Building The Distillery
Back To The Beginning
Casting back to 2013, our distillery looked nothing like a distillery, but an old and neglected animal hospital of The Royal Dick Vet School. First things first, 24 dog and cat kennels had to be removed. Matt & Marcus decided to keep eight of the original kennels, which are found hidden in the still room under our containers.
Time To Roll Our Sleeves Up!
Matt pictured standing above where Summerhall Distillery offices are now! Walls, floors and roofs were torn down and built back up again to contstruct Summerhall Distillery HQ. From an idea to real life, Matt & Marcus rolled their sleeves up to build our distillery in just 6 months!
We Did Everything Ourselves
Our team became plumbers, plasterers and tilers overnight - we really did everything ourselves! Once the structural work was complete, it was time to bring in the distilling equipment. Our copper stills imported from Portugal and our first label machine handmade from various materials including MDF, a phone charger & plumbing pipes!
Our Distillery Today
Our small but perfectly formed distillery is now home to Pickering's Gin and The Broody Hen Scotch Whisky. From a pipe dream around the kitchen table to a distillery producing 2,500 litres of spirit a week we have evolved our business and team massively in the past 8 years.
Hand-crafted Spirits
Distilling
Taking an idea and making it real starts in our botanical room. The research and development stage begins where our distillers test and perfect the key notes and flavours of the spirit. Botanicals are weighed precisely by hand and the liquid is distilled in a small pot still. We use copper pot stills to ensure the flavour and purity of our liquid is the best, as well as using triple filtered Scottish fallen water to dilute our spirits after distillation.
Bottling
Our unique bottling station is a very technical process and a labour of love! Our equipment was meticulously engineered by Matt, so that we can bottle almost anything. With Matt manually making bar optics to fill our 5cl mini bottles. Keeping it local to Summerhall we worked with our fellow neighbours to construct various parts of our bottling process, including our trusty manual bottle capper borrowed from Barney’s Beer.
Labelling
When you ask our distilling team about our label machine, they will say when it works, it works perfectly! However, quite like our bottling process this is another labour of love – see a theme here?
Gin On Tap At The Royal Dick
As luck would have it, our next door neighbour is the brilliantly bonkers Royal Dick pub, which serves top-notch food and drinks from noon till night.
