The gin still at The Surrey Copper Distillery is very special. She is a 300 litre Mini Carterhead designed specifically for us by one of the world’s leading craft distillery manufacturers, Green Engineering of Italy. Green Engineering not only bring a tremendous amount of technical expertise to still design but as craftsmen with typical Italian flair also produce beautiful stills. And we really wanted her to be beautiful.
Our distillery
Our gin still has been designed specifically for The Surrey Copper Distillery. She is beautiful!
The first chapter of the creation of the distillery was to design the layout of the distillery. The gin still would need to be supported by a spirit lab. The spirit lab would be the birth place of each new spirit produced at the distillery. Katherine sketched out the concept and basic plans and together with our friends at Hoare Laboratory Engineering a unique spirit lab was designed, built and commissioned.
Two 2 litre (The Twins) and one 20 litre (our heroine) copper pot stills with hotplates were acquired. The twin stills were unpacked and named themselves, as they look exactly like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Their taller and more elegant companion was obviously Alice. All three characters appear in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through The Looking Glass, which he wrote in Guildford. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are the perfect size for developing new gins and Alice is the still we use for Small Batch and Limited Edition gin making.
Creating fine spirits requires a special type of still. We could have bought one ready made but we decided to take a different path. We shared our inspirations and aspirations for our distilling process and the flavour and aroma attributes with Green Engineering and they designed a 300 litre carterhead solid copper still with infuser basket. The still was handmade in Italy and she is perfect. In fact, we think she is beautiful. She had to be properly sited and we needed help to understand how best to do that so we are very grateful to Briggs of Burton for all their help.