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30 August 2024Gin to the blue
In just a few years, the Cambridge Distillery has gone from producing a few bottles in a living room to the title of world’s most innovative maker of gin. Founder William Lowe shares the secrets of success.
I
t’s a clear November morning in Cambridgeshire and I’m about to do something I’ve never done before: tuck into a glass of ant-flavoured gin.
In just a few years, the Cambridge Distillery has gone from producing a few bottles in a living room to the title of world’s most innovative maker of gin. Founder William Lowe shares the secrets of success.
I t’s a clear November morning in Cambridgeshire and I’m about to do something I’ve never done before: tuck into a glass of ant-flavoured gin.
Pouring the liquid in question is William Lowe, founder and owner (with wife Lucy) of the Cambridge Distillery, whose premises is on the main street of the picture postcard village of Grantchester.
‘We make quite a lot of this,’ he confides. ‘We’ll do 99 bottles at a time and we’re about to do batch eight. It does very well in Australia, actually.
‘It’s a funny thing, ants,’ he continues. ‘People get really squeamish about them, but when you make a drink from them it provides a great opportunity to have a really important conversion about what food is.’
Well, I can report the Cambridge Distillery’s Anty Gin (price £220 a bottle) isn’t half bad; with a dry, almost malty overtone. It’s also one of a plethora of varieties that the firm produces, from truffle gin, to forest floor gin, to raspingly dry gin, to Japanese gin.
Lowe’s background is in the wine and spirits business. A psychology graduate who spent part of his childhood growing up in a Cambridge college (his father was a professor at the university), he worked in bars in his student days and ended up staying in the industry, moving into the wholesale side and twice winning the award of international wine and spirits educator of the year.
From there it was perhaps a logical step to start distilling his own product, which he did by setting up a glass still in the family living room.
It went well. So well, in fact, that when he asked people to try a taste test with his product against the biggest brands in the business, it would invariably win the day.
The Cambridge Distillery was officially born on 7 April 2012, the day of the Boat Race. ‘Cambridge won,’ Lowe recalls. ‘Oxford broke an oar which was perhaps a good omen for us. We had ploughed everything we had into the project and our aim was to make 50 unique gins that year. In the end we made 84.’
The Cambridge Distillery was officially born on 7 April 2012, the day of the Boat Race
That may sound like a huge number of different products and it is, but the reason the firm can take this approach comes down to its unique method of distilling.
Lowe explains: ‘Every other distillery changes their product to fit the process. We change our process to fit the product.’ Key to this is something called vacuum distillation that lowers atmospheric pressure to bring down the boiling point of ethanol from 78°C to room temperature.
‘That means we can take ingredients and separate them, distilling them one at a time. So we do just that. That’s how we can make gins that taste objectively better and why every single gin we have ever released has won at least a gold medal at international level. We bring together the threads to make a tapestry that is our gin.’
This element of control and flexibility means the firm can try new recipes a litre at a time. Once he’s happy with the flavour profile, Lowe can then scale up production by a factor of 10 if he so desires, uninhibited by the caution attached to producing huge batches.
He says: ‘Because most gin distillers work in a very similar way, the spirit had become very predictable and very repeatable, with all the same ingredients. Our system helps us, frankly, to produce better gins. We’re also able to use ingredients that were previously out of bounds. Because of the strict temperature limitations, distillers had to resort to synthetic flavourings. We, however, can make a blend with ingredients people would never have thought of before. And that’s one reason why, on three consecutive occasions, we’ve won the title of world’s most innovative spirits company.
‘My rule of thumb is if it’s not poisonous or illegal then it’s worthy of experimentation.’
‘My rule of thumb is if it’s not poisonous or illegal then it’s worthy of experimentation; hence the ants...’
Whatever else goes into the mix, however, there is one constant: juniper, because without this botanical a spirit does not qualify as ‘gin’.
‘Historically, alcohol was a medicinal way of storing juniper so that it was available all year round,’ Lowe explains.
‘The first written record of juniper being used as a medicine was in Greece in the second century AD. On that occasion a physician wrote its oils “would thin the thick and viscous juices”; meaning it was a diuretic.’
This brings Lowe onto the topic of flavouring, one about which he has understandably strong opinions.
‘If you go to a supermarket today you’ll probably find plenty of flavoured gins. Except gin is already flavoured and the flavour is juniper. So “flavoured gin” is either a tautology or, if the flavour isn’t juniper, then it isn’t gin.
‘At the last count there are something like 3,000 gins in the UK and a lot of them,’ he emphasises this phrase… ‘A lot of them… are not gin. At all. If they’d been released in the 1990s and not the 2010s they would be called flavoured vodkas.
Cambridge Distillery prefers to innovate in different ways, he adds. ‘We have a level of versatility where we can make special gins for people a bottle at a time. That’s why we say we are the world’s first gin tailor. For example, we can make gins specifically from plants in people’s own gardens. I have a client who has a big property in Surrey and a yacht in Monaco. He drinks the gin from his garden while he’s on his yacht.’
‘We have the ability to make gins specifically from plants in people’s own gardens.’
This ability to use fresh, seasonal botanicals has been an eye-opening experience.
‘We live in a world that is so provenance obsessed, but most distilleries are making almost exactly the same stuff. They’re not local spirits, they’re locally assembled spirits.’
That’s not the case here, where a batch of spirit can be made based on what’s available in the local fields. Obviously, that can be a lot easier in summer than winter, but it doesn’t mean that a month like November is given up as a bad job.
Far from it.
‘We’ll keep foraging and wait for something to stand out,’ says Lowe. ‘Last year, for example, we discovered something called anise hyssop, whose flower, stem and leaf all had a really different flavour profile. That was the ingredient we then built our gin around.’
It is this type of approach that has helped this small distillery in Cambridgeshire secure the title of world’s most innovative distiller. It has also meant it has grown at a rate of almost three times every year since 2012, this year producing more than 60,000 bottles.
Next year, if all goes to plan, Lowe will boost the brand’s profile by adding a Master of Wine qualification to his existing Master Distiller label.
‘We exert an influence that extends vastly beyond our postcode,’ he says. ‘We have become a global brand.’ I’ll raise a glass of something anty to that.
cambridgedistillery.co.ukWords: DH
