The Curious Bartender's Gin Palace by Tristan Stephenson

Author:Tristan Stephenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ryland Peters & Small
Published: 2017-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

The famous silent pool itself, looking… well, silent.

The relaxed exterior belies the passion and dynamism going on inside at Silent Pool.

The Silent Pool pot still with maceration vats visible on the right of the image.

‘The Major’ is a wood-burning steam boiler that generates all the heat required to power the still.

But the reality of the Silent Pool Distillery is a family of young (mostly!), impassioned distillers producing good-quality liquids. Ambition and curiosity are well represented, but this is balanced with a seemingly relaxed approach to things. The still room has music playing, which is a surprisingly rare find in this industry. Dogs potter about the yard and a barbecue/outdoor grill is fired up for lunch.

When the team discovered that mains electrical power was insufficient to heat their still, they turned to a wood-burning steam boiler affectionately known as ‘The Major’. The still itself is a modified 350-litre (90-US-gallon) Arnold Holstein, sporting a column that allows one of the (two) MSc-graduate distillers to tweak the body and brightness in the finished product. Maceration vats surround the wall space and there’s no shortage of botanicals to fill them – 22 ingredients in total, although some are repetitions of the same. Two types of juniper (Bosnian and Macedonian) top the botanical list, and you only need to smell them both to understand how different they are, which bodes the question: why is juniper blending not a common practice? Ginge likens them to opposing but complementary musical instruments, ‘Bosnian is the bass guitar; Macedonian is the banjo’.

With a great number of botanicals comes a great degree of methodology, or so it would seem. Seeds, roots, dried peels and Bosnian juniper are macerated and distilled in the traditional manner. Lavender flowers, fresh peels, fresh pear and Macedonian juniper are vapour-infused, and some floral ingredients (kaffir lime leaf, chamomile, rose, elderflower and linden) are brewed like a tea, in high-strength spirit, then filtered out before that spirit is re-distilled, thus avoiding cooked notes in the finished product. It’s a complex process, but a logical one when you consider the diversity of the botanicals. The guys are using local honey too, but the plan is to go even more local and install their own hives near the pool.

Besides the ‘Silent Pool’ bottling, there are special releases already in the marketplace. Experiments with wood are taking place, too. Oak, acacia and mulberry – the latter of which which I’m told tastes terrible – are all under observation, but by far the most exciting and head-slappingly obvious type of wood under trial is juniper. I got to try a 12-day-old sample, which had been the first fill of a 7-litre (2-US gallon) cask. It was slightly overdone, its nuances muddied by woody notes, but I’m told that the fifth fill is tasting very good.

SILENT POOL (43% ABV)

Coiled tight with floral and ethereal notes, which relax in to woodsy, nutty spice. Then comes the juniper (which you realise was there all along), which is both bright and earthy at once. Water reveals meadowsweet and perhaps a touch of that honey.

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