cals,” said Fowkes.“We wanted to go ‘wow that’s

almost off the map’. We just noticed that berries weren’t really used in gin distillation so we started to explore citrus and then we played around with coriander which is quite instrumental in changing the taste, they were the key ones we looked at.”

In 2009 Brockmans Gin was born.

The brand was launched in London before moving into venues in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester. And it wasn’t long until the team behind Brockmans cast a wider net.

“We went in 2010 to Switzer-land and Spain and we took off in Spain,” said Fowkes.

“Then we took a year in 2011 to plan our introduction to the US because of the scale of the market; then eventually in February 2014 we introduced it into Massachusetts, New Jersey and Manhattan in New York.

Gin team embarks on tour of Scotland

Brockmans co-founder presents masterclasses for Scots bartenders

• (Clockwise) Aberdeen winners Katherine Charleston, Adrian Gomes, Will Farquhar; Glasgow winner Paul Anderson; Edinburgh winner Matt Belcher.

news

BROCKMANS Gin co-founder Bob Fowkes was on a tour of Scotland late

last month, staging a series of gin masterclasses for bartend-ers in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The tour is part of a wider push from the team behind the gin to drive up its on-trade presence, a push that’s seen the brand enter bars in the US ear-lier this year and Ireland last month.

Fowkes said the brand’s distri-bution has grown steadily since its inception in the UK in 2007.

“It was a guy [Kevan Crosth-waite] who was in the financial industry and he was living in Singapore,” Fowkes explained.

“He said ‘why does vodka get so much attention yet gin is the much more interesting spirit?’”

That question, said Fowkes, prompted Crosthwaite to con-tact his brother David along with Neil Everitt and Fowkes – the team that would found Brockmans.

From the outset, Fowkes said the goal was to “create a gin which is pretty much what we say in our claim line, ‘a gin like no other’”.

“There were a lot of people making new gins at the time by changing one of the botani-

“Beyond that we’ve had inter-est from Canada and from Ger-many.

“It’s not our intentions to go

into 50 countries, we’re going to stay in those countries that understand gin, where we can apply our efforts to develop the

brand.”With gin sales on an upward

trajectory according to data firm CGA, the Scottish trade, it seems, is one that understands gin.

Brockmans has gained list-ings with a number of groups north of the border, including G1 and Buzzworks, as well as with independent operators.

And Fowkes said his plan for the brand moving forward is to continue to help build bar-tenders’ knowledge of gin and Brockmans through “more of the same”.

“We emphasise the on prem-ises as that’s where consumers are most likely to have their first taste of Brockmans,” said Fowkes.

The masterclasses in Scotland late last month were ‘hands-on’ with bartenders invited to create their own Brockmans serve in a cocktail competition.

The bartenders that came out on top were Paul Anderson, manager at Riding Room & Polo Lounge in Glasgow; Matt Belcher, bartender at The Hanging Bat in Edinburgh; and Katherine Charleston and Will Farquhar of Orchid and Adrian Gomes of The Tippling House sharing the top spot at the Aberdeen masterclass.

12 • SLTN • September 4, 2014

The goal from the outset was to ‘create a gin like no other’.

IN the throes of doing the day job a couple of weeks ago, something tickled me – metaphorically speaking, that is!

I was working with colleagues in Edinburgh and Glasgow and had the chance to look at the wine lists of a number of the cities’ restaurants. What filled my little heart with joy was the sight – a delightfully

surprising sight, I may add – of some really exciting wines. These wines were not exciting because they were from the latest svengali

winemaker or an experimental white wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon; what thrilled me was that they were from places in the wine world that you would never normally see represented on a list.

In fairness, they were all restaurants of some note; but, nevertheless, the establishments were really trying hard to seek out interesting wines from wine producing nations. There were wines from as far afield as Romania and Brazil, with a couple of the lists even sporting bottles from Morocco and Thailand.

I thought it was great, not only that they were listing these wines, but the fact that the patrons of the restaurants intimated that these wines were not

just esoteric fluff, they were paying their way! The fact that these hard working restaurateurs are prepared to give these wines space and that the punters are buying them is a fantastic sign!

As Bill Hicks, one of my favourite ever comics, once said: “We are the facilitators of our own creative revolution”. It is in our gift to try something new; nobody is forcing you (but I am definitely encouraging you!). I find it mightily boring to keep plugging away at the same old wines every time I go out and despair when I see other folk doing exactly that.

In reality it can actually be more evolution than revolution, in that to make your list a wee bit more interesting, you don’t have to go all crazy and list a Greek Malagousia or a Croatian Plavac Mali. Grape varietals like Albarino and Gruner Veltliner are pretty common on most merchants’ lists now, meaning that there is a greater understanding and acceptance in the trade. If you start to culture an interesting list by challenging your supplier to bring these delicious things to you to taste, your customers will definitely respond. In my humble opinion, a negative response is one hundred times better than an ambivalent one as at least it means the person is interested and engaged with you.

It also gives you the opportunity to try something else new!

When it comes to wine, operators should dare to be different, writes Guy Chatfield

Cork Dork film reCommenDation:

Mondovino (2004) A fantastic documentary on the

impact of globalisation on the

world’s different wine regions

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