From Kitchen to Pilot Distillery

Sue and Maia getting to grips with our first still - Ginger

Lockdown provided an opportunity for many to put ideas into practice and we were no different. From our kitchen experiments and infusions we began to develop the two processes required to turn bread into spirits. First, we make a distiller's beer from bread and refine the resulting alcohol through distillation and filtering. Second, we infuse and distill the alcohol produced to create gin, vodka or other botanical spirits.

It is common for NZ distillers to buy in whey alcohol (lactanol) or import a neutral grain spirit then focus on flavouring to produce gin or other spirits. A few distillers make their own alcohol using sugars sourced from grain, sugar cane or whey. Unlike all other NZ distilleries, we were starting from a food waste problem. We were making our own base alcohol with sugars derived from surplus bread and bakery products. To tackle the waste problem, we had to deal with a wide variation in ingredients; bakery surplus is a broad church - from sliced bread, to raspberry buns, ciabatta rolls to sour dough. There was a lot to do and it was clear we needed reinforcements to develop our process. Carla and I were joined by Maia, a botanist, and Sue, a food service manager.

Horror at the scale of the food waste problem had brought us together and a love of good spirits cemented our alliance. Now all we needed was a space to pilot the process. By the end of lockdown, we four founders were installed in the Artisan Food Producers factory in Kaikorai Valley.