The City of London Distillery open in 2012 and was the first gin distillery in the English capital in over 200 years. Through their gins they have not only explored a variety of gin styles but also the history of gin-making in the city itself.
Starting with a pair of 200L copper stills named Clarissa and Jennifer (after ‘The Two Fat Ladies’ of the BBC food show), the distillery has gone on to win awards and show the variety of expressions that micro-distilling can produce.
We talk to Joe Brayford the brand ambassador for City of London about the distillery itself, their range and in particular their Six Bells expression and of course what cocktails you can make with it.

Joe, there hadn’t been a distillery in London for nearly two centuries, what made you think to open one?

For us, it was the first distillery for 187 years. Our founder, Jonathan Clark, had worked in the building since 1976 so he went on to manage the bar that was here before and eventually owned the building itself. But it was 2009 the law that was overturned that regulated the minimum size of still for gin production in London. The really big moment that opened the floodgates for small craft distilleries like us to start opening up. But before that they opened around the outskirts of London. It's very expensive. It's quite difficult. Land isn't easy to come by in the center of London, the city. But Jonathan having this space, he looked at it and what he decided was actually he could bring gin distillation, particularly more traditional styles of gin distillation back to where they were born. So back to where this first gin craze happened, and back to where early gins were developed and created and had not existed for nearly 200 years. So for him it was really about reviving something that had disappeared from its home.

And from what I understand there were a lot of gin distilleries around this area?

Yeah. It's a huge amount. There's a lot of numbers and figures thrown around, but there's one that always sticks with me that they estimate one in every four buildings in the city of London was either producing or selling or distilling or compounding gin.
Wow. And this would have been what, in the 1700s? When it was at its peak.
This was the 1700s in the midst of the gin craze. So it's really an enormous place for gin and it's where the history was born. And now we're still the only distillery existing today so it's pretty exciting for us.
Oh, okay. Within the one mile?
So the only one in the square mile still.

Now why did he choose to call it City of London?

I think there's a big thing with gin in this whole modern gin revival we're going through. I think the idea of location, a lot of towns, a lot of cities will have a gin named after them that's key to that area. So for us being the only distillery in the city of London itself and where it was born, it was great for us to be able to put that on the bottle. You can see on our bottles where we use the official city of London crest. That is the actual same crest used by the corporation in the city of London. And in turn, we work with them whenever we can.
So it was right time, right place, so to speak with ...
Yeah, I think so. I think it was good timing. It was the right place. It was also, I think a very good idea. I think that was a big thing for us is we came around towards the beginning of this big gin revival, we got in quite early and really did put out a very good product. And it was reviving that kind of traditional style. But also a big thing for us in the beginning was looking forward and looking how we can modernize these classic styles. So falling into that, it was very good timing. I think we caught onto it.

And logistically, I mean how difficult is it to ... I mean being where you are in terms of things like storage and stills and ...

It's not easy at all. I mean people come down here, they're always very shocked at how small the actual distillery is, the room that houses the stills is tiny. And people, their assumption's that we have this huge space in the back and we have a massive warehouse where we store everything, and there's a space where lorries can get in and deliver everything. It's really not the case. When we opened up, we had to get two 200 liter stills down into a basement. We now have a 500 liter still, we have weekly deliveries of 1,000 liter containers of alcohol. But the door that you come into the still in is a normal size and maybe even slightly small double door that goes down a narrow staircase. So the only way for us to get anything in is we have a trapped door that's about a 12 foot high drop and a forklift that lowers things.
So we've worked around it. It's always a little bit exciting, a little bit terrifying to see 1,000 liters of gin being raised up by a forklift onto a back alley off Fleet Street. But it's another thing that I think really adds to the charm of the place. It's the way things were when people were first producing gin and it was in basements, it was in bars, it was in people's homes. So for us it raises a lot of troubles. We don't have a lot of storage space. We have to be very careful with how we work everything. But also it's part of the charm and it's part of the character of the distillery.

Do you bottle here as well?

We don't, no. We did when we first started, we then moved to a slightly larger site in Wessex just for the bottling and storage. Now being part of Halewood has given us the scope for them to bottle up in Liverpool in their plant, and it means that we can really focus on distillation and production here, and then they can deal with the bottling, the labelling.
We bring it in large containers, we distill it, we produce the gin. And then it gets sent to them for the bottling.

Talking about the fact that you're a small batch distiller, do you think that the small batch distillers have really changed the nature of what gin is today over the last five to eight years?

I think absolutely. I mean going back before this happened, your options for gin were very limited to the very big producer, very few. I think just having so many small distilleries and craft distilleries open up, it's one, given people so many more options. It's really opened up the kind of scope of what gins you can get. And secondly, I think it's really driven innovation. People are trying new things and really people are experimenting with botanicals. They're experimenting with methods of distillation. They're experimenting with how they can use botanicals, and it's also driven the bigger distilleries to do the same. I think it's great to see tiny, very small craft distilleries alongside huge distilleries equally experimenting with where the category can go.

What have you guys done particularly in terms of experimentation since you opened?

From the beginning, from day one, the concept was that we wanted to take traditional and historic styles and modernize them a little bit.
We were never wanting to straight up just recreate. So things like our Old Tom and our Square Mile are perfect examples because it's taking these old styles and these traditional practices, but adding something new. To Square Mile, the addition of fresh citrus and making it a little bit more uplifting. It's quite bright, it's catered to modern pallets. As the taste for gin has changed these ideas, flavoured gins are coming in more and more. We've not changed how we do things, but we've adapted to how we produce. We've adapted to what people want, to look at producing these kind of flavoured gin styles, but in our more traditional, more classic style of production.

Now you mentioned the Square Mile. Can you quickly run through the range of gins that you do make?

Yeah, of course. We have eight minutes in our portfolio now. We started off in 2012 with what we call our authentic dry. It's seven botanicals and it really encapsulates the idea of tradition with a little update from modern pallets. So the base five botanicals are very classic. It's got juniper, it's got coriander seed, it's got licorice root, Angelica root, and then dried orange peel. That gives it this really nice, very traditional base. And then the use of fresh citrus in that is where we bring it a little bit forward and make it a bit more modern. So we have fresh peeled lemon and fresh peeled grapefruit. So rather than using dried, fresh peel gives this much more oily, much brighter, much fresher flavour. The grapefruit brings a little bit of sweetness. The lemon brings a bit of brightness and it's very well balanced. It's a very refreshing, very good classic gin.
One of the late ones we launched was the Christopher Wren, and it removes the fresh citrus. It's just those base five botanicals. So it's something we worked on with Tom Nichol from Tanqueray, who's the master distiller of Tanqueray. And the idea was to produce something very traditional. So it's five botanicals, it's very bold, it's a little bit more woody and earthy than the authentic dry. It's got this nice kind of marmaladey, orange note from the dried orange, but it's also a great example of how five botanicals and a very simple botanical make-up can actually be very complex. It can be very layered and it can have a lot of depth to it.
The Square Mile is our top end. It's higher ABB, it's 47.3%. Has the same botanicals as the authentic dry, so it has those same base five, it has the fresh citrus. But the difference is we changed the ratios around, so the citrus has a bit more emphasis from the coriander seed, and from the dried orange it has little bit more richness and a little bit more of a classic citrus profile, and a little bit less of that bright, fresh citrus.
We also have an Old Tom, the Old Tom's super exciting. It's a bit of an older style. It's got a little bit more of a spice led profile. There's some cassia bark in there and it has a real small touch of sugar. So it's really rounded, it's quite soft, it's very sip-able. It makes great classic cocktails, very warming, quite wintery.
We also have a aloe gin. Our sloe gin is as traditional as sloe gin can be made. It's macerated for about six to nine months. There's no recipe written down for it. It's very much we take our authentic dry, we take it at still strength, so 84.5% ABB. We fill it with sloe barriers. And from there it is taste and it's smell and it's stirring it by hand. And then when we think it's ready, it's taken out and it's sweetening it to taste. We don't have a recipe. It depends what slow berries we get that year. They might be a bit more tar, they might be have been on a sweet. It's very much a handmade labor of love. But the end product is a really classic, very traditional, slightly drier sloe gin.
Then we have our three most recent releases, which is where we move into this more idea of a contemporary style of gin, but with a more traditional practice for making it. So we have our Six Bells, which is a kind of lemon forward gin. It's still traditional, it's still juniper forward, it's still a dry gin. We don't add sugar, we don't add flavourings, but we use distillation ... for the Six Bells we use vacuum distillation alongside traditional pot distillation to really emphasise that lemon flavour.
We also have our Murcian Orange Gin, which works a bit of an opposite to the Six Bells. The Six Bells is very fresh, it's very bright. There's lots of oily, sherbety lemon. The orange, again, it's a London dry, it's a classic style gin, but it has this really big caramelized, marmaladey, very rounded orange. There's a little bit of spice in there. There's some cardamom and cassia, so you end up with this very warming, quite wintery style gin.
And then last we have our Rhubarb & Rose. It's our most recent release, and again it's a London dry. So we wanted to explore this category of rhubarb gins. They're becoming hugely popular. Very much do it in our own way. We use fresh, raw rhubarb and we distill it in the pot along with our other botanicals. We also have some in our basket for vapour infusion for some these softer notes along with some rose. And what you end up with is very delicate. It's not as forwardly rhubarb flavour as a lot on the market. It's a bit softer, it's a bit more balanced against the juniper. But particularly when you add some tonic, it really opens up and you get a lot more of that cooked, stewed, nicely fruity rhubarb. And then you got lovely top note from the rose. This floral kind of finish to it. For us it's really exciting because it's very balanced, it's very interesting, but it also appeals to these kind of modern more flavoured styles of gins.

Now with the Five Bells, you were talking about the distillation. Do you want to go into a little bit more detail about that?

Yeah, of course. We use two different types of distillation for it. The first one is our traditional pot distillation. The second one that we use, which is called vacuum distillation. The reason we use it is because we get flavours from it that you can't get through traditional pot distillation.

How does vacuum distillation work?

Vacuum distillation, rather than traditional pot distillation, we use a lot of heat. So you'll heat the botanicals, you'll heat the alcohol to 80 degrees plus, because what you want to do is evaporate the alcohol, but not the water. Vacuum distillation uses pressure rather than heat. So by putting the environment into a vacuum, by lowering the pressure, what you do is lower the boiling point. So instead of distilling at 80, 90 degrees, we're able to distill at 20 degrees.
For something like fresh lemon peel, it makes a huge difference because you're not cooking it, you're not changing the flavour, you're not altering it. It really is a pure representation of fresh lemon peel. The smell on it is exactly the smell that you get from cutting a lemon peel or squeezing the zest of a lemon peel over the top of your drink. It gives you all of this oil, all of this flavour, all of this brightness and nothing is cooked in the process.

Is it a common distillation?

It's starting to be used a little bit more. It's a very modern distillation process. It's not anywhere near as popular as traditional pot distillation. But particularly in this big gin revival we're going through, people are experimenting with it more and more.
And experimenting with what different flavours they can get through it. Some people will use it for their entire product, some people will use it like us and use it alongside other distillation methods.

When you talk about lowering the pressure, do you mean the pressure within the still itself or ...?

Yeah, within the still. It's a piece of equipment called a rotary evaporator. It's lots of things that sound quite fancy, but it's essentially a different type of still. They tend to be a lot smaller and it's attached to a vacuum pump. Everything in it is sealed, so you're able to suck the air out and lower the pressure within the still itself.

Now you mentioned Six Bells. Where does the name come from?

The Six Bells comes from a very classic British nursery rhyme called, The Oranges and Lemons Say The Bells of St. Clements. St. Clements is a church not too far from our distillery, and it was said that you weren't a true Cockney unless you could hear the bells of St. Clements from your house. It's this famous nursery rhyme that I think really resonates anyone who's grown up in Britain and particularly grown up in London. If you mention it to them, the minute you say this first line of the nursery rhyme, they click and remember it. And equally with a lot of our gins, we take inspiration for our names from our local area and from the city of London. Being the only distillery here, it means that we can really celebrate that fact. So it's another little bit of culture. It's another part of London's history that we can integrate into our gins.
The first one is the oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clements. So Six Bells has orange and lemon in it, and that church is a key part in the nursery rhyme.

You talked about lemon being quite predominant with the Six Bells. What other botanicals do you highlight?

The juniper is really key across all of our range. Juniper is a very core thing. We like to celebrate that that is what makes gin gin and we really do bring it forward in everything. Equally, we use fresh grapefruit in it. We use some dried orange, the same as our authentic, and we use coriander seed. So what all of these are doing are bringing different levels of citrus.
The coriander seed will bring more of a peppery, slightly aromatic citrus. The dried orange will bring a marmaladey, rich, caramelized citrus. Then the grapefruit brings a little bit of very sweet, quite bright, quite rounded citrus. So as much as we're highlighting the lemon, we're using all these other botanicals to add depth and add layers and add complexity on top of that.
The Six Bells was actually originally for the Craft Gin Club. So Craft Gin Club are a subscription service here in the UK. You sign up and every month you get sent a bottle of gin. The idea is people can explore new gins. So they actually approach us to produce a very summery, very bright, very fresh citrus lead gin. And it was in looking at how we can really emphasise this freshness and really emphasise this bright, classic citrus that we started to look into vacuum distillation.
Pot distillation is always going to use a lot of heat. It's always going to alter those flavours as much as you can get freshness. Vacuum distillation was really a way of stepping up for us.

Now if someone were to buy a bottle of the Six Bells, what would you suggest they do with it? How should they first use it?

I think it's very versatile. I think one of the best first things you can do with the gin is poor little bit and have a taste, and have a little think about it. From there it's very much how you like to drink it. I think it makes an amazing gin and tonic. It's really bright, it's really fresh. Martinis, I think it works particularly well in as well.
It's got so much lemon, it's got so much of a bright, fresh oil content to it that stirred down a martini, it's very crisp. It's very dry. It's very clean. There's really no need for a garnish in it. I think it drinks almost as if it has a lemon twist on top. It's that forward with that lemon. From there I think start to experiment. Things like Negroni’s, we didn't expect it to be the best fit for it actually.
We gave it a go alongside the Murcian Orange that we really expected to fit it, and actually they're both very different, but they're both fantastic. The Six Bells gives this layer of brightness and this layer of acidity underneath it that you don't normally associate with a Negroni.
It really uplifts it and brings this new dimension to the drink. So I think start with something classic, start with something that you know, and then start to integrate into drinks that you wouldn't expect. I think we've been really surprised with it, how well it actually mixes and how versatile it is.

So it's quite an adaptable gin.

Yeah, I think it's always going to shine through. You're always going to get a lot of that lemon, it's always going to bring a lot of brightness. But it really compliments a lot of things, it really brings a new dimension to a lot of drinks that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to.

Now you talked about experimenting with it, with a variety of classic cocktails. Did you guys actually invent any specific cocktails for that gin?

We've worked with a lot of different things. We have worked on twists, on classics a lot with these gins to give people something recognisable, but also something new. One place we found that the Six Bells really worked was in an Aviation. Alongside that big floral note and the nuttiness from the maraschino. It really brought this brightness. It really uplifted the drink. So we experimented with that a little bit and we found that switching out the maraschino for something like Cointreau or a Dry Curacao or more rich dry, orange liqueur, bringing that into it brought, again, like the way we produce the gin, it brought another level and another depth of citrus to it. And it becomes a really complex, really interesting, but also super refreshing drink.
So you still get that beautiful color, you still get that nice floral note, but it just brings a lot of citrus and a lot of layers of flavour.

Okay. Now what has the reaction of bartenders been to that particular gin?

It's been really good. I think at the minute bartenders with gin, they've got so many kind of options. You've got to be offering them something exciting, you've got to be offering them something that immediately after tasting it gets them keen to be making something with it. I think the Six Bells was great because it really straddles that gap between traditional classic styles of gin and this very modern category of flavoured gins.
It has a real emphasis on the lemon, it has a real bold forward profile. But equally it has a lot of juniper, it has a lot of classic flavours in there and it's a very dry gin. So you see a lot of bartenders when I've talked to them, and having bartended before this myself, it's a really exciting one to look at firstly, how it works how you’d expect it to in citrus like drinks and drinks where you want to break the lemon note. And like I said, with the Negroni and with drinks where you wouldn't expect it working, I think it's been really exciting to see bartenders putting it in slightly less expected drinks and finding that it works. The response has been really good. I think it's exciting to see people being very creative with it.
I mean the obvious thing, and what we did a lot when we first got our hands on it, was spritzes and long drinks and Tom Collins. But then actually we started to realise that in stirred down boozy drinks that you would normally associate with a more woody or more richly flavoured gin, actually it brought this new level to it. Things like vegetal notes work fantastically with it. We found it really marries very well with sherries. From Fino sherries where that brightness and that freshness goes great with a little bit of savoury note, through to things like all oloroso where you get really nice nuttiness. Really gets uplifted and gets a brightness from the gin. That's very interesting.

Okay. Now have you experimented at all with food pairings for this gin?

We found the Six Bells goes nicely with lighter dishes, so we looked at where it can slot in. And one place we found it really worked was with Mexican food. One of the first things we tried it with was with some roasted pepper tacos. They were really simple. We made an orange salsa, again, to bring a little bit of that zesty, a little bit of that citrus into the food, and it was really nice. It was a light style, snack type dish brought with the gin, particularly in cocktails. If you put it in a sour or in a Collins, something nice and separable and bright and refreshing. It really paired fantastically together.

The brand and the distillery have been going for nearly seven years. What do you think are the biggest hurdles for the brand at the moment? I mean, especially being a small craft.

I think being particularly the style that we are, really focusing on this tradition and the history and the more classic styles, I think there's always people who are going to want something very modern and they're going to want these much more contemporary styles, which are not necessarily what we fit in. But what we always try and do is, like with these newer ones, is offer something that bridges that gap.
Offer something that actually can maybe give people something new to try. The amazing thing about these flavoured gins that we have at the moment and the fantastic thing about them for the category is it's introduced an entirely new demographic of people to drinking gin, to being excited about gin. So we really wanted to offer something in the middle, something that bridged that gap. And from there we run a lot of sessions. I've done master classes on gin history. We offer sessions where you can come and make your own gin at the distillery on our small stills. So we try and use that fact to overcome it and actually give people a bit of history, and give people a little bit of context to what it is that we're doing.
But I mean we've been going seven years. The obvious hurdles of where we're located and being a small distillery, we've found our ways to get around them and we've got our unique method of working now.

You talk about things like the Six Bells being straddling both traditional and what some would call gateway gins. Do you think that that's the way forward? Do you think that that is how gin is going to move?

I think it's another part of it really. I think those flavour gins really bringing people into the category has been fantastic, and you'll always have that style of gin. I think that's a real core part of the category now. I think you'll also always have the classic London dries, the Old Toms that people like us who are producing very traditional styles. But for us it was that missing link in between that we really wanted to start to fill and we wanted to offer a next stepping stone for people who were starting to learn a bit more about where gin came from, starting to learn a bit more about the traditional styles, and they maybe wanted to move onto them. And it gives you that little stone in the middle. It gives you that little step for something else to try. I think we're going to see a lot more from gin. I think there's a lot more innovation and exploration to be done with it. And I think we'll probably see more styles like that.

So you think the renaissance hasn't been coming to an end yet?

Definitely not. I think people will say it, but I think gin has so much more to offer. I think people are still very excited about the category. People are still learning so much more and finding out new styles, and they're finding new ways to work with botanicals, new ways to distill. I think there's a hell of a lot of life left in it.

Now what are the future plans for City of London Distillery?

We're constantly experimenting. We have small stills in the back where we can try new flavours, we can try new botanicals.
We have a few things coming. We've been playing around with a navy strength. That's something we've been experimenting with and hopefully will be coming soon. We experiment a little bit with distilling strawberries for a while, that didn't come to anything in the end. But actually, we're constantly seeing what we can do next. Nothing is announced yet, but hopefully soon.

What about your distribution? I mean obviously you're available in the UK. Are you UK wide?

Yeah, we're UK wide. We're in quite a lot of supermarkets. Our Rhubarb & Rose is in Sainsbury's. We're available on Amazon. We're available from our online store that will ship UK wide. We also have our physical store in the distillery open every day except Sunday.
From there we're in 23 other countries so-
I was about to ask what's your international ...
We're spreading more and more. Being a part of Halewood now has really given us a scope to expand and get the gin out to more places, and get it to new people.
We are in Canada. We were in Denmark recently for a gin festival. That was really exciting to see how huge the gin industry is over there and how popular it is. And actually City of London, how popular it was. We were in Denmark for a few days. We went to a few supermarkets and saw our bottles on the shelves. We went and spoke to people about it, which was really great for us to see that actually in other countries it is becoming very popular.

Well, look, thanks for joining us.

Thanks very much for coming down.

Now if people want more information, of course they can go to your website, which is cityoflondondistillery.com.

That's right.

Or alternatively find you on social under City of London Distillery.

Absolutely. Instagram is the best place to keep up to date with what we've got coming. If we've got events, if we've got new products. And then for any kind of bookings and see what it is we do and what we're about, the website's a great place to look.

Cool. All right. Thanks very much then.

Thank you very much.

Cheers.