Small Batch

It was a decade ago that a “gin-aissance” started to gain real momentum in the UK, triggering the rapid evolution of a British craft gin industry. Now in 2022, there are clear signs that a similar movement is happening Stateside. Robin Barwick distills the issue...

Never doubt what kind of business success can emerge from the basement or garage. Golf equipment giant Ping started out with Karsten Solheim toiling away at his garage workbench; Jeff Bezos—reportedly now the world’s richest man—launched Amazon as an online book shop from his garage. Microsoft was a garage start-up too, while sportswear company Under Armour came into being in the basement of founder Kevin Plank’s grandmother’s house (imagine the panic when the NFL asked for a meeting at Plank’s “office” at short notice).

Batch Gin is not looking to grow into any kind of mega-brand, but it produces some of the UK’s most interesting small-batch gins, and it, too, began in a basement in the Lancashire town of Burnley, a roll-your-sleeves-up, straight-talking kind of place in the heart of England’s industrial northwest. Company founder Phil Whitwell knew his business had outgrown the basement once sales started to pick-up and he and his nephew Ollie were struggling to haul palates of gin up the stairs.

The distillery has been located in a repurposed mill since 2015, where a diverse and ever-changing product range is led the Batch Signature Gin. Distinctly spiced yet not overpowering, the Signature Gin is distilled with an array of botanicals including cinnamon, cloves, frankincense, myrrh, nutmeg and orange peel. The flavors conjure thoughts of sleigh bells and reindeer, although there is no low season when it comes to appreciating a well-balanced, hand-crafted spiced gin.

Batch Signature Gin from Burnley; The Darnley’s Gin Cottage in Kingsbarns [below, right]

The Batch distillery epitomises the British craft gin industry, and while Batch gins are imported into the United States, this small business with a staff of five produces on average only 1,000 bottles of precious liquid a month.

“We want a sustainable craft business,” Whitwell has said. “The objective is not to get to the point where we get acquired or stocked in a national supermarket. We’re in it for something we all enjoy doing.”

The most interesting and creative gins are usually the ones distilled in small batches.

“Quality can be lost in mass production,” Whitwell tells Kingdom. “You lose the attention to detail and if you are distilling in large volume you just can’t afford to take risks because if you make a mistake you might be throwing away thousands of litres of gin.

“At Batch we are constantly innovating and tweaking our recipes. Botanicals change and even if you don’t change the recipe you can’t always get exactly the same flavor profile. We are able to react to that but it is harder to do on a big scale, so the recipes for the bigger distilleries tend to be very safe.”

Gin has a long and sometimes notorious history in the UK, and in particular in London. The juniper berry-based spirit originated as a medieval elixir in the Netherlands (“Jenever” is Dutch for “Juniper,” which became shortened

to “gin”), before the Brits took to it with such resolve that much of London became intoxicated in the 18th century “Gin craze.” Glamorous gin palaces reigned a century later—once the trade had genuine regulation in place—as a growing middle class had the disposable income to splash out on a “flash of lightning,” as a shot of gin was sometimes known. Now, another 150 years on, gin served with tonic or in cocktails has enjoyed a rocketing “gin-aissance,” with an array of small-batch gins challenging the long-standing mass-market brands.

“We were the first gin distillery in Lancashire in 2015,” says Whitwell, “but there are now 70 others in Lancashire alone. That growth is reflected throughout the UK.”

UK gin sales surpassed £1 billion for the first time in 2015, and since 2016 the number of gin distillers in the UK has trebled to nearly 600, with more than 300 in England.

The attention to detail in producing craft gins extends to sustainability. Darnley’s Gin is a young brand making a big impact from a small cottage at the Kingsbarns Distillery, just to the south of St Andrews on Scotland’s east coast.

“We source as many of our botanicals as we can locally, whether they are grown or foraged, and we are making our operation increasingly sustainable,” explains William Wemyss, founder of Darnley’s Gin. “For instance we offer gin pouches, so customers can buy refills in pouches which saves on glass bottle production and so reduces CO2 emissions, as a glass furnace uses a lot of heat. Also from a transport point of view the pouches are lighter.”

At the forefront of the Darnley’s range is its “Original”, an award-winning and elegant London Dry gin. Made with a recipe inspired by the abundant elderflower growing naturally on the Wemyss family estate in Fife, the dry and subtle Darnley’s Original brings hints of elderflower, grapefruit and juniper, along with light floral notes.

“London Dry is sort of the Champagne of gins,” adds Wemyss, “because you get all the flavors from the botanicals very well integrated into the white spirit, rather than flavors just being stuck in after distillation. To be a London Dry gin all the botanicals must be in the still when you distil. You can’t add or infuse any flavor after distillation. Compounding flavor into a gin after distillation is much easier, whereas we are trying to focus on quality.”

Many of the flavored mass market gins are made by adding a syrup and coloring to the gin after distillation.

“Compounding is the easy way to keep your flavor consistent but there are no natural ingredients involved,” explains Batch Gin’s Whitwell. “It’s a shortcut because it is easier to add flavors afterwards than it is to bring them through in distillation, and that is not what we want to do here, certainly.”

The American market has become increasingly important to British gins. While the UK has become saturated with small gin brands, there is much more room for growth on the other side of the Atlantic, where popularity of craft gins is gaining momentum.

“In the United States the market was polarized to New York and California for a long time,” says Whitwell, “but there is growing interest out there and a lot of room for expansion. We are very focused on the U.S. market and we are beginning to see sales increase in more states, like Florida and Texas.”

Meanwhile Darnley’s Gin, which produces in the region of 40,000 bottles of gin a year, is on sale across 24 American states at the time of writing, with “Sales growing very strongly,” says Wemyss; 40,000 bottles might sound like a lot—it is more than treble the annual output of Batch—yet it is still a small fraction compared to the mass market giants of Tanqueray, Gordon’s, Beefeater and Bombay Sapphire.

Either way, Wemyss claims status as a craft gin is more in ethos than it is in production volume.

“It is more of a mindset,” he says. “Producing craft gin is about quality, particularly in terms of making sure all the botanicals are traceable and local where possible, and to ensure you are sourcing the best botanicals available.”

So for that full flavor in a G&T keep the gin smallbatch. It might cost a couple extra bucks at the bar but as long as you don’t drown out the taste with too much tonic—the gin lover’s cardinal sin—it will be worth it. And as committed gin drinker Ernest Hemingway once said, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”