What inspired you to set-up Gower Gin?
We had run our own business before in the 1990s and had been looking at other opportunities ever since. It was a chance visit to the ‘Ginstitute’ in Portobello Road in 2016 to make our own gins that inspired us to look at the developing gin industry as a new challenge. We came back from this experience thinking ‘What if we could make our own gin based on the flavours of Gower?’ and the Gower Gin company was then born in 2017.
How does the gin distilling process work?
Like most craft gin distilleries, we buy in the base alcohol and rectify or re-distil it. One of the differences with us is that we exclusively use soil association certified organic spirit for every product we make. Our production process takes a few days – we cut the ethanol with purified water (50%/50%) and then macerate all the gin botanicals in this liquid for around 36-48 hours. We remove the botanicals and heat the liquid in the Still to the boiling point of ethanol which is just under 80 Celsius. The distillate is collected before being ‘cut’ with purified water to the desired % ABV (Alcohol by Volume).
Can you share your recipe for Gower Gin – or is it top secret?
We always reveal the botanicals…but not the precise quantities! We specialise in London Dry gins which is the name for the production method we use. We design all our gins on a spreadsheet so we can scale up from the initial tests. All our gins have a core of 4 botanicals – juniper, angelica, orris root and coriander. For GŴYR original, we also add fresh lemon and pink grapefruit zest and the key ingredient, foraged fennel fronds. For our GŴYR Rhosili, with the same core 4 we add sea buckthorn, linden flower, fresh lime zest and foraged gorse.
Tell us about your ‘green’ credentials
For us, this is constant work in progress, and we have monthly reviews where we think, what could we do better? We started concentrating on the little things with the plan that all of these add up. We source as many organic and local ingredients as we can. We use a reverse osmosis process for purifying the water which is a much more sustainable method than buying in purified water. We have changed our bottle to a significantly lighter one and which has a high recycled content. The closures we use are made from plant cellulose and can be disposed of in the food bin. All of packaging is plastic free and recycled or recyclable. At the distillery, we have switched to green energy and have tried to look at ways of lowering our footprint from bamboo toilet paper to LED lights and a water saving device in our toilet cistern.
What would you say is your unique selling point?
For us, it’s all about being rooted in our locality, showcasing the flavours of Gower. When we started, people told us that a brand that used Welsh would not sell outside Wales, but we have proved them wrong, and customers have respected our desire to have bilingual bottles and celebrate the beautiful Gower peninsula.
The company seems to be going from strength to strength – winning national recognition – what next for the company?
We do have many branches to the company from our Môr-Ladron rum which we make with Dafydd Morris from Cheers Wine Merchants, to our Glân sanitiser and to our contract gin service, which has helped us build the business during some challenging years and employ staff. Our dream, however, is to have a Visitors’ centre on Gower where we can do tastings and tours but also have a shop that sells all the wonderful products made on Gower.
Will you ever need to move out of the ‘garden shed’ and into a factory unit to keep up with demand?
We already have a factory unit with a much bigger still for the contract gins we make but Gower gin will always be made on Gower and for the moment, that means we’re still in the shed!
Siân Brooks was talking to Colin Everett
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