Author Archives: John

Sorry to repeat ourselves, but we were very pleased to receive our certificates and a real gold medal from the IWSC this morning for our Gold Outstanding award for Linden Leaf “8” gin, as well as certificates the silver awards for Linden Leaf “8” and “88” gin. These will be going in the display case: […]

This year’s IWSC is the first competition we entered, with gins that came off the first production batch only the day before the competition closed for entries. We are very proud that they liked our gins! Both the gins we entered, Gin “8” and Gin “88”, won Silver awards in the main gin competition. In […]

Yuzu is a citrus fruit, well-known in Japan and other parts of east Asia. In our opinion, it’s the best citrus fruit! The zest is wonderfully aromatic, and even better, the oils and aromatic components are retained and enhanced when extracted into alcohol. We get our supplies of Yuzu from Japan (the photo is of […]

Juniper is the backbone flavour for our gins. And we are serious about the quality of our juniper! We’re constantly trying every variety and producer we can find. Some juniper berries smell wonderful, but result in lacklustre results when we try and extract the flavours into alcohol. Others seem a little disappointing as berries, but […]

We’ve decided to go for a simple label for our first batches of gin. We never realised how many choices we would have to make for even such a simple label: the type and weight of paper, the exact shade of white we should use, the type of ink (a slight debossed, 3D effect, or […]

Well, for the first few batches at least we think we like these bottles. Custom bottles are beautiful but until we’ve got up and running we can’t commit to the huge number that we’d need to order. We ordered a few coloured bottles and they arrived this morning. We’re still in two minds about coloured […]

We had great fun taking photos of botanicals today at the Shed. Before extracting the flavours from some of our favourite botanicals, we made them look as beautiful as possible, and photographed them—from fresh fruits like melons and kiwi fruits, to bowls of star anise and, of course, the star of the show, juniper. We […]

Thanks to Steven Noble for his fantastic illustrations of linden leaves – the symbol we’ll be adopting for our company. Steven Noble is a talented US-based artist, and we are fortunate that he has the time to work with us to develop some beautiful artwork in this clear and crisp woodcut style. Check out his […]

What’s the right sort of bottle for our gin? There are so many bottles out there, off the shelf. And there are so many options for customised bottles. We started by ordering a whole load of bottles from a whole load of bottle companies. Being the organised bunch of people we are, we meticulously labelled […]

With a little brainstorming to work out how we can explain flavours in a way we can all understand, we developed a tasting sheet for our gins. We’ve been carrying out huge numbers of tastings, relying on friends, friends of friends, and any other contacts who wanted to try our novel gins and give their […]