Viva Brighton Issue #65 July 2018

LOWDOWN ON...
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Photos by Adam Bronkhorst
Making Brighton Gin
With master distiller Ian Burgess
We make pot-stilled gin, which means that
all of the ingredients go into the copper still
with the gin. We use approximately 2kg of raw
botanicals – lime zest, orange peel, coriander,
juniper berries and a couple of other ingredients
(which I will not name!) – to make a 250l batch.
Everything is very precisely measured; literally
every berry counts. People have a very strong
memory for flavour, especially for things which
have a higher aromatic content, like beers and
gins. If you were to try a bottle of Brighton Gin
that was produced five years ago and a bottle that
was produced today, they would taste identical.
The first step is known as maceration. The
dry ingredients go into the still with a mixture of
alcohol and water. We don’t want to put berries
and seeds in with pure alcohol, because what will
happen is it will try to draw everything out, but
some of the flavours in there, you don’t want. All
of this is macerated, first cold, then warm, then
hot. We are trying to get the flavours out into the
alcohol, so that we can then take that flavour and
carry it over with the vapour to produce what we
call the ‘essence’.
We are now going to put the head of the
still on and start distilling. Different oils
and different flavours come out at different
temperatures, so we extract the essence at
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