Distilling Dry Gin in an iStill 250

I learned how to make the Shakespeare Distillery’s Stratford Dry Gin during my three months working there. The distillery has four core gins which are: Stratford Dry Gin, Rhubarb Gin, Mulberry Gin, and the Elderflower and Quince Gin. However, the Stratford Dry Gin forms the base for all of their different gins, so the distillation method is the same for all four gins.

Charging the Still

The still is first filled with water and neutral grain spirit (96%abv), and then the heat is turned on. It usually takes about 45 minutes for the still to heat up, so in the meantime, we would weigh out the botanicals (a substance obtained from a plant and used typically in medicinal or cosmetic products for our gin).

The Botanicals

The Stratford Dry Gin has ten botanicals. First is fresh rosemary, plucked fresh from the little herb garden out front. The second is juniper berry, the mandatory gin ingredient. Juniper berry lends piney and resinous flavour to gins. The third is lovage seed; whilst the leaves and stems of lovage have a celery-like flavour, the seeds have more of a thyme flavour with a hint of spice. Fourth is lemon balm. We use the leaf of the lemon balm to add a sweet lift to the gin in tandem with the lemon and orange zest. Fifth is angelica root, which acts as a fixative. It helps to enhance the flavours of the gin and bind them together. Sixth is coriander seed, which brings a lovely spicy lemon flavour to the gin. Seventh is sage which has a  slightly peppery taste with hints of mint, eucalyptus, and lemon.

While the types of botanicals used in the gin are not a secret, the amounts of each botanical are a secret that only David (the distiller) and his brother Simon (the owner) know.

David will mix up the seven botanicals and then wrap them up in a cheese cloth with some string. The two botanical bags are then hung inside the still from a hook. The three remaining botanicals of lemon peel, orange peel, and rose petals are measured out separately and put in the section of the still with the copper packing.

Gin iStill Distillation

When the iStill is ready to start collecting spirit it will make a beeping sound to call you over to check on it. There is a mechanism to separate the foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails of the distillation run during spirit collection. The foreshots have methanol and other poisons that can make you feel sick, so based on the temperature inside the pot the iStill will make these cuts automatically. The first drops of spirit that come out of the run will be collected into an Erlenmeyer flask and discarded. 

After this portion of the run has finished collecting, the spirit collection will stop momentarily as the istill column stabilizes. Then it will beep again and the spirit will now come out of a different section, which is our heads. We will collect the heads in a graduated cylinder below. The heads will be added to the tails of our run. We’ll combine the tails and heads from 4 to 5 gin distillation runs and redistil them into neutral grain spirit (NGS). After this re-distillation into NGS, we will use the NGS to make more gin.

After two and a half hours, the collection into our steel drum will be nearly finished. We get a lot of spiciness from the lovage. This is a sign that it is time to switch the collection from hearts to tails. We make these tails cut manually by taste, so I will take out the tubing out and collect the tails in a different container. I then weigh out the steel drum with the hearts and record how much has been collected. After another 2.5 hours, the tails will have finished collecting and we will rinse out the column of the still.

Cutting it Back

A few days later David will calculate how much reverse osmosis water needs to be added to bring the gin down to the correct bottling strength of 45% abv. Then I pump the hearts we collected into a larger container, and then we add our reverse osmosis water slowly. I will stir it, and test the alcoholic strength with the Snap 40 device. I will do this a few times until I have the correct alcohol concentration. Then we bottle it, label it, and it will be ready for the shop.

Watch it on YouTube Below

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