Espresso: How Tarquin’s Gin Turned £50k into a Dream Distillery

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0:27and what they did i just thought it was the coolest thing i'd ever heard it's like you could make small batch spirits um it sounded absolutely incredible you know you can do it in your house you know the guys Ian at heart at sacred was making gin at his house I was like wow you know how incredible and he had a commercially viable product that he was selling in some of the best bars and hotels in the world he was exporting you know he was in Fortnum and Masons and I was like oh my god you know I would I had a dream of you know making my own product um I thought this is it you know this is what I would love to spend the next five ten twenty years doing and that's literally what I did you know I love researching so I didn't have big budget effectively I had some inheritance which I ring fence I had fifty thousand pounds to set up my business it was very clear that fifty thousand pounds doesn't set you up a quick service Thai restaurant chain in London but it could if I you know played my cards right and was quite frugal with how I set up this distillery i could bring a brand to market to make gin and that's and that's pretty much what i spent how did you spend the 50k because a lot of people want to set up i mean i mean there's a gazillion different paths here right but like you can either go and set up your own factory distillery which is one path where you can kind of just use a third party but yeah people who may want to be setting it up may think they need a gazillion k how did how did you spend the 50k yeah that's a good question so my motivation for setting up the the the are the gin so i i love the idea of creating something unique um was obsessed with you know be yeah i don't know how much everyone knows about gin but as long as you add juniper you can add anything you want to make your own completely unique recipe why juniper juniper um is uh it's this technically a pine cone but it's that it's the it is the flavor of gin um and uh it's it's piney it's resinous it's really oily it's got that fantastic scent on you know both on the nose and on the palate and it it's bitter and it you know blends beautifully well with tonic as we know but as long as you've got that ingredient You can add absolutely anything you want in to make your own recipe.

2:43So that's what appealed to me about it. And so I set up on the journey to make the gin. And so I basically, I didn't have the budget for a consultant. So that would probably be the first thing you do. You get a consultant to learn how to make it. But equally, I didn't go down the third party route to contract it out. What appealed to me to make gin was to actually dive into the product to make it myself. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to make this flavor myself I wanted to make it unique I wanted to get that perfect balance between those junipery notes the florals the spice the earthiness the herbaceousness and create my own unique recipe that I would feel very proud to sell um and um you know it wasn't I didn't really know much about marketing or brand as such back then maybe it was a little bit naive I don't know if that worked in my you know as a strength from or as a weakness but for me I dove into the product and the process itself so I knew I wanted to make this gin I knew I wanted to make it myself so I needed to learn how to do it and so I was always going to do from start to finish production and bottling myself there wasn't really any other way that I knew or I didn't even you know I didn't explore for someone else to make it because that wasn't what got me excited I wasn't professional marketer i didn't you know i couldn't tell you you did i didn't know the best practice of making or launching a brand that wasn't my expertise but i knew i had the passion to make something which i hoped could be a little bit better i wasn't shooting for the moon but if i knew if i gave it the right care and attention to detail that lots of these real ale brewers and cider makers had done um provincially or regionally in in cornwall and in devon and somerset in the west country if i could do the same with gin make it taste better than the household name or in the green bottle that everyone else has i might be onto something you know and i could convert people maybe one at a time that they should you know give my gin a try um and hopefully convert them for a bit of an upsell so that was very much my premise at the beginning so just going back to the 50k how did you how did it break down yeah so i found um so i left London and moved back to the West Country and the idea for me was to live by the sea and I think on paper was to go surfing in the morning and make a few bottles of gin in the afternoon but the fantastic things about living in Cornwall is we've got Falmouth University so first off that was one of the best graphic design and art degree universities in the country so it's a hotbed of creative agencies so I found some guys who were similar age to me about 25 24 25 when i was starting up and they were happy to do my whole branding website design bottle packaging the whole works like a hundred grand package for a couple for a few grand is that still the branding today uh we have refreshed our branding since um the agency is still going and they're going from strength to strength from kingdom and sparrow and it was very much you know for them probably building out their portfolio a bit for me getting something which was an an extraordinarily fantastic value you know the amount of hours and time and effort they put into this you know i was getting way more bang for my buck um so i had this awesome creative agency really enthusiastic guys um and basically they did that marketing front um including website for that so it's super cheap um my still so i've been eyeing up which is the copper pot still that you use to make the gin i've been eyeing up um the one that sip smith had used but it was you know close to 100 grand, that was twice what I had.

6:17So I had to be more creative. And I found these beautiful hand beaten copper pot stills from Portugal, they're a couple grand. So here we are, you know, a few grand for my branding, a few grand for my still, maybe some auxiliary equipment, I needed a 200 pound bottle filler and filter, I needed some tanks, you know, another 1000 pounds. But ultimately, on equipment, you know, less than I'm sure, equipment and branding, probably less than 10 grand then i just get the rest is really goes into stock so you know you've got to buy your first pallets of bottles first labels juniper alcohol um and then the rest is working capital thank you so much for listening to that espresso i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day let's be having your boy and please do subscribe follow the podcast share this espresso on WhatsApp if you liked it.

7:13And also there's a link to our newsletter in the show description. I spend 15 hours toiling and writing this bad boy. It's full of wonderful wisdom from the biggest names in food and drink. You're not going to get these in a business book. So please subscribe and thank me later.