of learning, excitement, and the final creation of our extraordinary and amazing Gin.  We've come such a long way in 12 months, but we have survived and seen it through, and now we are steaming ahead for 2018 and what lies before us.

It all started way back then, with our love of Gin over the years and with a visit to a gin distillery for a "Gin Experience".  Several hours later, and slightly worse for wear after quite a few G & T's,  it was then that Laura and I fell totally and utterly in love with the concept of producing our own Gin.  We came home proudly with our own bottle, complete with Duty Stamp. 

It seemed quite a simple process - find a few botanicals, chuck them in a copper pot and off you go! But as we discovered, the complexities of Gin go far far beyond a handful of Juniper.

It was time to knuckle down.

A distillery seemed like a good starting point, but after much sourcing and talking with distillers, we simply couldn't rob a bank to find the £150k up front costs, and hashing up our own bespoke one in the kitchen didn't seem like a great idea either. So that idea was parked.

We set off in earnest with beginning to find out more about the wonderful world of Gin.  Our learning (amongst other things), started with hosting monthly Gin Tasting events for "ladies that love gin" This naturally involved buying lots (and lots) of bottles of gin of all different shapes, sizes and flavours. It went down a storm and we became known as "The Gin Girls" in town. 

Immersing ourselves with beautiful books about Gin, reading up on botanicals, distillation, and history gave us the beginning of some knowledge.

And then we got serious... We needed a recipe, branding, and a business plan.

Finding a recipe that we liked was not as simple as we had thought it would be - should we go floral? How about fruity? Or just keep it simple and traditional? 

Who could we work with? The process of finding a distiller that was singing off the same song sheet was key if we were going to be successful.

Notebooks were filled with ideas, thoughts, botanicals, suggestions. Scribbled paper, recipes, and countless sampling of different gins until finally, finally we found something that we agreed on: A blueberry gin, or so we thought.. but as it turned out much much later, that was not the way it was going to be...