When Oxford biochemist Dr John Walters distilled brandy from home-picked grapes on a whim, did he realise that it would lead to annually producing nearly 2-million bottles of various spirits? The heart and passion that drives the craft brewing industry is alive and well in the UK’s craft distillers. The question is: should you be joining them? Velo Mitrovich reports.
You’ve seen craft gin take off during the last five years and you’ve seen some of your fellow beer brewers jump on the bandwagon. You’ve looked around your brewery, saw the space, equipment and skills you already have, and wondered if distilling could be a way of expanding your line.
How hard could be? When you look at some of the craft gins out there, it’s no surprise if you think there can’t be too much to the distilling process. But, if you want to make a quality product, this is where the real challenge begins. The only way to describe it is, it’s like ramping up from the kit beer you first brewed at home to what your brewery is doing today.
If this sounds like a challenge, it is. But, compared to 10-15 years ago, it’s getting a whole lot easier thanks in great part to government regulations easing up. Training is now readily available through universities, institutions and centres such as the Institute of Brewing & Distilling and Brewlab. Distilling equipment is not something you need to build yourself by piecemeal and numerous trips to HomeBase, but can be bought ready to use by companies such as VitiKit in Exeter.
If your interest is still piqued, let’s throw this into the old copper still. There are other craft spirits out there besides gin, such as vodka, brandy, eau-de-vie, whiskey, moonshine and rum. A trip to Waitrose will show you that craft spirits sell for anywhere £20 to £45 a bottle, with most £30 and up.
With gin already established with craft distillers, what’s on the horizon for those who like to lead and not follow. Well, we’ll let you in on a secret, rum is beginning to shape up to be the new craft spirit, showing drinkers there is so much more to the sugar-based spirit than what you got drunk on at 16 during that school trip.
But – there is always a ‘but’ – if you thought gin was a challenge to do right, in skill level of the distiller to make rum, it’s a comparison of Yeovil Town FC to Liverpool.
Distilling basics
When you visit English Spirit’s distillery in the small Essex country village of Great Yeldham, don’t expect much help from your car’s satnav. Part of the distillery grounds date back to the 13th century, with the distillery itself in a large 200-year-old barn, and time seems to have stopped when the last barn beam was laid.
If you’re lucky and rum is being distilled in the 20 gurgling, boiling 200-litre cooper stills, there is a smell like Christmas in the air from the spirit and the huge containers of imported molasses on site. As you debate in your mind if it’s “Yarrr” or “Arrr” to be a proper rum-drinking pirate, you take a close look at the stills which appear to be as ancient as the barn.
“No, they just look that old,” says Oxford biochemist and English Spirit founder Dr John Walters, who immediately insists you call him ‘John’. “They take a real beating, four or five years and that’s it for them.”
While looking at a new car engine makes you slam shut the hood in confusion, there is a timeless beauty in distilling which is easy to grasp, as if it is ingrained in our ancient memory.
There is evidence of distilling for perfume dating backing to at least 1200 BCE. The first recorded clear evidence of distilling alcohol comes from the Arab chemist Al-Kindi in 9th century Iraq, although it probably happened much, much earlier. Regardless, if Al-Kindi stepped into English Spirit’s distillery, it would take him less than 10 seconds to grasp the technology. Really.
Although stills have changed shape over the years, mostly to allow for greater volumes to be produced, the basic technique remains the same and revolves around the idea that alcohol becomes vapour at a lower temperature than water. If you capture and cool the rising vapor, you have alcohol.
It’s not as simple as just heating your container to just below the boiling point of water and extract the alcohol fumes – leaving the water and other impurities behind – but in the absolute simplest terms, that is pretty much what happens.
Then, each time you further distil the liquid, you’ll be extracting more of the alcohol and leaving behind more impurities. This can be what you want when producing vodka; not necessarily what you want when making rum or other spirits which rely on some of the impurities for flavour.
You take grains, potatoes, any high-sugar plant such as sugar cane or sugar beets, fruit, whey – actually pretty much anything – add water and yeast, and after it ferments, filter out the plant material, put the liquid in a still, and distil away, trying to eliminate most of the water. You are left with alcohol.
It would be easy to say that at least 80 percent or more of all brewers started brewing in their kitchen, garage, or university dorm. That, you reason, is why there are so many brewers out there and not distillers. Unlike beer, you can’t legally distil at home and learn the basic ropes – or at least that’s what most believe.
“Not true,” says Walters, who says hidden deep in the HM Revenue and Customs website is a statement saying you can own a still for personal use, up to four litres in size, provided you go onto a register.
Discovering that he could legally distil at home, along with hearing a feature about French eau de vie on a radio programme, inspired Walters. After filling out the form and constructing – badly – a still, he used grapes growing by the side of the house to make wine, which he then distilled into brandy in 2009.
Comparing it to an expensive cognac and discovering his was better, he followed with several vodkas and an elderberry eau de vie. Looking at the figures at what this venture could bring in, his pharmaceutical company suddenly seemed far, far away. In 2011, English Spirit was launched. However, before that happened, he had an Mt Everest to climb in regulations.
You have to realise that all laws restricting distilling here, in the USA, and a good portion of the world weren’t created to make a safe liquor or to prevent home stills from blowing up the neighbourhood. No, they were made only to allow the taxman to have his due by hitting hard-liquor hard. Governments grasped this principle back in the 17th and 18th centuries, which led to fighting in the Scottish Highlands and the USA’s armed Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-94 which came close to putting to an end what British redcoats couldn’t do in 1776.
A small distillery could be portable – going from farm to farm – or easily hidden, making it impossible to collect revenue. However, if regulations forced distilleries to be large, they would also have to be in permanent locations, making it easier for taxation. It was decided then that the minimum size for pot stills would be 18 hectolitres – 1,800 litres.
“Now that’s a pretty big still,” says Walters. “So basically, it meant there couldn’t be a small distillery like you have with breweries, HMRC wouldn’t allow it. So when English Spirit came to do this, we were the third to go down that route; there was Chase Distillery, Sipsmith’s and ourselves At that stage we met with a very, very helpful HMRC officer, I mean, seriously helpful.
“The pot still size requirement was dropped and as long as you had a business plan and they felt you were able to deliver on it, they give you the go-ahead, which was what happened to us,” says Walters. “Nearly a decade on we are paying HMRC seven figures in duty so you know what, they made the right decision!”
In 2011, English Spirit was desperately trying to make about 120 bottles a week. Now, the distillery should be just shy of producing two million this year, and in between those years it’s won over 100 international awards.
The distillery has around 14 core lines – such as gin, vodka, rum, brandy, eau-de-vie, single malt spirit, liqueurs, English sambuca and cucumber spirit – and do 10 to 20 special editions a year, such as the latest, Strawberry Rum Liqueur. In addition, a good portion of production is in contract distilling for commercial clients.
What is truly amazing about this production figure is that English Spirit has stayed with its small 200 litre copper stills and small batch philosophy.
Small batch rum
What is small batch? “It’s exactly that,” says Walters. “So it’s the size of the batch that you process at any one stage. Yonks ago, we decided – having reviewed all sorts of different still sizes – that we preferred 200 litre pots for distillation. And the rationale behind that was that when you’re distilling, it is all about grabbing the bits that you want and throwing away the bits that you don’t want.”
The 200 litre size gave English Spirit the precision to capture exactly what parts were wanted. [For more specific detail, listen to the English Spirit podcast at rebymedia.com, The Brewers Podcast.]
Besides pot stills, which come in various sizes and shapes, there are also column stills and hybrid stills, again, all in various sizes. While English Spirit swears by the 200 litre pot still, you will find others who swear at them and prefer other designs.
But what will decide in part what type of still you chose, is what do you plan on distilling? Will you specialise in strictly gin, or be an all-rounder such as English Spirit? While there are numerous commercial distilleries which produce more volume than English Spirit, few – if any – have the same range in spirits.
With gin, almost to a one, UK distillers buy their base spirit – made from sugar beets, grains, or potatoes – and then redistill it with botanicals. There are two reasons for this. This first is licencing is a relatively simple process if you’re not making the base spirit, and the second is, the distilling is a whole lot easier – you’re not gathering raw material, fermenting or doing the more difficult first-distil. English Spirit is one of the few that makes its own base spirit, using 100 percent of it for their own gin.
“As you know, the renaissance of gin is vast We’ve probably got a couple of years left in that I’d say, but the markets cluttering up,” says Walters. “But actually what is now emerging at a hell-of-a-rate I’d never thought possible is rum.”
With the long history of rum in the UK you would think that somebody would have been distilling it here, but they weren’t. Some distillers were buying rum in from elsewhere and re-distilling with flavourings – much like how the gin industry works – or simply bottling it as-is from other sources.
English Spirt was the first modern distillery to produce rum in the UK, starting in 2012. “We make rum from sugarcane molasses, fermenting it, distilling it multiple times, sometimes aging, and sometimes doing other weird and wonderful things,” says Walters.
“You know, there’s some good rum around, but the vast majority of rum has languished because it’s been produced in parts of the world where the impetus is not for quality, it’s for maintenance of social welfare,” says Walters.
“A lot of the distilleries in the Caribbean are state run, they’re there to keep people in jobs. And they have to return a significant profit. So, the impetus is commercial and there is nothing wrong with this, businesses exist by virtue of having to turn a profit.”
What Walters finds frustrating with this is – no doubt from being a biochemist – he understands the chemical components of rum and sees the potential in it to make a truly amazing spirit.
For English Spirit’s Old Salt Rum – which was the first modern-era rum made in the UK – the distillery ferments the molasses on average for 14 days, but this sometimes stretches to over three weeks depending on the outside temperature. The molasses wash is then distilled three times in the copper pot stills, with around 200 litres of molasses ending up as 20 litres of rum. It’s then aged for a few months in English oak barrels, which imparts its own flavour notes and gives the rum a golden colour – rum coming out of the still is as clear as spring water.
If you take Old Salt Rum as the benchmark, this is what rum can taste like if made with care. At the Essex distillery, using Old Salt Rum, a spiced rum is created. At English Spirit’s new distillery in Cornwall, a white rum is made.
So, why aren’t we all more familiar with rums such as these?
Thanks to a massive advertising campaign, the rum most of us know is Captain Morgan’s Spiced, which had to take ‘Rum’ off the label to comply with EU regulations that regulate which flavourings, colouring agents, ingredients, etc, can be used in rum and still be called ‘rum’.
Officially, Captain Morgan Original Spiced Gold is described as a “premium spirit drink made with the finest Caribbean Rum expertly blended with adventurous spice and natural flavours.” Which all suggests that the rum component could be relatively low and begs the question: If you’re having to add that much “adventurous spice” and other flavourings to a rum, just how low of quality was it to begin with?
However, if this gets people more willing to try rum and see the potential of it, this is not all bad – much like how beer drinkers need to drink big beer to a appreciate craft beer.
Other potentials
Walter sees several other potential grow areas of UK craft distilling, but with caveats with both.
The first is producing apple brandy. Going hand-in-hand with an increase in cider, the raw ingredients are here in utter abundance. Single source apple brandy or regional apple brandy springs immediately to mind. Walters cautions though before getting too excited, is a reminder that through his experience, it takes around one ton of apples to make 45 litres of brandy.
“Now you begin to get to the commercial crux of the matter; unless you produce apples, you’re not going to be doing this because you can’t buy them in, requiring considerable transport,” he says.
“The thing with all distilling is that it’s lengthy and it’s costly. And it takes a lot of bums on seats because the thing about brewing is that the real pain in the backside is the quantity of liquid you have to handle.
“For virtually every pint that goes out the door, there’s probably 1.25 1.5 pints of liquid you’ve had to utilized in your process. So there’s lots of bums on seats, lots of tanks, lots of energy, lots of processing, lots of bottles.
“At the end of the day, the irony is that we take a raw material, we add water to ferment it, and then we take all the water away. It is massively labour intensive and it keeps all 16 of us here very busy.”
But, if you glutting for punishment, Walter sees with the ever increasing change in temperature, a growing glut of white grapes being grown in English, whose yield is surpassing what is required for the English wine industry.
“And English-style of cognac could be a real possibility – you just can’t call it cognac.”
New centre
As much as Great Yeldham has its charm in the English countryside, it is well off of the tourist highway. English Spirit’s new centre – opening up within a month – in Cornwall should introduce more people to English Spirt.
Already the distillery has been based at Treguddick since 2017 with a sales, creative and operation team, along with being where St Piran’s Cornish Rum is made. The new centre will not only continue distilling with additional copper pot stills, but will now offer visitors food and drink, a shopping experience featuring local products, and events.
Walter describes distilling like being a new chef, with knowing in theory how to cook things but not really knowing how to do it great. And, what you thought you were doing great when you left catering college, you look back five-years later and realise that it actually wasn’t that good.
“It’s like all things, you have to educate your palate. You have to know what you want to achieve. You have to know what you have to avoid. And those sorts of things take an awful lot of experience, a lot of trial, a lot of error, and a lot of failure. If you win the first time, you’ve got very little chance of getting things right in the end.
“We’re delighted with where we are because we have not only made a good stable business out of things, we’ve had a staggering amount of fun. Put the two together and it can’t be better,” says Walters.
