Full steam ahead for gin making family
A FAMILY of gin makers is celebrating their latest success with their tipple being stocked behind the bar for first class rail passengers.
Karl and Lindsay Bond, with the help of their daughter Hattie, make Forest Gin from their distillery at Langley using ingredients foraged in Macclesfield Forest. They have been stocked in Harvey Nichols and a string of high-end restaurants and bars.
Now their bottle is behind the bar in the first class Virgin Trains lounge at Euston station in London. Forest Gin is not the first Macclesfield company to be stocked by Virgin Trains. Passengers in the on-board shops on the trains can buy a specially brewed pale ale called Tilting Ale made by Red Willow brewery, which is based at Byrons Lane.
It’s part of efforts by the train company to stock local suppliers from along its West Coast Mainline.
Karl said: “We’re so excited and proud to have our gin behind the bar in Virgin’s First Class Lounge at Euston. We only launched the gin at the start of last year and it has already won numerous awards so this is great way to begin 2016.
“We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved.”
Forest Gin is made by the Bond family in very small batches with botanicals foraged from Macclesfield Forest and the gin is then blended with cool water from forest springs to produce a fresh, herbaceous London dry gin. Since its launch, Forest Gin has become recognised as one of the world’s finest London Dry Gins, resulting in the award of the silver medal in the Global Spirits Masters awards in 2015.
Karl and the family only distill the gin in batches of 75 bottles at a time and it’s sold in a ceramic bottle featuring a hand-screen printed papercut design by the artist Suzy Taylor.