What did you do before creating you gin/distillery? Our gin distillery is based in the brewery, where we brew unusual and adventurous beers using locally foraged ingredients, which was established in 2012. What made you decide to create your gin, and what's the inspiration behind it? We saw an opportunity to produce gin alongside our beer using locally foraged and sourced ingredients to produce high quality, low volume gins. We are inspired by the fantastic array of combinations that are available to produce something exciting and different. What's the distillery like and can you tell us about the distillation process and/or botanicals? The still is based inside the brewery. We have an overall floor area of around 30m2 so we are very small and compact but quirky. We buy the neutral grain spirit and use our G-Still to produce our gins in small batches. What can people expect and experience if they visit the distillery for a tour/tasting? As can be appreciated from the size of our brewery/distillery, a tour is fairly static but interactive with a brief history of gin, the processes we use and a taste of the gins we are currently producing. As we have the brewery equipment to hand we also discuss the grain to spirit process. What have been the biggest challenges and achievements so far? Obviously our still arriving one week before lockdown was not the perfect time to launch a new gin. We had the still, the bottles, the recipe but no neutral grain spirits or labels. They followed through almost 2 months after delivery. The cancellation of all outside events, markets and fairs had a massive impact on our ability to sell out gin but between lockdowns the distillery was busy. We've achieved the launch of two great gins in a pandemic and survived to battle and enjoy the challenges of 2021! How would you describe your gins in 3 words?
Unique, classic, aromatic. What's your favourite way to drink your gins? One followed by another one! Which gins would you always have on your gin shelf (other than your own of course!)? Sipsmith Gin and Martin Miller's Gin. What's next for Poppyland Distillery - any exciting plans? To carry on producing great gins in small batches, concentrating on more diverse locally foraged botanicals. Comments are closed.
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