Launching Dorset's First Gin Distillery

Admitting something was wrong.

At 28, I had what most people would call a ‘proper’ job — the kind with career prospects, letters after your name, and a company car. It was all going to plan.

But I was miserable.

I could see the next 30 years stretching out ahead of me, and it filled me with dread. I’d chosen the wrong path, and I knew it.

Telling my girlfriend, Emily, felt like admitting a guilty secret.

“I know everything looks great,” I confessed, “but I hate my job. I want to work for myself. I want to build something. I need to create.”

Emily just smiled and said, “By the time you’re 30, you’ll have quit your job and be doing whatever it is you want to be doing.”

So I married her.

Leaping from the day job.

It’s thanks to Emily’s unwavering support and optimism that Conker exists at all – and still exists 12 years later.

And, of course, she was right. She’s always right. Just a few days after my 30th birthday, it happened exactly as she’d predicted.

In April 2014, I nervously told my boss, “Thanks for everything, but I’m handing in my notice to set up Dorset’s first gin distillery.”

Jaws dropped. The same look spread across the pub that evening when I told my friends. “Gin?!” they replied.

The idea was simple. The execution? I’d figure that out later.

I had no money, no experience, and no clue where to start. But I did have one powerful truth that kept me moving forward:

If I don’t do this, someone else will.

Creating the Dorset Dry Gin.

It was tempting to think that Dorset’s first gin needed to be something radically new — a bold flavour twist to stand out from the crowd and the big brands that dominated the shelves.

But I knew gin didn’t need reinventing. Gin was doing just fine.

People weren’t looking for a revolution in flavour — they were looking for handcrafted quality and a meaningful connection to our home county and the people who produce it.

Conker’s uniqueness wouldn’t come from novelty. It would come from our approach — from being transparent, people-focused, and committed to what we call Genuine Craft: We do what we say we do.

The Dorset Dry would be a proper gin. Classic in style, but not just another London Dry in Dorset trousers. It would use botanicals from Dorset, founding the gin in its home county.

Our kitchen distillery.

The recipe for the Dorset Dry Gin was created on a little one-litre copper alembic pot still in the kitchen of our rented house in Christchurch, Dorset.

We even registered that tiny kitchen with HMRC (our landlord didn’t mind!).

We started at the very beginning by developing a foundation of London Dry botanicals to give the gin its proper, crisp G&T backbone, before introducing plants that grow wild across Dorset.

And for the neutral grain spirit base? We popped to Lidl. I got a few odd looks as I wheeled yet another trolley piled high with bottles of vodka through the checkout on a Saturday morning.

After three months of rigorous (and very enjoyable) testing with friends and family, we finally landed on recipe 38 — a blend of ten botanicals in all:

Seven London Dry usual suspects — juniper berries, coriander seed, angelica root, cassia bark, orris root, Seville orange peel, and lime peel.

And three botanicals from Dorset — gorse flowers, marsh samphire, and elderberries.

The result? A gin that’s true to a crisp, dry G&T, but with a bright, herbaceous and refreshing twist that could only come from Dorset.

That first year.

It was a whole year from ditching the day job to selling the first bottle of Conker Dorset Dry Gin.

Emily kept the lights on with her teaching job at the local school. We had no mortgage, no kids — and, looking back, a rare window of opportunity to take a punt on this big dream.

“We’ll give it a couple of years,” she said.

The to-do list was terrifying. We needed to raise some money. We needed a recipe, a brand, bottles and labels — and, critically, a licence from HMRC. And for that, we needed a proper premises. A home for our distillery.

We wanted to be rooted in our home town of Southbourne — not hidden away on an industrial estate or out in the sticks. Conker needed to be part of the community.

Building us a home.

So, in 2014, we took a deep breath and signed a three-year lease on a tiny industrial unit in Southbourne for £5,000 a year — before a single bottle had been sold. That was a sobering moment.

That little workshop became home to our first still: a 30-litre copper alembic pot still. I recruited my dad to plumb it in, we made the place watertight, and got ready for the all-important visit from HMRC.

And that was it. We had our Distillers licence. We had a bonded warehouse. Conker was officially in business — thirty litres at a time.

Crossing the start line.

After a year of touting Conker Gin at every food event and festival across Dorset — and not being able to sell a single drop — we had a long list of folks eager to stock our gin.

In April 2015, we finally crept across the start line with a £1,500 loan from my dad to buy our first pallet of bottles.

It was still very much a one-man band: foraging botanicals, distilling tiny 60-bottle batches, funnel-filling and hand-labelling every single bottle.

Every Thursday, I’d load up the boot of my VW Golf and do a lap of Dorset — sharing out our limited supply among the hundreds of excited wine shops, bars, and hotels that had backed us from the start.

With the appetite and excitement for our gin growing fast, that tiny little distillery soon began to feel smaller and smaller.

Then there was two of us.

July 2015 brought the birth of our first daughter, Beau. Life couldn’t have been better — or busier.

Just in the nick of time, Fred came to the rescue.

Fred’s my best mate from school. He saw something in what I was building down in a double garage in Dorset, and — for reasons still slightly unclear — decided to join me.

He left a solid career as a clinical scientist with the NHS to help Conker the world with me.

So yes, Conker has officially ruined two perfectly decent careers.

But thank God he did. From that day on, we’ve been a formidable team.

Just when I thought I’d already won the lottery — escaping the day job to start my own business — I got to do it with my best mate by my side.

10 years since.

It’s been quite a journey since those first 30-litre batches in a Southbourne garage.

Jess joined the team not long after — originally as a helping hand on the bottling line. Today, she’s our Head Distiller, the guardian of every drop that leaves the building.

From that tiny workshop, we’ve grown into our enormous home here at the Conker Distillery — complete with our 500-litre column still, “Big Bertha”, and a skyline of towering tanks. It’s the grand vision I had back in 2014, but one we had to patiently build, bottle by bottle.

We now welcome hundreds of people every Friday and Saturday night for our Distillery Tours and our Tap Room for drinks and street food.

Thank you.

Our spirits now sit proudly on thousands of shelves and back bars across the Country — from independent stores to the likes of Waitrose and M&S and Fortnum & Mason.

But that’s just the stuff you can see. What really gets me is what people say — the love and admiration we feel from our Conker family.

That’s what I’m most proud of.

Creating a product is the easy part. Building a brand that people love — that’s the holy grail.

And the best part? We’re only just getting started.