Making spirits is a lengthy process, and not all of it happens here at the distillery.
In the diagram below, you can see all of the end-to-end steps needed to complete the process.
Growing
Maris Otter barley is a classic UK variety highly prized by brewers
Malting
Malting softens the barley and makes the starches accessible to the brewer
Mashing
Mashing in hot water converts the starches into fermenting sugar
Fermenting
Yeast is added, converting the barley sugar into a distillers 'beer'
Wash Distilling
A first distillation strips the alcohol from the beer and produces a liquid of about 30% ABV
Spirit Distilling
The second distillation further refines the alcohol of absolute purity of 96% ABV
Filtering
The spirit is filtered with activated charcoal and fine filter papers to remove impurities.
Gin Rectifying
The spirit is redistilled through a chamber containing botanicals, infusing the flavours into a spirit
Resting
The gin is rested for 3-4 weeks to allow full flavour to develop
Bottling
Finally, the spirit can be bottled to be sold and enjoyed in fine cocktails
By comparison, most distilleries these days don’t bother with all of these steps.
Most modern gins are made using industrial ethanol, bypassing most of the hard work. Of course, we know that making gin is not easy even if you buy in the base alcohol, but with so much grain grown locally, why wouldn’t we create our spirits from local ingredients?
Growing
Maris Otter barley is a classic UK variety highly prized by brewers
Malting
Malting softens the barley and makes the starches accessible to the brewer
Mashing
Mashing in hot water converts the starches into fermenting sugar
Fermenting
Yeast is added, converting the barley sugar into a distillers 'beer'
Wash Distilling
A first distillation strips the alcohol from the beer and produces a liquid of about 30% ABV
Spirit Distilling
The second distillation further refines the alcohol of absolute purity of 96% ABV
Filtering
The spirit is filtered through activated charcoal and then fine filter papers to remove impurities
Buy Industrial Ethanol
Gin Rectifying
The spirit is redistilled, sometimes through a chamber containing botanicals
Resting
The gin is rested for a limited period
Bottling
The spirit is bottled
Making the Barley Wash
Our good friends over at Hobson’s Brewery in Cleobury Mortimer take care of the malting and brewing portion of the process. They’ve spent many years building a supply chain of locally grown barley to make their beers. So, we contract with them to brew our base barley wash, which is an un-hopped distiller’s beer of about 7% ABV. They take great care to ferment the beer slowly to prevent any awkward flavours from developing that might concentrate during distillation.
Wash Distillation
This is where we get our hands on the beer and start distilling. The first distillation is called a stripping run, as it simply strips the alcohol out of the raw beer. It takes us four days at the still to fully strip a batch of distiller’s beer. The resulting liquid is about 30%ABV, but isn’t anything you would want to drink yet.
Spirit Distillation
The second distillation uses the more high-tech parts of our still, during which the spirit undergoes roughly thirty distillations in one long, slow process. It takes three agonisingly long days at the still to reach a pure 96% ABV, the maximum possible by distillation. Despite all that work, the spirit is still nowhere near ready for a bottle.
Filtering
We charcoal filter the spirit to remove any trace impurities and then chill filter it through very fine filter pads to clarify the spirit. Some of the spirit at this point is bottled as Barley Vodka, but for Hillside Gin a few more steps are required. After all of the hard work and nearly four weeks after the folks at Hobsons first mashed the grain, we finally arrive at the starting point for making a gin.
You get an idea why some distillers choose to just buy in their base alcohol, but we absolutely love the process. We feel that the authenticity of seeing our spirit all the way through the process gives us a much greater sense of dedication to the final product.
Gin Rectifying
To make our spirit into gin, we carefully measure out the precise amount of spirit and botanicals. With gin, the measures are very tight and tiny variations will become glaringly obvious defects in the final product. The botanicals are placed in a muslin bag and soaked in the spirit overnight to macerate. The next morning, that bag of soggy berries, blossoms and peels gets suspended inside the column of the still, the boiler is started, and the flavours are vapour infused into the spirit in a process taking most of the day.
Resting
Gin needs time to rest after it’s made. The flavours need time to meld together and solidify into the final taste. Some botanicals take longer than others to mature, and the character of the gin changes quite dramatically during these important weeks of resting. A gin tasted the day it is made will be entirely different after several weeks of resting, so this vital part of the process cannot be rushed.
Bottling
Finally, it’s time to put the spirit into bottles. Bottling is probably the easiest part of the process, and the most satisfying. Seeing rows of newly filled bottles is one of the greatest pleasures when you know how much effort and time went into making the spirit they contain. At this point, it will have been over two months end-to-end in the making, and every bit of effort and every hour of hard work has resulted in an exquisite liquid that we're proud to call An Honest Shropshire Spirit.