Hello, I'm Nicky, owner, and chief distiller at Collymoon Craft.
​
We are a small family-run business created out of a shared passion for craft gin.
​
Having spent the previous 20 years working within the education sector I had the opportunity to fulfil a long time ambition to create my own gin to share with others.
​
I am constantly sourcing unique botanicals inspired by those naturally growing locally and more widely throughout Scotland, with the addition of a few flavours I have enjoyed from around the world.
I am proud to have developed my own small batch Collymoon Craft Gins.
I hope you enjoy them too.
our Story
Our journey began back in 2022 when I registered Collymoon Craft with Companies House and started my adventure into the world of craft gin making.
Naively (on my part), I thought I would be up and running producing gin in no time, how wrong was I!
I read so many books on distilling, the history of gin, how to set up a business, all of which were so informative and really helped me move forward. I started to undertake courses on gin making, often dragging my husband Glyn along for the ride. I recommend Brew School, http://www.brew-school.com with Jamie Baxter and the team.
I found out that other gin makers were very helpful and willing to share experiences, a special thank you to Chris at Shoogle (https://www.shooglespirits.com), also I found that there were some interesting blogs available too. The more I learnt the more I wanted to know. I successfully applied for my rectifiers licence (licence to make gin!) and I continued down the legal side, securing my personal licence (to sell alcohol), AWRS licence (to sell to businesses) and premises licence.
I started to develop ideas for logos, gin recipes, branding and learned how to create a website. I enjoyed learning about foraging (see botanicals section), the seasonality of plants and how best to use different parts of plants at different times of the year to enhance the flavours.
Setting up a distillery, even on a small scale is very costly, so I decided that before I take the plunge into setting up my own small batch distillery, I would need to enlist the support of another distillery to enable me to bring Collymoon Craft Gin to the market. It is thanks to Lewis Scothern and the team at Distillutions, (https://www.distillutions.com/) that I have been able to do this. Lewis allows me to 'cuckoo' his larger stills to run off small batches of my gin, also sharing his years of experience, helping me to learn about scaling my own production.
I am proud of what we have done and I couldn't have done, it without the support of my family, Glyn, Ben, Cameron and Kieran and the constant encouragement of many other family members and friends.
We are proud that Collymoon Craft Gin is made by our family for you to enjoy and we hope you do enjoy drinking it as much as we enjoyed making it.