Well the history of Anno goes back to 2010, at the time I was heading up one of
the research and development sites for GlaxoSmithKline. I was told in
beginning of February of that year I had to close the site, make people
redundant, move some to our base at Stevenage. So, the decision was would I move,
would I stay with the company? I worked with Norman Lewis he was one of my directors
and we decided to take the King's shilling, or in this case the
GlaxoSmithKline redundancy package and pension, and do what we'd always wanted
to do, and that was open a distillery. We'd spent a lot of time in the States
and tried some very nice spirits in the distilleries over there in the bars,
and as you do after a few drinks, you think, 'why couldn't we do that? We could
do that with scientists.' When we had the opportunity to get a redundancy package
and a pension from GlaxoSmithKline, we decided to invest some of that, which the
wives allowed us a little portion thereof, and we put it into a distillery.
Not the distillery we are in now in Marden, life started off in
the corner of my wife's kitchen with a two-litre Alembic still that we got from Portugal
for about 120 euros.
Being techie types we went up to the British Library in
London and spent a few weeks researching the history of gin, going back quite a
few centuries, identified 100 botanicals that we liked, found over 350
different botanicals used over the centuries. We picked 100 and
requested samples from the botanical suppliers and started distilling, which was a great interest to
my neighbors they used to ask why there's an alcohol lorry turning up with
lots of people carrying barrels into the house and we declared we're a distillery so
that had the free tasting panel lined up. Also had Kim, my youngest daughter,
another scientist, she's a biologist, she was in Malaysia teaching people to scuba dive,
got a phone call from me one day: "how do you fancy leading sales and
marketing on this new distillery we're opening?" She said at the end of the dive season I'll come home,
she flew home, we then introduced two interesting facts. One, the distillery
was in the corner of her mum's kitchen, and the other was we couldn't afford to
pay her for two years so that went down well! But she did lots of distilling,
Norman and I did lots of blending and making different gins, and we had three lovely
gins that we made. A floral gin, a very citrusy style of gin and a woody style of gin.
We did lots of blind tastings with our friends and neighbours, they all
loved what we were making, they could pick our gins out, put them above a lot
of commercial gins that we put into the blind tasting, so we put some serious
money down and ended up with the premises in Marden, ordered the still from
Christian Carl, they're based in Germany so she's a lovely piece of kit
and she arrived just before Christmas 2012. We installed everything ourselves,
put all the plumbing in, everything apart from the final hooking up with the electrics.
So we started operating middle of 2013 and the first batch of Kent Dry
which was based on the floral gin that we developed, that came out in October of
that year, subsequently won a gold medal of the World Spirits Competition in
San Francisco, so for our first product we were very pleased.
Ah, our lovely 300 litre copper pot still made by Christian Carl in Germany,
her name is Patience and you might ask why Patience? Her name comes from the fact
that we built her over Christmas 2012 and waited for the licenses to be moved
from my house in Maidstone down to Marden. Didn't seem like a terribly
complicated job but it took quite a long time for the HMRC to move it.
Great support locally, but we did have a few issues up in Liverpool for the bond
and up in Glasgow for the main licenses, so it wasn't until the middle of 2013
when the licenses finally came through, we were thinking of a name for our lovely lady
and Patience seemed quite apt because she'd been sitting there for
many months without any use whatsoever
So, hence patience.
The company's continuing to grow, we had crowdfunding last year so that brought
new funds in, so we're looking to expand more products in the portfolio.
We already have seven vodkas and gins, maybe gin, so we'd be looking to put some perhaps
some more flavoured gins onto the market, still very buoyant at the moment.
We're also looking to repeat the manufacture of a whisky, we made the first whisky
ever made in Kent released that on World Whisky Day last year
and that's gone down exceedingly well, we're nearly out of that we just
made a limited stock. Westerham Brewery did the fermentation and then we did the
distilling and ageing, so we'll be looking to work with Robert Wicks to do more of that.
We're also working with a couple of other wineries, so we're going to be
making some products and co-branding with them, but the names of those are
under wraps at the moment. We'll be releasing some more spirits so we'll be
moving into some interesting rums. We think rum is going to take off so
some craft rums will be coming out from us later in the year. We do have a couple of
other projects which we think will be very high press when we release them but
they're under wraps at the moment, Kim won't let me talk about those!
Okay, that's it from us, so lots going on lots of exciting stuff and look out for some new products!