The People's Choice Spirit Awards in association with The Buyer have revealed the winners of their coveted annual awards at Revolution Bar, Manchester.
Attending the event members of the Lancaster Spirits Co team discovered that they'd been awarded a silver medal in the Contemporary Gin category for their artisan small batch gin Firecracker.
During the evening, the winners of all 20 award categories were revealed, which included spirits formats such as Whisky / Whiskey: Around the World, Vodka Small Batch, Rum Easy Weekend & Spiced, Alcohol Free and Small Batch Gin to name a few.
Each year finalists are ranked on a number of stringent criteria, which include aroma and flavour, balance and quality, suitability for the category and value for money. In some instances a second round of judging is undertaken for certain categories where close scoring or identical scores between two spirits have been recorded or where spirits have been identified as possible candidates for a Gold Commendation award.
Lancaster Spirits Co Senior Manager, Gemma Carradice, commented: "Winning silver for Firecracker in the Contemporary Gin category at the People's Choice Spirits Awards is fantastic. Especially as the awards are the only ones where consumers and professionals judge the products side by side to identify the winners. Winning one of the three awards presented on the night alongside our peers also shows that as one of only a handful of grain to glass distilleries in the UK that we're making progress, both creating handcrafted drinks that people enjoy and that stand out because they are distinctly different to many others in the market."
As well as the award win Lancaster Spirits Co is pleased to announce that work has begun to embark on the next stage of its developing story. After significant investment and eight months of construction work, the Lancaster based company has added a bespoke pot still and storage facility to the grain-to-glass distillery's facilities - The Whisky Rack.
This specialist building has been designed to produce, house and age cask whisky. The building is built to take into account fluctuations in temperature and humidity providing a consistent and controlled maturation of the spirit. This is an essential part of ensuring a quality product: produced using water from an ancient Bowland aquifer, a two-hundred-year-old Lancastrian yeast and the finest barley malts and ultimately infused with delicate flavours and aromas from "1st fill" bourbon oak casks. The new Whisky Rack will house hundreds of these beautiful wooden casks carefully stored to maximise the evolutionary maturation process all the while gaining more flavour, aroma, and body.
In due course The Whisky Rack will play host to a wide range of events, including distillery tours and tastings. Please keep an eye on the website for future event details. https://lancasterspirits.co.uk
About the Lancaster Spirits Company:
Housed alongside the home of multi-award-winning Lancaster Brewery, The Lancaster Spirits Company is a grain to glass distillery, utilising decades of brewing know-how and a painstaking distilling process, to produce premium quality, small-batch gin and vodka.
The distillery has taken an exceptionally unusual and challenging approach to creating their own base grain spirit, by distilling from a specially concocted beer. After many dozens of test brews carried out over an eighteen-month development period, they've mastered the art. Using a secret blend of wheat and rye grains, a two-hundred-year-old Lancastrian live yeast and water drawn from an artesian well, the spirit has a proud local heritage, a remarkably small carbon footprint and a uniquely complex flavour profile.
Even the bottle has involved scrupulous thought and regard. The design is based on a 19th Century Lancaster based brewery (Yates & Jackson) beer bottle and then carefully modified to allow space for the label and etched with the distillery's name.
To produce a single drop of The Lancaster Spirits Company gin or vodka takes a minimum of five weeks of work. Painstaking, fastidious, complicated work, in proud classically Lancastrian style.
All products in the range are available to order online via: https://lancasterspirits.co.uk