News / Gin
New Bristol gin distillery has big ambitions
The headquarters of the Bristol Distilling Co. is big enough to make more gin than has been produced in Bristol for decades. All the team now need is the equipment to arrive from the USA.
Currently being handbuilt in Lincoln, Nebraska, when their 500-litre still gets to Bedminster, it will only be the sixth of its kind ever built and the first to be operating in Europe.
It’s just one sign of the ambitions of Bristol Distilling Co, who hope to be making and selling gin by as early as May. If the gin production goes well, the next steps will be to make vodka and then a US-style whisky aged in oak barrels.
is needed now More than ever
A much smaller 30-litre still currently sits on the bar of their headquarters within the Malago Vale Trading Estate, close enough to the railway line to hear trains pass by every few minutes and close enough to the bars of North Street to walk over the latest batch of gin as soon as it is bottled.
“Our dream is simply to make great gin, classic London punchy dry gin, maybe with fresh ginger and grapefruit” says Jake Black, best known for being the founder of Chomp, a burger business that begun in a converted horse van and has had a restaurant on St Nicholas Street for three years.
“We’ll be making quality spirits with bold flavours,” adds Bristol Distilling Co. commercial director Emily Astley-Cooper, who has worked with Jake since coming as a customer to Chomp’s first ever pop-up at 40 Alfred Place in Kingsdown.
Bristol Distilling Co’s warehouse in Bedminster used to belong to a vehicle repair firm
Looking ahead to the vodka that they will be making here, Jake and Emily say that they want to create the perfect vodka to go in a bloody Mary, perhaps made with pink peppercorns.
As for the whisky, that’s not going to be on shelves for a while because distillers have to wait for their spirit to mature for three years before it can even be called whisky.
So now it’s all about the gin, with the name of the Bristol Distilling Co. a nod to Bristol’s proud distilling history.
A business with a similar name made a basic grain spirit on Cheese Lane, close to what is now Temple Way, from as early as the mid-seventeenth century with barley from the fields of St Phillip’s.
“There is such a legacy there,” says Emily, who has been researching gin production in Bristol in centuries gone by with the idea of perhaps recreating a historic Bristol gin.
“It would have been much easier for us to get a site further out of Bristol,” Jake says. “But the feel of our business is very rooted here and it was important for us to be in the city.”
Bristol Distilling Co. hope to be bottling their first batch of gins in May
Jake worked in property in London before moving to Bristol to set up Chomp. “Chomp has always been pretty boozy,” he admits. “That business and this are linked in so many ways. It’s a natural progression, a logical next step.”
Jake and Emily looked at various locations for a second restaurant site, but have now given up the search to concentrate on Bristol Distilling Co, whose foundation came out of building up their collection of spirits at Chomp and wondering if they could make versions just as good, if not better than the bottles on their back bar.
Emily, who grew up in Didcock and started working for Chomp after graduating from the University of Bristol, explains more about the mission of Bristol Distilling Co.
“We’re going to be making something that looks beautiful and feels special,” she says while pouring a G&T for herself, Jake and Bristol24/7 featuring Pink Pepper Gin from Audemus Spirits based in Cognac in France (“a bit more out there!”).
“We want to be making modern British spirit. That embodies what we are trying to do and we will be being ambitious from the start.”
Emily and Jake on a research trip to Nebraska see the design of their still
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