What goes into developing a distillery?

 Just the same ingredients that go into any one-of-a-kind recipe: experience, passion, expertise, craftsmanship, hard work, a lot of humour, and some degree of insanity.

What makes the new distillery different to other gin distilleries?

Our distillery isn’t a random factory somewhere out there, but rather a facility where gin is distilled by real people who are passionately devoted to their craft and its very essence.

Has Monkey 47 gin changed since 2010?

A product is either perfect or simply not good.

In our view, there has been no need for change. It sounds boring, but same people, same ingredients, same recipe. We did not set out to create a ‘brand’, but rather the best gin possible. We set out to produce aromas, not alcohol. For that reason, we shouldn’t be mistaken for typical ‘spirit producers’ or ‘liquor entrepreneurs’: we are distillers to the core, and, like a perfumier, constantly on the hunt for aromas and fragrances.

We have followed age-old traditions in the learning of our craft, and we immerse ourselves every day in the finer points of the honourable art of distillation – not just as an intellectual pursuit, but rather in a very concrete and practical manner, “hands-on” in the distillery. It´s not about change, it’s about quality!

Monkey 47 gin has a really interesting history. Can you expand on where the name comes from?

In memoriam of the enigmatic character of Montgomery Collins, from whom our Schwarzwald Dry Gin originates, we have named our Schwarzwald Dry Gin Monkey 47. His childhood as the son of a diplomat in East Asia, his military career among the ruins of Berlin, his sponsorship for an egret monkey, and his late-adopted home in the Black Forest supply the autobiographical background for a recipe that represents an audacious combination of guess what – 47 botanicals.