14 Apr Ealing Pioneers Grant Winner: The Story of Ealing Distillery
The Ealing Pioneers Fund, launched by the Ealing Council was a £1 million pot, shared by 12 select businesses based in the borough to boost economic growth and job creation. Ealing Distillery, one among the winners sells hand-crafted gin locally in the Borough.
Ealing Distillery, launched in 2019 by Simon Duncan and Amanda Duncan, sells hand-crafted gin locally in the Borough. Distilled in traditional copper still named Felicity, the gin is in the super premium category which means it uses the finest botanicals as well as the London dry gin distilling process.
Since its launch, Ealing distillery has also won two international gold medal awards – International Wine and Spirits Competition (WSC) and The Gin Masters. Amanda had bene working at a public relations consultancy in Soho for 25 years, helping it grow to 140 members of staff while Simon started his career in marketing, and then set up a software business from home, helping small and medium sized businesses to set up their own websites.
Amanda says, “We’ve always wanted to run a business together and decided that creating Ealing Gin would be it. We decided to take the leap and go for it and now we are both working full time at Ealing Distillery.”
Wondering how the gin is made? Amanda shines a light on the process,
“We hand weigh all our beautiful botanicals to very precise measurements and our own recipe. We then carefully place them into Felicity our still along with neutral grain spirit (pure alcohol made from wheat here in the UK) and pure filtered water from our own filtration system. The ingredients steep for a minimum of 24 hours before it is switched on. It takes around six hours to distil one batch. As a small handmade batch maker, we produce a couple of hundred bottles with each batch. By gin standards, that’s tiny, but it means that every batch is guaranteed to be super-high quality.”
While the duo manages the business on their own-from e-commerce and website to content creation and accounting to making the gin in itself, they do have a part-time staff helping them with sales and marketing. They hope for to build a bigger distillery in the heart of Ealing, for people to visit and experience Ealing and to also see how the gin process works. The believe the pioneers grant will accelerate their ability to do that. They want to use the grant to build the brand and business up, raising awareness in Ealing and beyond its borders.
Source: aroudealing