4 Exploring a working distillery

Here at the distillery, we make a London dry gin. It's a very basic product to make, so we use 96% ethanol and we use water. This is put into our still here, and it is diluted to 60% when it goes in the still. In here, we put our botanicals. So the night before we are due to do the distillation, we put in our three main botanicals. So we put in our juniper, our coriander seed, and our Angelica root. This is then left to macerate overnight. In the morning when the first distiller comes in, we then put in our six botanicals, which is our Bay leaf, cardamom, black peppercorn, lime, pink grapefruit, and our lavender that we use. We then turn the stirrer on in the morning, which then macerates everything together. We then turn the steam on, relieving any pressure from the bottom as we do so. We then wait for about 30 minutes for any distillate to come through. So this still is actually a steam jacketed still. So at the bottom, you can see this stainless steel jacket. This is filled with steam which heats the still very evenly. Once this does come to a temperature of around about about 80 degrees, the vapour inside will then go up the top of the onion. It will then pass along the top there, bypassing this column here, because we don't actually use this for the distillation. The vapour will then travel around the back into the top of our condenser. They can see the dials there. You'll see the temperature rise as the distillate comes through. It'll then pass down through the condenser, passing through lots of pipes filled with very cold water. That will then turn the vapour back into liquid, which you can see in this vat here. So as the distillate comes out of the spout here, it is collected into three different tanks. These three different tanks will actually collect different portions of our distillate. So by that, I mean at different times of the run, different flavours will actually come through. So at the very first part of the distillation, we get a portion called our head's cut. And our head's cut is very stringent tasting, so there's a lot of very kind of sharp flavours in there, things that we won't want in our gin. So that is collected in this tank down here. Then comes our most important part of the cup, which is our heart's portion. So our heart's portion is collected in the main tank here. Once we collect the whole of our heart's cup, it is left to rest in the IBC over there for about five days. This is just to let all of the flavours distribute evenly, all the oils, all the acids will find their own place, basically. We equate it to making a curry at home, actually. So if you leave a curry in the fridge for three or four days, it tastes a lot better than when you first make it. The last portion of our distillate to come through is our tail's cup. So that is collected in the tank over here. And that is similar to the head's cup in that it doesn't taste very nice. It's astringent. It's actually more dank and woody than the head's cup. So that's the reason that we don't really want those flavours in our main portion, our main gin. So now that our gin has rested for five days, we dilute it down to 46% and it's bottled. So we do all of our bottling on-site. It is then packaged up and shipped off to stores all over the country and around the world.