As part of our SFH on Tour series, some of the team headed over to Suffolk Distillery in Stoke-by-Nayland.

The custom-built barn is actually rented off Peake Fruit, who grow some of their products in the fields next to the distillery.

They moved out of a double garage into the newly converted building and it’s a really nice set-up, a visitor area meets guests, with a reception desk, shop and area for making your own gin. Behind the reception area, a door holds the production room, a large room with all the equipment.

We were met by Gary, joint owner of Suffolk Distillery who led the team on a small tour, beginning with the labelling process. Did you know that the indent on the bottles indicates the back of the bottle, this is also hugely important in the labelling process (they use a machine to label their bottles), they used to do it all by hand but this has speeded this up completely.

We then went through the bottle cleaning (also a machine press) this cleans the inside of the bottle completely, I might need one for my washing up! The bottle topping, was also machine processed, rightfully so, imagine pressing bottle tops thousands of times, high risk for injury, which Gary said he had actually had off the back of pressing bottle tops in the past.

The gin-making process was interesting, essentially defined as this:

Gin is made by first preparing a grain, such as wheat malt and combining it with water and yeast to create a well-combined mixture called “gin mash.”

The mixture is then fermented for about one to two weeks until it deconstructs and forms ethanol.

After fermentation, the ethanol is strained and goes through a distillation process, usually in a copper distiller, where it is heated, vaporized, and then recondensed to purify the liquid and concentrate the alcohol.

Distillers can opt to distil the product once or multiple times for a more pure product. Different botanicals can also be incorporated during the process to create unique flavours.

Finally, the gin is diluted with water to reach the desired alcohol percentage, and any other sugars or flavourings are added.

Gin can be distilled using different techniques, but steeping is the most common method, which involves heating the ethanol in a pot still and infusing it with botanicals for one to two days.

They can also distil whisky in the same copper distiller, they have been working on a special whisky, but I can’t say much more than that!

What shocked me was the vast capital investment they had made for all of the equipment, you realise how much they have put into the business and the distillation process.