S2 E11 - Foraging and Creativity: The Art of Distilling at Glendalough

Transcription

00:00:04
            

My name is Geraldine Kavanagh, and I am the full time forager At Glendalock Distillery.        

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My job is to pick the botanicals and to put that essence of Glendalock into the bottle.        

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The inspiration for the flavours come from Glendalock, from what you might smell and taste and see. The ingredients that we use grow in the wild. It's a collection of botanicals that just really grow here. It's a very Irish gin. It has a sense of place and its place is Glendalock.        

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Glendalock Irish gin. A place in time.        

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Well, hello, Geraldine. How are you? Hi, Kerry. I'm very well, how are you? I'm good.        

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So I spoke to Donald last year, I think, and he went through all the whiskeys that we can get in America and the poutine, and I got to taste them. Then I saw him again at Tales of the Cocktail. He gave me these great socks, can't show you. And then I told him I was coming out here and I wanted to learn more about your gin because your gin fascinates me. He told me a little bit about it during my first interview and he raved about you and how you go foraging and pick all the stuff and make all this fun botanicals.        

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And the two gins that I tried, that he sent me before were fantastic. But then I get here and I see you have four that I cannot get at home. So I would love to talk about these too. So tell me, I usually start off with your whiskey journey, but in your case, let's go with your spirits journey. When you were a wee little last, did you ever see yourself making gin at a distillery with these boys?        

00:01:53
            

No, I didn't.        

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I suppose when I was a child, when I was a little girl, I was a very outdoor type of child and spent my childhood outside in the garden of Ireland, where we are now, county Wicklow, south of Dublin, but completely remote from the city. Very rural, beautiful mountains, the seashore and every kind of habitat you can think of. So when I was a child, it was the so we were allowed to just roam freely. Yeah, nobody really cared where you were. Just come back when you're hungry.        

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And so I had a great childhood roaming County Wicklow, so that kind of is how I ended up in the position I'm in now. I, for some reason, was always drawn to plants and was always just looking at flowers and just enjoying being with nature, being with flowers. And as I got older, I started to learn the names of plants and then older still, I started to learn their different uses and became very interested in what there was to eat in the wild, because for many generations, people didn't really eat wild food anymore, although all of our ancestors lived exclusively on wild food. So as I got older, I thought it was a great loss of knowledge. So very slowly and on my own, I started to just teach myself about what was edible, what was poisonous, how to identify each plant, what it was going to taste like.        

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So it was just really a hobby. And I think in 2011, when my three children were small, I wanted to be at home with the children, but I needed to work as well. So I thought about starting teaching wild food foraging. So, wow. I started teaching that about eleven years ago.        

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And it wasn't really a big thing at the time, but slowly over the years, it's become much more popular. And so I started teaching, taking people out on tours. I started my own little food business. I had a market stall selling wild mushrooms and wow, all sorts of soups and cordials and jams and cakes and all sorts of things. But everything had wild, at least one, if not many wild ingredients.        

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So in 2014, one of the journalists from one of our biggest national newspapers, the Irish Times, asked if she could come out on one of my walks. And we had a fabulous day. And I got a two page spread in a very big newspaper for free. Fantastic. Gary McLaughlin, one of the founders of Blendlock, was reading the newspaper that day, that Saturday.        

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And at Blend Lock, they had just bought a new still that was going to be exclusively for gin because you can't have gin and whiskey stills crossing over and the guys had distilled a few batches of gin. But they were thinking about making a gin with a sense of know, because Wicklow is a very special place and they hadn't really come up with a solution. How can we put Wicklow into this gin? And then Gary said he was reading about me. He said, that's what we'll do, we'll put wild plants in the gin.        

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So they called me up the following Monday and in a couple of weeks we just went out foraging. And the guys told me what they kind of they had come up with a good base recipe, a good balance of juniper, coriander, auris, you know, the things that most people regular. Yeah, so they had a nice base recipe. So I said, send me your recipe. And I'll think about what there is out there in the wild that's going to work well with that and what kind of quantities I'd need to use compared with, say, how much juniper you're using.        

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So we all just went out foraging. We went all over the place and we had a really nice day. I hadn't met them before and then they went back to the distillery and then a couple of days later we spoke and I was like, so how did the gin turn out? And they were like, oh my God, it's so good. And we were all really happy.        

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And then I started thinking and I thought, well, there is a slight problem because everything that we've put into this gin is going to be gone soon because that's how wild food is. You cannot go and buy it in the shop. It's very seasonal. You're excited all year because there's something new coming and something else is going and you're always trying to preserve it. So I said to the guys, we can only make this lovely gin that we've created for just another few weeks.        

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So I think it was particularly Gary had this idea, well, maybe we could do seasonal gins. Like, this could be maybe a summer gin. And could we do an autumn gin and a winter gin? And I was like, yeah, probably. So we had to come up with recipes in the wintertime before, because even if you want to create a recipe in November, you don't have the ingredients.        

00:06:46
            

Sometimes you have to just use your imagination and think of different flavors that will work together. So that was in 2014. We made our summer gin and I think the following year then. And for two years, we made spring, summer, autumn and winter. And that was incredibly unusual because every single batch we made was slightly different.        

00:07:08
            

Every season, the recipe was different and each season was inspired by what is available at that particular time. Let me back you up just a. Little bit before we get into too much of the gin. So when they called you up on that Monday and said, hey, we were reading about you in the paper, was the foraging trip just to go see what they could do, or were they offering the job right up front? Oh, the job didn't happen for a long time.        

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It was all kind of I don't know. So we were just kind of helping. Them out just because, I mean, after I spoke to them the first time, I was like, I don't even know how gin's made. And I've just agreed to help. To make gin was like, sure, I'll see how it goes.        

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I didn't think it was going to really come to anything. It was just like someone just asked me to do something random. And I thought, yeah, sure. And when you came in to the distillery, did you see Rowdy and start helping him or just watching him? Rowdy hadn't started just then.        

00:07:59
            

He started shortly afterwards. At the time, the guys were all actually working full time. They were all working in jobs and had young families, or actually didn't even have young families. They were all probably recently married, but they wanted to branch out on their own. They wanted to revive craft spirits.        

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So they were selling whiskey in Pochin, but nobody was working full time in the.        

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You started how long were you helping them out before you became the foraging employee? Probably like a year or something. Yeah. Nice of you. Well, I was doing my own work as well, and we were trying something very new and yeah, we didn't really know.        

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I had no idea it was going to be so big. Like the first year, we only made 2000 bottles of gin. Wow. But because we were doing everything in such a different way, every single batch was slightly different. We were using what was available locally, seasonally.        

00:09:06
            

We were bottling here, we were handwriting the date of foraging, the date of distillation. We were hand waxing and dipping the lids and wax. You couldn't be more craft than we were. We have scaled back slightly on some of that because we wouldn't get anything done. But, yeah, we started off very small and personally, I had no idea that it would have grown to be a gin that's on sale in 45 or more countries in the world.        

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Well, as I was saying before, I have had these two, but it's been a while.        

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I know these are special. So, out of these two, which one is your favorite? That's a difficult question. Well, I think maybe this one, because I think because there's a phenomenal amount of work put into picking all of the botanicals, and this one is made over an entire foraging year, which is not twelve months, it's more like nine months. It's a school year.        

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Yeah. I would find it hard even to buy another gin because I picked so many different things and put so many hours into the gin to bring here to the distillery. Do you think that taking this job has ruined you for other gins? Yeah, definitely. All right, well, let's taste this one.         

00:10:33
            

Yeah. So, should I tell you a little bit about wild botanical? So, when we started making the gins, we were doing seasonal gins. We did those for two years. We won lots of awards.        

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People were talking about us all over the world because of this very strange way we were making gins and the gin craze hadn't happened. And also, the idea of using local botanicals was quite rare. I don't know if anyone was doing it at the time. So we were very unusual and I think we inspired a lot of people across the world. So we did that for two years.        

00:11:04
            

We did the four seasonal gins. And then people might call up and say, I really want to get the spring gin. And we'd say, we're really sorry, we can't make it and we'll have it next year. And then a really nice bar might have a lovely cocktail menu. And they'd call us up and say, can we get more summer gin?        

00:11:21
            

And again we'd say, we can't do it till next year. So everyone asked us, Would you make a Glendalock gin, a gin that's available all year round? So myself and Rowdy and the guys spent a long time trying to come up with an idea of an all year round gin and also to think, how can you make it using ingredients that are changing constantly? So it took us a long time, what we wanted to do was express the four seasons in one sip. That took a long time.        

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I bet. But I can still remember the day. Probably twelve months worth. Nine months. I think it was nine months, and I can still remember the day tasting this and going, oh, my God, we did it.        

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We all were like, it's got spring on the nose. When you taste it first on your tongue, you're getting the floral notes of summer. Then you're getting the lovely fruits of autumn and the lovely kind of unusual fruits and spiciness of winter. Nice. That took a long time, but we all knew when we had arrived at that moment.        

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Let's have some here.        

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All right, launch it.        

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Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. So what you're smelling on the nose is plants that are collected in springtime, so pine and fur and sorrel, which is kind of a citrusy green leaf. Yeah, I'm getting all of that. Yeah.        

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So if you were standing in Glendalock at the lake in springtime, these are the kind of things you're going to smell the fresh you can kind of get a smell of green, of things growing. So that's the nose. And then if you taste it.        

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That bravo. That does have all the season. Yeah. So the first thing you're going to taste is floral notes because we pick a lot of elder flour, wild roses, honeysuckle meadowsweet, lady's bed straw. They're all beautiful.        

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What's lady's bed straw? Lady's bed straw is a little yellow flower. It would be hard for me to describe the flavor of ladies bed straw. It used to be used in cheesemaking. It's almost unknown.        

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It's not used anymore. But I literally can't think of a way to describe the flavor for right now. But it's a lovely there's a whole kaleidoscope of different flowers from summer that are all put together, and then there's a lot of fruit as well. So we used wild blueberries that we call frockens. They grow in the mountains in autumn.        

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Yeah. frockens. Why is it frockens? Well, it's from the Irish, which is freachon, which means something that comes out of the heather. Freach is heather.        

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So the frockens grow where the heather grows. So in autumn, in August, the mountains basically change color because the heather has come out and yeah, those frockens are kind of I love that word. Yeah, frockens. It is an unusual one because it comes from the Irish. So we use those wild blueberries, blackberries apples, raspberries, so lots and lots of fruit of autumn, and then more unusual fruits that come at the end of the season and herbs.        

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And the little kind of spiciness comes from some of the base ingredients we use. I get the finish is definitely a nice little wintry spice. Oh, that's delicious. You should be very proud. That's great.        

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We are. Okay, I'm going to skip this one because I hear it has something special for Rowdy. This is Rowdy so this is Rowdy's baby. But I would love to taste the seasons because that's what started it all. Really?        

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Yeah. So would you like to start with spring? Sure. Let's go with spring. Okay.        

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Spring is over here now. Oh, we moved them. We moved them. Spring starts in April, really, in terms of foraging. So we have this lovely yellow flower that covers the whole countryside in April.        

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It's called gorse flower, and it smells a bit like vanilla or coconut.        

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It's a very soft so the spring gin is really reflecting spring in County Wicklow with this beautiful yellow gorse flower that you can see everywhere. And then again, new shoots of pine, fur, spruce. Sorrel I have some of the botanicals in a basket if you want to actually see them. So here we have this is Douglas FIR. So if you just take it in your hands and just crush it gently because I don't think you want to eat it.        

00:16:00
            

That's one of the botanicals that comes out in the springtime. I feel like your Douglas FIRs are a little bit more green than our Douglas spurs. I'm sure they are. We don't have a lot of green in California. No.        

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Yes. So that has lovely citrusy notes. In spring, it's like a lime or a lemon, and then as the season goes on, the essential oils get more concentrated, and it becomes more like an orange or a grapefruit. Yeah, that's actually in all of our gins, but it's one of the first things that you taste and smell, and it changes with the seasons as well. So we use that, and then in the spring gin and the summer gin and the wild botanical gin and the rose gin, we use this wild mint that only grows in water or near water.        

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So I go to that smells like water. It smells like outside. Yeah. If you would just rub your hands gently with that as well, it'll release the oils. It's an incredibly pungent mint.        

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I love it. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's amazing, isn't? Yeah.        

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So that grows in the water. We have a special place called Mint Island where I go to harvest that every year. That smells so good. I'm okay with breaking the fourth wall. It's.        

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That'S wow. That's in our rose gin, wild botanical gin, spring gin. Will I show you the other one or two? Well, let's go one by, and we got the summer gin. These are all in spring.        

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Okay. Yeah. The difference between these two is drastic, but good. Drastic. Yeah.        

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I can definitely see drinking this all year. And I can definitely see drinking this only in the spring. Yeah. Just because they're part of a season, it doesn't mean you can't drink them other times of the year. No, but I could totally see just sitting out and watching the butterflies go by and the birds and the sun.        

00:18:00
            

Okay, so these four seasonal gins aren't available outside Ireland because we only make small batches, so the only way you can get them is if you come here. That means y'all you need to come to Ireland during whichever your favorite season is and come get a bottle here in Ireland. Okay. So now the summer gin. What's in the summer gin?        

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So summer gin has a lot of elder flour. Do you know elderflower? I do, yeah. I can smell the elder flower. Yeah.        

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Has a lot of elder flour. Wild roses, honeysuckle meadowsweet, wild raspberries. And then, of course, it has juniper and coriander. It has water mint. So it's harvested in a time of abundance when all the flowers are out, all the greens are out.        

00:18:53
            

That's beautiful.        

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Wow, you did it again. Summer in a mouthful.        

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Yeah, I could totally see this sitting on the shore. Yeah. Getting a tan. Yeah. Not in Ireland.        

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Well, they all taste the same, yet they all taste drastically different at the same time. What we try to do is have a similar kind of base recipe that even though they're all slightly different, you still know it's the Glendalock gin that you're tasting. That's fantastic. All right, so what's in the autumn gin? So autumn, the hedgerows are full of fruit.        

00:19:39
            

Thank you. So the hedgerows are full of fruit in autumn. So we have yeah, that's very fruity on some here. I have some of them here. Do you know rose hips?        

00:19:50
            

No. Yes. So they're the fruit of the rose. They can't just eat there's a fruit on the rose. We don't have fruits on our roses.        

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We have thorns on our roses. You do have fruits. Yeah, they'll come a little later. So if you don't pick the flowers. We have very badly genetically engineered plants.        

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You'll just have to move here trying. Anyone wants to hire me, I'm right here. So rose hips are the most beautiful fruity flavor. They're full of vitamin C. They grow in the hedgerows.        

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They'd be one of I can't eat. It just like this? No, because you can't eat the seeds inside. Oh, are they poisonous? No, you just don't swallow them.        

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They'll never eat, like, gum. If you swallow gum, it would just stay in your body. Just not nice to eat. So we make syrups and wines and things and jellies and things, but we don't use the seeds. It's just that they're scratchy.        

00:20:35
            

Well, that's probably baby thorns. Yeah, baby. So I can't show you all of the botanicals that we use in autumn, because some of them are gone now. Like, the blackberries have finished. We use a lot of blackberries.        

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We do use I've seen those before, though. You have? Yeah. Of course not. Of course.        

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Because half the stuff you're talking about, I've never heard of. Yeah. So lots of lovely late summer herbs, the wild blueberries heather, this flower I told you about that changes the color of the mountains. That's in the autumn gin as well. That tastes like honey and smells like honey.        

00:21:10
            

So when you're driving in the mountains or walking in the mountains in August, you get a smell that's just like honey, and they're covered in bees. So I do get bee stings when I'm picking those. There are always bees. Do you go out on one of those bee suits with the no. Maybe you should.        

00:21:25
            

No, I don't mind a bee sting. Yeah. Well, a good thing you're not allergic. I know. Okay, I'm going to try it.        

00:21:32
            

Yeah.        

00:21:37
            

Oh, that's really smooth. It's a lot of people's favorite. Oh, that's really good fruitiness. There's so much fruit, so much apples. This is my favorite season, so it would be appropriate if it were my favorite.        

00:21:49
            

We'll see. I have to go to Winter, which is my second favorite season because I'm a snow skier. Oh, cool. And, you know, we don't get a lot of rain in California. No, our Winter is what we've been having here.         

00:21:59
            

Yeah. Which has been lovely because I miss it. We've been having 100 plus degree weather at my house, I hear. Mike, how soon are we going to Ireland? I need to get some colder weather.        

00:22:12
            

So what's all in this one? So this is we're still on autumn, so rose hips, crab apples, blackberries, the, wild blueberries, heather, watermint, fur, juniper, coriander auris, angelica, licorice, and I've probably forgotten one or two. That's amazing. Yeah.        

00:22:37
            

This is getting harder and harder to pick a favorite. I know. Here's Winter. Last but not least is Winter. So Winter was more of a challenging drink for us gin for us to make.        

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Smells like snow. Okay. Crazy. No, this smells like when I'm in the mountains at Lake Tahoe. So we have in this this was a more challenging one to make because there isn't a lot to forage.        

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There are things like these slows. Okay. Do you know slows? Like as slow gin? Yeah.        

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You can taste one if you like, but we'll leave it for a minute. Okay. Because it's a bit of a strong flavor. But we also use these little wild apples called crab apples, which add lovely fruitiness. A friend of mine has a tree that grows those, and they get everywhere.        

00:23:28
            

They do. They cover the ground, which is lucky. You don't have to climb the trees to pick them. No. So these are haws these grow on the Hawthorne tree.         

00:23:37
            

Oh, okay. And they taste a bit like a red apple. I don't know if you have red, green apples, and so if you have a really ripe red apple, but without the sugariness. So, again, they're unusual fruits at that time of year. The slows are quite tanic.        

00:23:53
            

So we have slows, and we also have fur and spruce and pine, things like that. I think that's why I'm saying it smells like snow, because when I smell this, I'm in the snow because it doesn't snow where I live. So these are the flavors that people think of at Christmas. Time. This is like you could use this as a Christmas tree.        

00:24:12
            

Then you could put it in the still afterwards. That's the best way to recycle. Pop your tree in the still. Pop your tree in the still and make it into something else everlasting. Yeah.        

00:24:22
            

And then we also add a little bit of spice to that. So there's a nice spicy finish on this winter gin. So we added a tiny bit of clove. Okay. Clove.        

00:24:30
            

Getting that? Yeah. Clove is something that we like to have in a hot whiskey in the wintertime. We also used caraway seed. Okay.        

00:24:38
            

Yeah. So caraway seed, it's not a native spice or anything like that. For some reason, it's quite common in Irish cookery. In wintertime, people would make caraway seed bread and cakes and things like that, and it's a lovely, warming spice. Chef Louise Leonard, who does guest appearances on the show all the time and does pairings and recipes.        

00:24:56
            

She uses caraway seeds. She introduced it to me. I had no idea what they were. And then so she talks about that. Yeah.        

00:25:02
            

Nobody really knows why they're so popular here, but they're very popular years ago in baking. So they add a lovely warm spiciness to that gin and also cinnamon and maybe nutmeg as well. So just to add a little bit of warmth to the winter gin, let's do this.        

00:25:26
            

Again. Winter. Winter. I love the finish on that. I have no idea.        

00:25:31
            

I understand why you don't have a favorite. It's too hard. Different one every day.        

00:25:39
            

Okay, I'm going to try to pick a favorite. Hold on.        

00:25:54
            

Not odly enough, I guess. My favorite two seasons are my favorite two seasons. Okay. Yeah. I can't pick between these two.        

00:26:02
            

And these are also lovely. But what I really love about these gins is that you really have captured the season, because every sip I take, I can see myself in that season enjoying a DRAM right out there in the wild with these. They're fantastic. Lovely. It's great here.        

00:26:20
            

It's wonderful to meet somebody who makes a gin that I like every single I mean, some gins this is are you've knocked it out of the park, Geraldine? Fantastic. Well, I can't take all the credit. That's only the foraging. So what happens after you forage these wonderful things?        

00:26:40
            

You bring it over to Rowdy and he does some distilling. Yeah. So what we do, because we started out I went out foraging with the guys, we picked fresh botanicals. We brought them, we put them in the still. So we started out using fresh botanicals.        

00:26:54
             

So we had to continue that way, because once you know the flavors you can get from fresh ingredients, like if you use a fresh herb or a dried herb, it's a completely different thing. So we had to continue on doing it that way because it's just so good. So what I do is I get up early enough and get out foraging for the day forage everything into baskets, because they keep the produce nice and fresh, the botanicals nice and fresh. Nothing sweats in there. That looks good.        

00:27:21
            

Well, it's also very nice to hold as well, because they have nice handles and they're just lovely to work with. They're all made with willow. So I pick botanicals all day and then I get to the distillery about four or five in the evening. Rowdy will just have finished distilling the previous batch and he will have the still filled with the alcohol, the juniper, the base. Botanicals the still is filled and then we'll put them into the still.        

00:27:48
            

They'll be left to macerate overnight, and then they'll be very carefully and slowly distilled the following day by rowdy. So Rowdy will tell you about how he captures the flavors of all of these, because the distillation is as important as the know, you've got to do it in a particular way. It's not automatic. It's a very sensory way Rowdy has of distilling. This is fantastic.        

00:28:13
            

I can't wait to talk to him to see how he finishes this project, because these are all fantastic. Again, I love this one. And I can totally see drinking this one all year round. In fact, I did drink it all year round until it was gone. And this, I got to find myself a bottle before I leave the country because good stuff.        

00:28:30
            

Great. Thank you so much, Geraldine. Thank you. Lovely to meet you. Thank you.        

00:28:34
            

Good afternoon, Rowdy. Good afternoon, Kerry. Lovely to meet you. I'm so glad you could take time from your distilling to come up here and chat with us. My pleasure.         

00:28:43
            

Welcome to Glendalock Distillery. Thank you. So I just had a bunch of these wonderful gins with Geraldine, and these two are my favorite. I can't figure out, out of this range, which two. I mean, I love all of them and I could see myself drinking all of them at each time.        

00:29:01
            

But they're all quite distinct, aren't they? Yeah. So out of these four, which are your favorite? Which is your favorite? Most likely I would go for autumn or fall, as you guys would call it.        

00:29:11
            

But yeah, I like Autumn. Autumn. It's also a wonderful time of year. Yeah. It's my favorite season.        

00:29:17
            

So before we get started on the gins, let's talk about your spirit's journey. When you were a wee little lad, did you expect one day to be working at a distillery making gin and all these other fabulous expressions that Glendalach has to offer? God, I'd love to say it was my lifelong ambition. However, that would be a big lie. It was a matter of sliding doors, I suppose.        

00:29:44
            

I had bailed out of the rat race. I was 40. I know. It's hard to believe that I'm even that now. I was going to say you look just 40 and a half.        

00:29:56
            

Yeah. No, I failed out of the rat race. I worked in telecoms. And I was just tired of it, I've had enough. It was quite a stressful environment and it was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up and quite good friends with lifelong friends with Kevin Keenan, one of the four or five founders of they were they were busy.        

00:30:21
            

I was in awe at looking at what they were doing. They were all still working full time jobs and they had started off this vision that they had of founding an Irish whiskey and gin company. I really was in awe of what they were doing and how passionate they were about it. They were so into it. I remember looking at them thinking, jeez, imagine loving your job that much.        

00:30:50
             

It's like a dream come true. Well, so far as I was concerned, nobody really liked the job. You couldn't like your job. It was work. It's like, if it was fun, it would be called fun.        

00:31:01
            

Exactly, yeah. So it was amazing what they were doing and the passion really struck me. And as they started to get a little bit busier and the business started to take off for them, it started to get a wee bit stressful for them because they all had full time jobs still and none of them had yet taken the huge plunge or gamble of giving up their full time job.        

00:31:31
            

So I basically said to Kev, look, they were having difficulties making fulfilling orders and literally getting bottles packaged and labeled or whatever. I was like, I'll give you a hand, I'll help you. I'm not doing anything. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up, so why wouldn't I help? That's what you do.        

00:31:49
            

You help your mates when they're doing something. So spent a little bit of time, came down here to help them paint the distillery when they got it first and started getting a call a little bit more frequently saying, rowdy, can you come and give us a hand again? And it was like, I was only too happy to. That's what mates are for, really. They invited me to a Christmas gathering that they were having and I suddenly realized that each of them had done a bit of Distilling themselves, but none of them really seemed that that was their focus, that's the part of the business that they wanted to do.        

00:32:30
            

And I sort of spotted a gap and kind of spoke to them, said, Lads, things are getting busier here. You're going to need somebody to focus on the Distilling only. Can I do it? Can you give me a chance at it? And they were well, I know already.        

00:32:43
            

Can you do it? And I was like, you guys learned so I can. I went and I did a Distilling course and did a lot of on the job learning and took to it like a duck to water. Loved it instantly. Absolutely loved it.        

00:33:01
            

I'd be kind of maybe a logical, process driven kind of person anyway. And there's a lot of process required in a distillery, so it fitted and I've got a good sense of smell, I've got a big nose and a sensitive smell that I inherited from my mom and her side of the family. And I've always been interested in tastes and flavors and come from a long line of enthusiastic drinkers. So everything seemed to fall into place and it was just right place, right time, I guess. Great, here I am, all these years later.        

00:33:43
             

So I was talking with Geraldine and she told me how she would bring in her botanicals and you would do the distilling. And then I also heard that there was something special about this bottle. Now, I've had this bottle. Donald gave this to me last year when we had him on the podcast, and I remember it being phenomenal, but I also thought, how is it a pink gin? Do they actually use rose petals?        

00:34:06
            

And the answer is the answer is yes. And how it actually came about was very much sort of a personal story. First of all, I guess I'm the luckiest distiller in the world. I get to work with Geraldine, who brings in the most amazing fresh, wild botanicals, and the flavors that I get to work with are absolutely fantastic. And I get to do it in such a way that there's very little pressure on me for there's very little commercial pressure for efficiencies or yields or whatever.        

00:34:45
            

The focus I'm allowed to put totally on taste. So all of our cut points, we've got really tight cut points. I want to make sure there's absolutely no sort of tailsy tastes coming through. And it just means it's a joy to work with.        

00:35:02
            

I don't have to worry about the numbers or the bills or whatever somebody else looks after that. My focus and direction has always been. I need that job. I don't want to focus on the bills or the numbers anymore. So, yeah, I guess I'm very lucky to be in that situation.        

00:35:19
            

And on to the rose gin. I think Geraldine has spoken through the process of how we went from the seasonals to developing the wild botanical to give to trade something that was consistent and available all year round. Not long after we launched it, my little brother was getting married and I decided we should make a batch of gin just for his wedding, just because I could. And my mom had passed away a couple of years previously at a terribly young age and we were very close and we were good mates and as a family, we were all very close. She was great crack and she was always the life and soul of every party.        

00:36:06
            

And so we had this family wedding coming up within a couple of years of her passing, and she was going to be desperately missed at it. So, as well as making a gin specifically for the occasion. My brother Paco and his wife to be, Gina, come down to go foraging with Geraldine so that we could know you helped to make this gin for the special occasion. Pretty cool. Go and get some roses from Mom's garden.        

00:36:34
            

Mom's name was Rose. So grab some roses from Mom's garden, bring them, and we'll include them so she can be with us in spirit on the day. Literally in spirit. That's great. So, yeah, it went down really well.        

00:36:47
            

People loved it. The staff at the hotel loved it. I figured when I was distilling the following day, after we had left it infused overnight, I could really get the I know it sounds like a corny story or whatever, but I could smell the roses coming from Mom's garden as the almost predominant aroma in the distillery that day. And I figured, we're onto something here. And I went back to the guys, the founders, to say, lads, I've got something.        

00:37:19
            

Let's make a rose gin. And they were like, I got a two word answer. The second word was off, and it was like, Come on, Rowdy, focus. We've just launched our wild botanical gin. We can't make a different gin every day.        

00:37:31
            

I know you'd like to, but keep focused. But I knew I was onto something, so I started harvesting the roses from Mom's garden. But my dad didn't even realize that there was no flowers on the rose plants, because every time they'd appear, I'd go and whip them out. And to this day, my little sister now lives in the house. Yvonne carefully tends to the rose bushes and gives me a call several times throughout the year.        

00:38:01
            

And I get, like, baskets of fresh rose petals, and I get them down to the distillery, and I get them infused into alcohol, make a tincture of them, and I just hope there's a little bit of rosy roses go into every batch of gin. Fantastic. I wanted I wanted it to be a rose gin that was naturally sweet. I didn't want to make a know almost artificial. Everything we do here in Glendalock is natural and pure, so I don't want people to look at it and think, oh, another pink gin.        

00:38:45
            

Another I've never seen one before. It's a rose gin that happens to be pink, and it's got lovely Turkish delight. Are you familiar with Turkish delight? Yeah, it's always chocolate rose, and you. Can smell the rose on the nose.        

00:39:02
            

Rose on the nose.        

00:39:06
            

That's beautiful. Okay, that's very nice. Get a lung. Very smooth, and then at the very end of the finish, there's a little. Bit of yeah, there's a little bit pink peppercorns added to it as well, to give a nice little spice, and it's unquestionably.        

00:39:28
            

Still a gin there's. Juniper notes are strong there also. That's fantastic. Yeah. When I made it, I expected it to be a limited release, maybe one or two batches, and it did really batch in the pan and it's like yeah.        

00:39:45
            

So how many years have you had this out now? We've had it for four years now, maybe almost going on five. Yeah. And it's a real pleasure, and it's an honor to be able to walk into a bar and see it behind the bar. Yeah.        

00:40:03
            

Hey, mom slaunche. That's awesome. She'd be so proud. Yeah, she would. Next, we'll go downstairs and you can show me where you make all this magic happen.        

00:40:11
            

Fantastic. Look forward to it. All right. So Rowdy brought me down to the distill area. What's this bad boy all about?        

00:40:19
            

This is Kathleen. Kathleen is our gin still the hardest work thing in the distillery. 500 liter pot still, pot hybrid still pot and charging. So we've got full rectification plates, we're charged up there, ready to go tomorrow morning. Got a very intense juniper heavy charge in there that will macerate overnight.        

00:40:47
            

And yeah, basically the distillation will rise up through the pot, through the four rectification plates in the column. There's about a ton of copper at the very top of the column there through the condensed column. Our little spirit safe there. We've got a simple ball lever here that we direct for heads, hearts and tails. We've got very tight cut points.        

00:41:18
            

It's all done purely sensory, so the yield where we batch is slightly different. And yeah, it's taste and smell. And we basically simply move that lever to redirect the twelve liquid.        

00:41:36
            

It comes out in the wash approximately 430 OD bottles, 70 CL bottles per batch. We run this still twice a day. And what are you doing? This is after for our rose gin post distillation. The iceberg gin, it comes off the still about 89%, goes back into this tank and rose petals, more rose petals added to it to further infuse and enhance the rose flavor and add a touch of natural color to it as well.        

00:42:11
            

Some macerator there so that spins around. So we leave it rose pebbles for macerating for about two days. Again, it will be depending on taste, and then draw it off, transfer it into IBC and send it off to the bottle plant. Fantastic. And over here we have we have.        

00:42:35
            

Our whiskey set up. Yeah, we have our wash still. We've only got two whiskey stills. We're a bit tight space wise, so we do triple distillation wash still and then wipes through the spirit still. Further behind we've got our 500 liter brew house.        

00:43:02
            

There's a fermentation set up that gets pumped upstairs. We ferment for approximately four days.        

00:43:11
            

One brew will require two washes. There's only a 250 liter still. Two washes, two intermediates, one final. It's ultra small batch. Yes.        

00:43:25
            

So the wash still, we've got no cuff. So it's basically you're taking all of the distillate from that into the second distillation. And then we've got the center cut and force again, similar to the gin still. It's a simple ball hole and it's again flawed on a sensory basis. Fantastic.        

00:43:48
            

Okay, so what do we have here? We have, as they say, now for something completely different. We've recently launched a seven year old single malt. Finished in the rare and horrendously. Expensive and lots of fun to work with.        

00:44:03
            

Japanese mizanara. It's an amazing wood. I can smell that mizanara on the. Yeah, it's incredibly expensive. It's no fun to work with.        

00:44:14
            

I won't lie. It's incredibly porous, quite leaky, very unpredictable. I've heard that about it. Yeah.        

00:44:24
            

I suppose what makes it difficult to work with is also what makes it so good for whiskey, because you've got a huge amount of interaction between the liquid and the woods. What's? Constantly breathing in and out and extracting amazing, exotic kind of on the nose. There's nice chocolate, orange, almost flavors in there. Kind of like maybe a grapefruit, I think.        

00:44:49
            

Little bit you get on the yeah. Tasting notes are so personal as well, aren't they?        

00:45:01
            

Wow. That doesn't taste like how it smells. No. It's very surprising, isn't it? For me, this is chocolate finish on the late finish.        

00:45:12
            

Yeah. I could picking up any, like, small some sandalwood, a little bit of little bit maybe on the outer breath. With a coconut. Yeah.        

00:45:25
            

So it was like a chocolate coconut at the end, the finished finish. Yeah. It's long and for me, it's a thinking whiskey, isn't it? This is sitting your library in front of the fire. And have a good think about it.        

00:45:42
            

There's a lot going on there. Yeah. And it's not still finishing. I'm getting like the longer I let it sit, the more chocolate and coconut kind of marshmallow. Yeah, it's different.        

00:45:55
            

We wanted to do something different and. I think we nailed it. Good on you. It tastes and thank you so much for the tour today and taking the. Time to tell us all about your Jen.        

00:46:07
            

It's been a pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed it's. Been a pleasure. Thank you for coming. Thanks for watching, guys.