We decided that we could have a great deal of fun creating, producing and testing new spirits. Our next challenge was to see if we could spot a gap in what has become a very crowded market place. After much research we concluded that the market didn’t really need just another craft gin producer. Even in our relatively small part of the world, within a 25 mile radius there are several existing gin distillers producing fine products.
We noticed that everyone has the same goal - in simple terms - the objective is to create and produce a relatively narrow range of superb craft Gins or other spirits and then produce a “small” batch of them and sell as many of them as they can. All of us would probably agree with this statement.
There is one word, however, that can be interpreted in many different ways and that’s the word “small”. There is no agreed definition of “small” in the world of gin batches. Typically the word small should have the letters “er” added to the end because most craft distillers are much smaller than the national drinks brands but now, the early innovators are effectively producing thousands of bottles of per month from Stills which will in turn produce several hundred bottles in a single batch.
There’s no doubt that the work involved in the set up of a gin run is a relatively significant overhead and there are economies of scale to be achieved if you produce increasing batch sizes. However, for us the interesting part of the business is in experimenting and creating new recipes and so we decided to go in the opposite direction .
Our model is to develop bespoke offerings for the licensed trade (vars, restaurants, hotels, Spas etc) which reflect their individual brand and then to brand the product with their brand. Often consumers will follow the recommendation of their favourite bar staff and so by offering a bespoke gin landlords have the ability to stock a smaller range of gins and take pride in their own product. Of course this means small batch runs will typically always be small batch runs and when a customer likes the product, they’ll just have to keep going down to their local for more!
So to test this idea out and naturally some of products, we have initially relied on our kin and kindred spirits. Everyone’s been very keen to get involved and give us feedback and this has helped us greatly in shaping our offerings. Indeed it’s also helped us secure our first sale. So a big thank you to Cousin Phil and The County for helping us get the show on the road. Kin spirits by name and by nature 👍