Equipment:

We would recommend the Turbo500 as a great starting point. This machine will produce the best quality of Alcohol and is also very flexible. Meaning, you can approach the production of your gin in different ways. Alternatively, you could also take a look at using the Spiritworks Boiler. This is, in our opinion, when paired with the Turbo500 Condenser is the finest piece of equipment we have seen for the small producer.

We can produce top quality Vodka and then add any of the Classic or Top Shelf Gin flavourings. Although we think this is in a way cheating most of the distilleries around the world do it this way. They make Vodka and then buy in flavouring mainly because it’s cheaper to do it this way.

The other way is using Botanicals.  We can make the alcohol (I am not going to go into this as it’s covered in many other places on the web site) and then decide how to implant the Gin Flavour. We have several options

  1. We can do a wash and add some Botanicals to the fermentation at the start. When the fermentation has been completed we can then run this through the T500 and some of these flavours will remain in the alcohol when we are collecting it. We can then dilute this down to 40%ABV and drink it.
  2. We can make a wash using sugar and water. When this is finished fermenting and we have cleared the wash we can add this to the T500 and distil it. We will extract 92 to 94% ABV and we can then dilute this down to 40%. You can now bottle it. Alternatively the alcohol soaked with the Botanicals can now be run through the T500 to clean it and after collection be diluted to 40% and bottled. I have to say that some of the best producers in the UK of specialist Gin adopt this method.
  3. Again we can prepare a wash do the fermentation clearing etc. and add the alcohol to our T500 still. We can then create a basket which we can place the Botanicals into and suspend this above the liquid (our wash). We have done this by using something like a mesh and then tying this with pieces of cotton. The cotton is then trapped between the lid and the boiler base. Obviously the best way moving forward is to build a stainless tray with holes in and legs that will allow it to be suspended above the liquid in the still but for now the rather primitive basket will suffice. We are looking for the Alcohol vapours to come off the liquid and go through the Botanicals picking up the flavours. It will then go into the column and turn back into Alcoholic liquid.
  4. You can also look at using the Copper Alembic Dome and Copper Condenser. Again you have options of when to add the Botanicals but remember using this the alcohol that comes through will be of a much lower strength but will hold the flavours much more so and will lose less of these flavours when you are running through the Alembic Column.

As you can see from the suggestions above there really is no right or wrong way to do this. There are no fixed recipes or amounts of Botanicals or length of time this should be left in the Alcohol. We would strongly recommend that you come up with a recipe first especially if you are wanting to then sell this commercially in the future.

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