I recently wanted to try my hand at making a Gin. This isn't something I've done before, so I knew it might be a learning process to produce something I like. I decided to use the Still Spirits Distiller's Artisan Gin Ingredients Kit to keep it simple.

The kit comes with everything you need outside of the still itself: turbo sugar, turbo clear, a good quality gin yeast and nutrients, and all the botanicals. I was especially interested in the botanicals pack, which you can also get separately. Finding the perfect bontanical bill is most of the difficulty when it comes to gin, so I thought starting with a generic pack would give me a good foundation to add to and improve in the future.

The pack was incredibly easy to use, and came with excellent instructions for creating the wash, fermenting, clearing and distilling. An important note, because it uses a dedicated gin yeast, rather than a turbo yeast, I didn't need to add any carbon to the wash outside of what is included in the turbo sugar. I didn't even need to filter the spirit before doing the gin run. In total, it took about 7 days to fully ferment, although I left it a couple more until I had time to distill it.

I decided to do the stripping run in my reflux still. After dumping the first ~150ml, I collected about 3L of neutral spirit at 91.7%abv.

For the first run, since I was using a botanicals kit, I thought it would be a good idea to go the maceration route for infusion - this way I would have a good idea how all the flavours came through when not doing vapor infusion. I diluted my spirit, and macerated the botanicals for 24h, and then it was time for the spirit run.

Because I am using a Grainfather G30 for distilling, there is no exposed element to burn the botanicals. I poured the whole lot, botanicals and all, into the G30 and topped up with water to the minimum 10L line. The spirit run went without a hitch. Because I used a rectified neutral spirit, the cuts were very clear and I was able to extract a lot of hearts. I ended up with about 4.5 litres of good hearts, after diluting back to 40% abv.

I am extremely happy with the result! While the gin flavour isn't massively overpowering, which is probably because I macerated instead of vapor infused, it is very smooth and easy drinking. It's well balanced, with a light citrus note but mostly the juniper and coriander shine through. It is nice on its own over ice, and good when mixing with a nice Fever Tree tonic. Overall it's a great place to start, and I'll be playing around with botanicals more now.

About the author

Matt came on board originally to learn the ropes of commercial brewing when The League Brewery was taking off. Starting of washing, cleaning, measuring and tidying, he quickly got up to speed and starting doing full brews by himself. Having enjoyed the spoils of homebrew for so long, he discovered a passion for commercial brewing, and all things fermented!

While we are no longer brewing on site, Matt has stuck around and is usually working in the background with Ed to keep our systems up and running, and improve the shopping experience.

He is a keen homebrewer and distiller, always trying something new. Apart from beer, he loves making mead, brandy, gin, whiskey and rice wines, and will give pretty much anything a go!