INTRODUCTION

AFTER 35 years – very nearly all my working life, in fact – as a journalist and writer in the drinks industry and hospitality trade, I have accrued an astonishingly large back catalogue – or “heap”, as I call it – of verbiage on topics drawn from just about every sector of the industry you can imagine.

I can’t begin to imagine how many millions of words I’ve written in books and periodicals; and perhaps fortunately most of the journalism has withered and crumbled along with the pages of the Morning Advertiser and What’s Brewing on which it was printed. Much of it could only be classified as juvenilia, and few things are more embarrassing to the progenitor than juvenilia. I still have a few of the better pieces, of which I am so proud that I frequently plagiarise them; so if you ever read anything under my by-line that seems oddly familiar, it’s because I’ve stolen it from myself.

That leaves us with my books, 24 of them all told, cluttering my book-shelves and gathering dust and dead insects. It seems a shame just to dump all those deep-mined gems, so I propose to give my adoring public another chance to enjoy and learn by serialising those to which I own the copyright and publishing some favourite excerpts from those to which I don’t.

It’s a pretty tremendous library, if I say so myself – which I do, because nobody else will – ranging from travel and guidebooks through practical manuals to histories of whisky, cider, and gin. My first, back in March 1982, was The David & Charles Book of Historic English Inns. My latest, published in March this year, is Britain in a Bottle: A visitors’ guide to Breweries, Cidermills, Distilleries & Vineyards in Great Britain. My own picks would be histories (my BA!): Merrie England: The Medieval Roots of the Great British Pub, more of a monograph than a tome and undertaken to silence the oldest-pub-in-England bores; Golden Fire: the Story of Cider, written because only one previous history exists, and a very suspect one at that; and London Dry: the Real History of Gin, written because so much unresearched tosh has been written and repeated about gin that almost nothing that everyone believes is true.

My best seller has probably been Historic Pubs of London whose companion volume, London by Pub: Pub Walks Round Historic London, has also been very popular. But the most impactful works have been my contributions to Posthouse Publishing’s “Handbook” series – The Microbrewers’ Handbook, The Bar Owners’ Handbook, and The Craft Distillers’ Handbook.

All of them, I know, have helped aspirants to embark on careers as microbrewers, micropublicans, and craft distillers not by teaching them the practical nuts and bolts of their trades but by delving into the regulatory and legal complexities, especially licensing law and planning requirements, and into commercial and financial considerations. They have been invaluable vademecums to some and – just as invaluably – wasp-coloured deterrents to others, and I’m very proud to have made a difference.

I therefore propose to set out on my expedition into deepest blogland by serialising (and condensing somewhat) The Craft Distillers’ Handbook, which I have started below.

Ted Bruning

November 2020

THE CRAFT DISTILLERS' HANDBOOK

A practical guide to the making and marketing of spirits

THE OPPORTUNITY

Investing in a distillery is an expensive and complicated business, a prospect that until recently has put off many people who might have liked the idea of making their own gin or liqueurs. The traditional view of Customs as being implacably opposed to the opening of new distilleries has only added another layer of doubt. But the appearance in the last five years alone of over a 100 new distilleries, mainly small, artisanal affairs, should be enough to prove that here is a viable business that, for many categories of investor, is well worth seriously considering.

Recession and opportunity

One attraction is that premium and super-premium spirits are virtually recession-proof. It’s an industry commonplace that in hard times people drink less but better; and like many such commonplaces, it’s not entirely true but is a good enough rule of thumb. What actually happens is that as the poor get poorer they both reduce their consumption and migrate to value brands, so sales of standard brands decline. But the well-off mysteriously tend to get better off, so the market share of premium and super-premium brands increases. Not their actual sales, note – just their share of   the market.

To illustrate the point: HMRC obligingly separates whisk(e)y clearances from those of other spirits in its bulletins. Between 2008, the year of the credit crunch, and 2015 Britain’s overall consumption of spirits, both domestic and imported, fell from 1,154,368 hectolitres of pure alcohol to 1,119,431hlpa, a 3.3 per cent decline. Over the same period sales of whisk(e)y fell much further, from 296,016hlpa to 237,834hlpa or 19.6 per cent, as less well-off consumers switched to cheaper alternatives or simply bought less alcohol. But sales of the much more expensive single malt whisky actually went up from 32,544hlpa to 34,458hlpa, a 5.5 per cent increase comfortably ahead of both the market’s overall performance and the whisk(e)y category as a whole. (A hectolitre of pure alcohol comes to a sniff over 350 70cl bottles at 40 per cent alcohol by volume).

Perhaps it’s a bit of a statement of the obvious to say that in tough times, the rich keep spending while the poor tighten their belts. But the fact that demand for premium products tends to remain pretty steady even when the economy slows down is one of the reasons why a recession is a good time to start a business dealing in top-of-the-range spirits such as malt whiskies, premium gins, exquisite liqueurs and art-isanal specialities. 

Business discipline 

A business established in a recession is likely to be a robust one where costs are under tight control and governance in all areas – human resources, credit periods, cash flow – is likely to be strict. Sales and marketing are likely to be innovative, energetic and proactive. And with such a lean and hungry foundation, any business that can become profitable in hard times should become super-profitable when the trading environment improves.

Recessions tend to bring out the entrepreneur in people who might have been sitting out the good times in cosy jobs on apparently secure salaries: the looming possibility of redundancy has persuaded many people to turn their pipe dream into a business plan. It’s remarkable, in fact, how much of the capital that fuelled the microbrewing boom in its early years came from redundancy cheques and downsizing. It was a long time before the banks cottoned on to the fact that while a microbrewery wasn’t going to make anyone rich, the rate of business failure in the sector was comparatively low (and of the microbreweries that have closed since the early years, very few have done so through insolvency) and started lending. But that doesn’t seem to have deterred many would-be microbrewers – one of the most famous was launched on a string of credit cards and a loan from the brewer’s mum.

And recessions tempt existing businesses to investigate ways of diversifying into new but synergetic areas of operation. To pursue the microbrewing analogy further, many free-of-tie publicans have installed a brewing plant in their outbuildings – in more than one case, in what had been the outside loo. One Courage tenant founded a brewery in an old cooperage across the road from his pub just to supply fellow tied lessees with the guest ales the new Beer Orders permitted them to stock. It became so successful that he gave up the tenancy to concentrate on brewing: the brewery celebrates its silver anniversary in 2015.

As we have seen, though, the similarities between those pioneering microbrewers and the new wave of craft distillers are more apparent than real. The majority of the first microbrewers were actually refugees from the mainstream industry, thrown back on their own resources by the massive concentration of production capacity in 1960s and ‘70s. Some of them had been pretty senior figures before they found themselves rationalised out of a job, so they went into business with a great deal of practical knowledge, understanding of the trade and networks of contacts already in the bag. Furthermore, many of them only founded breweries of their own because, as middle-aged professionals (late middle-aged, in some cases!) with no experience of other industries, they more or less had to. The times were economically parlous then as well, remember (when aren’t they!), and jobs were thin on the ground.

None of these statements applies to the pioneer cadre of the craft distilling revival; or at least not to a significant number of them. They haven’t, by and large, brought any great hands-on experience of distilling, and few of them appear to be driven by need or the fear of imminent need. They are, in a sense, more hard-headed: they have spotted a good business opportunity in a fascinating area of endeavour and have determined to exploit it. If that all sounds a little cold, though, craft distilling is not without its romance and that is undoubtedly part of the attraction. So what is the opportunity that all these hard-headed businesspeople have spotted? Or rather, what are the opportunities; and, more importantly, who is best-placed to exploit and profit from them? 

International brand-builders 

he people best-placed to benefit from venturing into the spirits business are (as always) likely to be well-capitalised and well-connected marketing professionals with strong international links; for although domestic sales of spirits faltered during the recession, the export markets tell a very different story. In 2000, Britain exported a healthy-looking 3,273,587 litres of potable spirits. By 2007, the year before the credit crunch, exports had climbed substantially, to 4,321,182 litres. So did they go into decline as the world tightened its belt? Did they heck as like! In 2013, they reached 7,346,295 litres, and at time of writing the outturn for 2017 looked set to top a staggering 1.5 billion litres, according to the Wine & Spirit Trading Association. So, plenty of scope there. 

Scotch worldwide 

Exports of Scotch have risen so hugely that the industry is getting seriously worried about the possibility of failing to meet demand. In the calendar year 2016, exports of Scotch whisky increased in value by £153 million to more than £4 billion (£4,008,927,149), and by volume to the equivalent of more than 1.2bn bottles – an increase of 4 per cent and 4.8 per cent respectively. This is the first time since 2011 that both value and volume of Scotch exports recorded positive annual growth rates, and the first time ever that single malt exports have exceeded £1bn. But bottled blended Scotch whisky is still by far the biggest category. It accounted for 69 per cent of all Scotch volumes and values exported in 2016.

Several new distilleries both large and small have opened in the past five years and 30 more are being planned. For the most part, these are being built by the major distilleries to produce ‘filling’ – malt whisky intended for blending rather than single malts – but quite a number of artisanal malt distilleries such as Loch Ewe, Abhainn Dearg, Kilchoman and Daftmill have appeared too, and more are in the pipeline. These smaller ventures may start out with their eyes firmly fixed on the home market, but even if they don’t seek export sales, they inevitably find that export sales seek them. American enthusiasts in particular prize novelties and rarities, the more obscure the better, and avidly exchange news of their gustatory triumphs on social media. 

Gin exports 

If whisky has been leading the export charge, gin has not been far behind. Sophisticated cocktail bars, which are on the increase in all the key world markets, have an insatiable thirst for gins of all kind. While the major manufacturers such as Diageo, William Grant, Pernod Ricard and Greenalls have been rushing out well-promoted (and, according to independent reviewers, extremely well-made) premium and super-premium brands, they have left plenty of room for the independent sector. Some of the biggest independent brands in the export markets are contract-distilled, such as Bulldog, produced at G&J Greenall in Warrington, Juniper Green Organic Gin, produced at Thames Distillers in South London, and Broker’s London Dry, produced at the Langley Distillery in Birmingham. The fact that the owners of these brands are essentially marketeers who contract out the actual production doesn’t equate to the bandwagon-jumping of corner-cutting big brewers who label cheaply-produced everyday beers as ‘craft’ in the hope of fooling enough of the people for enough of the time: the consumers of super-premium spirits know their stuff and, for £40 and northwards a bottle, insist on the very finest, while the contract distillers who make the spirit are expert small-batch producers of several generations’ standing.

But the true artisans – those who make their own gin on their own stills – are by no means excluded from the world markets. Chase of Worcestershire exports a third of its output while gins from Sipsmiths of West London, surely the most media-savvy of the new-wave craft distillers, are on sale in 15 countries. But export markets are hard work for small players: establishing trustworthy agents, finding reliable carriers, processing the paperwork of different jurisdictions, networking with trade customers – these are all difficult and often burdensome areas for businesses whose time is severely rationed. 

Existing drinks producers 

Among those who are best-placed to succeed as distillers are those who are already brewing beer or making wine or cider. It was, after all, two cidermakers deciding to distill their own brandy that kicked the whole thing off. The advan-

tages here are practical ones. Not only have existing producers already taken the first step by producing fermented liquor to feed their stills with, they have also developed a network of distributors and almost certainly retailers as well. And they already have a name: consumers know who they are and have an idea of the quality of their existing products that will encourage them to try anything new. And if they already have a product to sell then they already have cash-flow, and they already have working relationships with their banks, with their local authorities and with HMRC. Finally, it almost goes without saying that they already have premises. With all the horrors of the start-up period out of the way, they have more time and energy to pour into making and selling their new products.

Brewers

Brewers, in theory, ought to have been among the leaders of the craft distilling revival. Merely by omitting the hops they already produce the raw material for either gin or whisky. More than almost any other trade, they have direct access to their retail base. And with the number of microbreweries now comfortably approaching the 2,000 mark but the number of real ale outlets dwindling by the week they, more than anyone, ought to be looking for new ideas to keep the show on the road. But until Adnams of Southwold suddenly burst out of its cocoon with its huge new shiny all-purpose distillery, brewery involvement in craft distilling had been surprisingly limited. St Austell half-owns and makes the wash for the Hicks & Healey distillery in Cornwall; Brains of Cardiff made the wash for Penderyn until it installed its own mashtun; and Liverpool Organic Brewery is a partner in a gin distillery (see below). Other than that marginal involvement, the brewing industry seems to be happy in its comfort zone. But its comfort zone is rapidly shrinking, and although Adnams of Southwold has so far been the only established brewer to plunge wholeheartedly into the spirit world, distilling seems a natural direction of travel for brewers both large and small.

Winemakers

Winemakers, too, surely ought to be looking to diversify into distilling. Brandy is one of the most popular spirits on the planet; and what’s brandy, after all, but distilled wine? Winemaking is growing both in quantity and quality in England and Wales, and our sparkling white wines have beaten genuine Champagne in so many comparative blind tastings it’s embarrassing. Still, no English winemaker would confess to being rolling in money: the fact that the acreage under vines and the number of entrants to the industry are on the increase doesn’t affect the bottom lines of those already in the business. If distilling some of their output added value, why wouldn’t they want to do it?

Well, two reasons. The first and most obvious is that few if any English vineyards produce anything like enough wine to set aside for distilling, which swallows up very considerable quantities; and what they do produce is high-grade stuff that sells at a good price. The distilling process will concentrate the wine by a factor of 10, so every case of wine you could have sold for £65 – £70 wholesale will make you a bottle-and-a-bit of brandy that you might sell for £30 wholesale. These figures are, of course, very approximate; but they could be out by a margin of 25 per cent and you could still be making a loss. And that’s without taking even the cash-flow implication of maturation and the duty differential between spirits and table wines into account.

The second reason is that only really bad grapes make really good brandy. The Ugni Blanc that accounts for 90 per cent of the plantings in the Cognac region is very acid and produces a wine that’s lower in alcohol than cheap Liebfraumilch – say 7–9 per cent alcohol. Ugni Blanc or, to give it its original Italian name, Trebbiano Toscano, doesn’t perform as badly as that everywhere: if it did it wouldn’t be so widely planted. But in the ungenerous soil of the Cognac region it does, and that’s what the brandy distillers want. English winemakers, obviously, don’t plant that kind of grape, and it would have to be a pretty poor year, even by our standards, that produced a vintage bad enough for brandy. Having said that, Ludlow Vineyard now has its own distillery and produces brandy using poor-quality grapes, the vintages of bad years, and the surpluses from bumper years; but the scale of its capital investment means that it makes apple brandy and eau de vie as well as grape brandy, and to keep the pot full it also distills for other vineyards.

That’s not the end of it, though. There is always marc or grappa. Only the most ruthless winemakers press every last drop out of their grapes. The pomace – the mass of skins and pulp left over after pressing – is more than merely moist: it contains juice that need not go to waste. Red wine is fermented on the pomace to extract the pigment from the skins, so the juice pressed from this will already be alcoholic and ready for the still, while the virgin liquid pressed from white wine pomace will need to be fermented separately. Distilled, they make marc or grappa that can either be enjoyed in its own right or used as the base spirit  for liqueurs.

Many if not most English winemakers on their own will not produce enough of this valuable resource to be worth distilling: the proportion of dry(ish) material left over after pressing ranges from 18–40 per cent per tonne of grapes, which yields anything from 4–8 litres of juice per 100kg depending on how hard the grapes were originally pressed. The most efficient winemaker, then, will be able to wring a mere seven litres of fermentable juice from the pomace of a tonne of grapes, while the least efficient will still only be left with 32 litres. After this has been watered down to about 9 per cent ABV, then distilled, then watered down again to 40 per cent ABV you would only get 4-18 70cl bottles of marc per tonne of grapes harvested which, even at £20+ per bottle, is hardly going to make much difference to your bottom line (although the leftovers or rackings from the bottling can also go into the still). However in eastern France the smaller makers, who are a byword for thrift, either send their pomace to a contract distiller or own co-operatives that run a still between them. Whichever option they choose, few English winemakers are so profitable that they can ignore the contribution that marc can make to their viability. It is, after all, money for nothing in that the pomace at present is used only as compost or mulch: effectively, it’s dumped.

So far only a handful of English and Welsh winemakers have dipped their toes tentatively into the world of spirits and liqueurs, but none of them regrets the experiment. An afternoon’s reflection – especially if it is accompanied by a frosty glass of kir made with their own wine and some bought-in crème de cassis – might tempt them to dip more than just a toe. 

Cidermakers 

To brewers and winemakers among those who can benefit from distilling must be added the growing army of cidermakers. Not only did they start it all, but the last 15 years has seen a huge increase in the number of small commercial cidermakers operating not only in the four traditional regions of the South-West, the West Midlands, East Anglia and the South-Eastern counties, but in Cheshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire – even Yorkshire. In terms of raw numbers their increase has been almost as impressive as the explosion in the number of craft brewers, if far less well-documented; but thanks to the exemption from duty of cidermakers who sell less than 7,000 litres a year they are mostly far too small to consider branching out into distilling except, perhaps, as a co-operative. But for duty purposes the amount they set aside for distilling would be additional to the amount they sold, so they could make any quantity of cider they chose, sell up to 7,000 litres duty free, and distill the rest.

And there is a considerable tranche of ambitious independent cidermakers who are becoming more and more frustrated at the barriers they face in getting their product to market. Supermarkets, the continuing concentration of convenience store ownership and supply, and the gradual closure of more and more village shops have made deep inroads into the number of genuinely independent off-licences; the 2003 Licensing Act banned the traditional but unlicensed ‘farm-gate’ sales; the bar franchises at agricultural shows and music festivals are now generally let to a single major operator who will tolerate no competition; and touring the circuit of farmers’ markets, while it has its compensations and even its pleasures, is hugely expensive in the one resource small independents have least of – time.

The number of pubs prepared to stock traditional still, dry cider is also limited and mainly both regional and seasonal, while hotel and restaurant sommeliers still almost universally regard cider as an unsophisticated rustic curiosity that doesn’t belong on a drinks list. Given the example of Bertram Bulmer and Julian Temperley, therefore, and the fact that they have even less of a comfort zone than small independent brewers, it’s astonishing that so few of these frustrated craft cidermakers have taken advantage of the opportunity offered by distilling. But any cidermaker dubious about its potential need only gaze on the artistry of Charles Martell of Dymock’s exquisitely packaged limited-edition single-varietal pear and oak-aged plum brandies – and the prices they can command – with awe and envy, and perhaps reflect that no matter how many retailers’ doors slam shut in their faces in the coming years, the door of the spirit still is always open. 

Arable farmers and fruit growers 

If being already in the drinks business is a great advantage, it’s by no means a precondition; indeed most of the craft distillers currently operating have come to it from a state of innocence, as it were. But having your own farm is a good start. Indeed, two of the latest entrants – Lurgashall Winery of Sussex and Bramley & Gage, originally of Devon but now based in Bristol – have actually been active for as long as Burrow Hill, producing fine liqueurs from their own fruit and bought-in spirit (both now have their own stills). And one of the biggest of the new independent distillers, Chase of Hereford, was originally a potato farm where William Chase, the owner, decided that there was more profit in making his own crisps than selling his crop to merchants and food processors. Once the crisp business was well established it was sold on for a handsome profit, and the farm became Chase Single Estate Distillers making a variety of gins, vodkas and liqueurs based on its own produce. Unusually, Chase produces its own ethanol or neutral base spirit on its own continuous column still. This is an option any large fruit or arable farmer could benefit from. Not only does it add value to the produce, it also irons out the price fluctuations that cause so many agricultural migraines. Fruit and grain prices go up and down, but vodka, gin, and whisky prices are pretty stable.

Arable farmers seeking to add value to their barley, incidentally, have one not inconsiderable boon to thank microbrewers for. As the microbrewing sector mushroomed in the early years of this century, the perceived value of traceability and authenticity led brewers and farmers to persuade specialist maltsters such as Fawcetts of Yorkshire, Warminster of Wiltshire and Crisps of Norfolk to introduce a ground-breaking innovation. Instead of malting all the barley they bought in great homogenous batches, they worked hard to offer a facility that allowed the grain from individual farms to be processed separately. You send them your barley and they malt it, then they send it back to you.

You might argue that at the end of the day it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference: the purchasers at these independent maltsters are pretty expert and pretty fussy, and don’t buy dodgy grain or take short cuts in the processing, so anything you source from them is going to be top-notch. But from a marketing point of view it’s a huge leap forward: a brewer who can boast that their beer is brewed exclusively with malt from a particular farm has a very strong advantage in terms of provenance. And if, like Chase, you can boast that your gin and vodka are made entirely from your own produce... well! Today, posher label; tomorrow, Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status! 

Advantages of distilling 

Anything that contains sugar can be fermented and distilled, whatever its condition. Starchy grains such as wheat and maize don’t even have to be malted, so long as there is enough barley malt in the mash – about 20 per cent – to produce the enzyme diastase to saccharify them. Fruit, be it soft fruit, top fruit or stone fruit, doesn’t have to be uniform and unblemished if it’s only going to be pressed, fermented and distilled. Roots too, especially carrots, swedes, parsnips and beet, contain bountiful amounts of fermentable sugar. And of course, if you’re not striving to produce uniformly pretty fruit and veg to satisfy the supermarket buyer both your input costs (including labour) and your wastage will be significantly reduced. This is a problem for root vegetable growers in particular: half or more than half of their produce might be rejected by the supermarkets and either goes as cattle feed at £10 a tonne (compared to the £800 per tonne the supermarket chains pay) or, worse, straight to landfill. If growers either individually or in joint ventures distilled ethanol from their reject tonnage they would make considerably more than £10 a tonne – and they’d still have the pomace and pot ale to sell as animal feed or as a source of biogas.

Even if growers don’t see themselves as the gin barons of the future, ethanol is a valuable product in its own right. The number of small craft distillers is set to mushroom and nearly all of them will want to buy in their ethanol, whose price is broadly increasing along with world demand. For ethanol is not only foundation of all gin, vodka and liqueurs, it’s also the bio-additive that’s supposed to make our motoring greener, and the minimum addition to petrol in the EU is set to rise from 5 per cent to 7 per cent by 2020. This will undoubtedly push the price up, so farmer-distillers who decide not to go into drinks production, or are left with surplus ethanol, will find a ready market for it. 

Artisan fruit growers 

You don’t have to be a big farmer to make a profitable business out of spirits, though. A more low-key, artisanal approach presents just as great an opportunity, especially for smaller fruit growers with little to invest either in terms of time or capital. In Charles Dickens’s day Britain had a great tradition of both home-made and proprietary alcoholic cordials and liqueurs that were at bottom no more than fruit macerated in ethanol, sweetened, strained and brought down to potable strength either with wine, water or even fruit juice. Sloe gin is almost the sole survivor of this tradition in this country, but in most European countries you can buy little bottles of ethanol in supermarkets to make your own liqueurs with.

To transform your own surplus, damaged, blemished or even over-ripe fruit into a liqueur is simplicity itself (although the necessary permissions and paperwork aren’t so simple, as we shall see!) and the price premium these kind of products commands will make you wonder why you ever bothered selecting and selling perfect fruit for the table in the first place. The easiest option is simply to steep your fruit in ethanol, but you can also take the process to the next level of sophistication by investing in a small still and redistilling your fruit with bought-in ethanol.

To be more sophisticated yet, you can make wine from your fruit and distill that. The equipment need not be all that expensive nor take up all that much space; and if you’re too busy in the fruit-picking season itself to make your liqueur or cordial or eau-de-vie, you can pulp and freeze the fruit and come back to it in winter when you have more time. All sorts of herbs and nuts can be treated in exactly the same way to make quirky hand-crafted liqueurs that have strong impulse-purchase appeal in suitable retail environments such as country gift shops and farmers’ markets, as well as online.

In fact the consumer appeal of hand-made small-batch liqueurs and eau-de vie – as with jams and chutneys – is as much down to their artisanal nature as to their quality. How they’re packaged and presented and where they’re bought is as important as how well they measure up against their mainstream equivalents. Quality is still vital if you want customers ever to buy a second bottle: all too often a tempting-looking pot of kitchen-made marmalade is, when you get it home from the farm shop, no better tasting than Frank Cooper’s but twice the price. That, perhaps, is a story for another day; what’s important for our purposes here is how to make the most of that artisanal feel, and the answer to that is simple: tourism. 

Tourism and heritage sites 

More than half of Scotland’s whisky distilleries have visitor centres, restaurants, cafes, shops and guided tours of varying degrees of sophistication. More and more distilleries are investing in similar facilities: the long-established Beefeater Gin distillery in Kennington, South London, opened a visitor centre back in 2014, and the Bombay Sapphire distillery in rural Hampshire will be almost as much a tourist attraction as a working factory. There are three reasons why tourists are lured to this kind of place. They like the heritage angle. They like to see traditional and authentic methods and ingredients in action. Then they like the aesthetics, especially the gleaming copper and mellow old oak. And finally, the fact that alcohol is the end-product creates an extra dimension – one of naughtiness.

Craft distilleries should never turn their backs on the tourism angle. Few of them, perhaps, could run to much more than after-hours guided tours followed by a short sampling session, especially for trade parties (but do remember: you have to have a liquor licence to sell from your premises these days!); but where a tourist attraction cannot always be bolted on to a small distillery, a small distillery might more easily be bolted on to a tourist attraction.

Until 1823 it was perfectly legal to distill for home consumption and many great houses did it, as did a number of coaching inns. The Excise Act of that year effectively (although not explicitly) banned the use of stills of less than 40 gallons’ capacity, reasoning that a 40-gallon copper pot was too big and heavy for a Highland moonshiner to hide or, should the Excisemen appear, run away with. However, the Act also made it easier and cheaper to get a licence for a commercial-sized still. At this point the English country house and farm distillers simply gave up and started buying what they needed from wine merchants instead; and in fact there have been remarkably few prosecutions for moonshining in England down the years. The legal ins and outs of the situation will be explained at the appropriate stage, but HMRC seems fairly relaxed these days about licensing small rectifying stills (subject to stringent security – not a drop is to leave the premises until the duty has been paid on it), so perhaps the pre-1823 country house distilling tradition is due a revival. And a small rectifier in the old stable block would not only be an attraction in its own right, but also a powerful boost to the gift shop’s bottom line!

Licensed retailers 

There is another category of established drinks businesses that is slowly beginning to grasp the potential of owning its own spirits brands, and that’s the licensed retail trade. The big supermarket chains, of course, have had their own labels for years, always mass-produced and mostly at the value end of the scale. Long-established independent wine merchants such as Tanners of Shrewsbury have also traditionally had their house Scotches blended for them, as have family brewers with renowned wine and spirit divisions such as Palmer’s of Bridport, the much-lamented Eldridge Pope of Dorchester and Adnams of Southwold. Indeed, before the meltdown of the brewing industry that started in the 1960s it was the norm for breweries to supply their tied estates with their own exclusive ‘house’ brands of spirits.

But now a new trend is just beginning to emerge: craft-distilled spirit brands exclusive to upmarket restaurants and pubs. In two Cambridge restaurants, Alimentum and La Raza, they are adding even more cachet to their names by having their own gins custom-made by the bespoke specialist Cambridge Distillery; Exeter’s Fat Pig chain of microbrewery and four pubs now has its own very profitable microdistillery; and in Liverpool a revered real ale pub – the Belvedere Arms in the Georgian quarter – has created its own gin, establishing a distillery on premises jointly owned with its partner in the business, Liverpool Organic Brewery. It’s not the only gin sold at the Belvedere, which stocks 18, but it’s a powerful draw for the pub as well as a profitable line in its own right. 

Boutique distilleries 

Perhaps even more significant for the longer term has been the opening of two boutique bar-distilleries in very different but equally dynamic parts of London. The first, in Bride Lane just off Fleet Street, was the City of London Distillery in 2012. Two German-made Arnold Holstein gin stills were installed behind huge glass screens in the ‘speakeasy-style retro cocktail bar’ (although the last thing you would find in a real speakeasy would be any visible evidence of alcohol production) by Exigo Brewing & Distilling of Leicester, which two years later did much the same thing at the Bow Wharf Bar, a Victorian former glue-factory off Grove Road in Globe Town, East London.

Now, slowly but surely, other equally upmarket independent pubs and pub chains, boutique hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants are beginning to follow suit and install distilleries of their own. 

None of the above... 

The drive and vision required of a successful entrepreneur are not limited to people who already have, in one way or another, a foot in the door. Most of the players in the craft distilling revival, in fact, had no previous track-record in the industry. Like all entrepreneurs, they set out with an idea and access to enough capital to assemble the nuts and bolts of the business. Since then it has been largely a question of intelligent decision-making, utter commitment and hard work – especially in the marketing: Sion Edwards and Tom Warner of Warner Edwards attended more than 60 farmers’ markets, trade shows and other events in their first full year of operation. But that’s life for pretty much any entrepreneur in pretty much any enterprise. If you have the energy and ambition to succeed, exploit market opportunities, and a strong sense that there’s something special – something romantic, even – about distilling, then the class of person most qualified to build a strong, solid business in spirits is a class of one: you. 

CASE STUDIES

Cotswold Distillery www.cotswoldsdistillery.com 

North Oxfordshire, it’s probably safe to say, had no great tradition of whisky-making until Dan Szor decided to create one, and in the process gave a masterclass in the importance of ready access to sufficient capital.New Yorker Dan spent 26 years as a currency trader, mostly in Paris and London, before his eureka moment hit him on a trip to Bruichladdich in May 2013. Ten years earlier he’d bought a cask to lay down and was on his annual pilgrimage to pat it and stroke it when he mentioned to manager Jim McEwan that he’d been thinking about founding a distillery of his own. Jim simply told him to get on with it and recommended him to master distiller Harry Cockburn, veteran of 15 start-ups across the globe, and suddenly the project was flying.“I spoke to Jim on the Friday, rang Harry on the Sunday and on the Monday we were in Sweden looking at second-hand equipment,” says Dan.The speed at which events moved from then on were probably less terrifying to a City trader than they would be to the rest of us, but a mere 14 months later Dan was able to fire up his 500L Holstein gin rectifying still while his two Forsyth copper pot stills – a 2,400L wash still and a 1,600L spirit still – were only waiting to be connected to the gas before his first batch of new-make whisky dripped out of the condenser.Luck, it must be said, played its part in the breakneck pace of developments, although it must also be said that fortune favours the brave, and much of Dan’s ‘luck’ was a product of his energy, his business experience and acumen, and his access to some pretty substantial chunks of capital. Exactly the right premises in the form of a newly-built house and barn, empty as the result of a planning wrangle, came on the market just five miles away from Dan and wife Katia’s country home. The house (built on a grant of light industrial use, hence the wrangle) was absolutely perfect for the laboratory, offices and shop; while the barn is possibly the most spacious new-wave stillhouse in the land. The pot stills also materialised by a stroke of luck. Having given up on second-hand equipment Dan and Harry resigned themselves to an indeterminate spell on Forsyth’s waiting list when suddenly the phone rang – a cancellation; would they like to...? Yes they would. And yes they could.Dan and Harry decided to source their malt from Warminster, whose boss Chris Garrett introduced them to a local farmer with 2,000 acres of organic Odyssey barley. Warminster is able to guarantee provenance by batch-malting, which means that Cotswold can genuinely proclaim its whisky to be as local to its terroir as any Scottish single malt. Then Dan heard that the Malvern Mineral Water spring had been closed three years earlier, and promptly had it reopened. So the barley and the water would be truly local, but only because Dan had made sure he had the resources to exploit unexpected opportunities. (The casks are foreigners – Bourbon barrels from Speyside Cooperage for the first fill, then sherry barrels, then US oak charred in Portugal and found by Jim Swan, 

to finish). Jim sadly passed away in 2017.What will this ‘grass to glass’ combination of Cotswold malt and Malvern create? We’ll know in 2018, when the first of the matured whisky goes into bottle. But Dan has a clue. “I love maritime peaty malts, but here we have got a definite terroir,” he says. “This is a beautiful, rolling, fertile area so the notes ought to be grain and fruit with vanilla, honey, raisins, Christmas cake – a lighter whisky, blonde rather than brunette, but with plenty of depth.” 

Case study – Dunnet Baywww.dunnetbaydistillers.co.uk

Perhaps because it’s such an expensive industry to set up in, small-scale distilling hasn’t attracted very many of what are termed “lifestyle entrepreneurs”: that is, people who see their business as supporting the way they live rather than dictating it, and often as much an ideological construct as a commercial one. And it’s not just the amount of capital required to get the thing going that dampens its appeal for entrants of this kind; it’s the level of sales they have to achieve and maintain in order to justify the investment. For Martin and Claire Murray, though, establishing the Dunnet Bay distillery near Thurso in their native Caithness has been as much a labour of love as a hard-headed business decision. With a Master’s in chemical engineering from Heriot-Watt, Martin fancied a life in distilling but at the university’s careers fair found only four distillers represented, each with a single vacancy to fill. On the other hand there were jobs going begging in oil and gas and, he says: “With a student loan to pay I had to let my head rule my heart.” That was in 2004. He’s been in oil and gas ever since. But in 2012 Martin, by now married to tourism and hospitality graduate Claire and with a young family to support, faced a critical decision. They were living in France, but all the while yearning for the north of Scotland, when Martin’s employers asked him to relocate to Nigeria. “We’d been thinking about our own distillery, but that was when we decided to go into it in detail,” says Claire, who grew up in Dunnet where the Murrays already owned a house. “It was definitely a lifestyle choice. With a young family, we wanted a settled life and Caithness was where we wanted to be. We both grew up here and it’s a truly beautiful region – not enough people know about it, and part of what we wanted to do was spread the word about it.” Not unnaturally, the Murrays’ first thought was of whisky, but after considering the expense of building and equipping a full-mash distillery and the time lag before they could sell any of the product, they opted for gin instead. But this is gin with a distinctly local flavour: “We went out with the countryside rangers and they showed us what herbs and berries grew wild and what was good to eat, and we came up with a blend of botanicals we could be confident of,” says Martin. So in Dunnet Bay’s Rock Rose gin you’ll find ingredients such as rose root, rowanberry, blueberry and sea buckthorn. Next they had to find a site – and as luck would have it there was a suitable vacant lot in Dunnet itself, complete with its own stream. By the end of 2013 the project was well under way, with building work about to begin on the vacant lot and a 500-litre still on order from John Dore. But how to publicise the venture? Claire had a brilliant idea. She simply sent a Christmas card to anyone she could think of who might want to order a case. More than six months before Dunnet Bay went into production a buzz had been started that ensured that the first batch, when it arrived in August 2014, was an instant sell-out. As was the second. And the third... Which was just as well, as Martin says the total investment in buying the land, building a distillery on it, then equipping the distillery was in the region of £200,000. Some of it came from a regional enterprise grant, but the Murrays raised 70 per cent of it themselves.A new visitor centre is planned which is due to be completed in May 2017 and there is a small gift shop open between 10–4pm.