Since the beinning
It began in a laboratory,
not a barn
Three scientists, a father and a son, one small still in Shropshire, and sixty‑two botanicals that all had to earn their place.
Most craft gin opens with the countryside. A field, a hedgerow, a family name in a serif typeface. Ours opens somewhere less romantic and, we would argue, more interesting: a laboratory bench.
pHure was founded by three scientists. Between them their working lives had covered natural product extraction and identification, drug discovery, chemical synthesis, analytical science and commercialisation — which is a formal way of saying they had spent decades learning what a plant actually contains, how to get it out intact, and how to prove what you have when you are finished.
When people with that training start distilling, they do not stop asking questions.
They weigh things. They write things down. They run the same botanical three ways to find out which one tastes right rather than which one sounds best on a label.
“The romance is still there. It is simply measured first.”
Tim, Elaine & Andrew Evans
That is where the name comes from, and the flask, and the pH scale up the neck of every bottle. None of it is decoration. It is the shape of how the gin is actually made.
The FOunders
Five disciplines.
Nothing about pHure was a hobby that got out of hand. Every part of the process came from somebody’s working life.
Extraction
Natural product extraction and identification — getting a compound out of a plant without damaging it, and knowing exactly what you have.
discovery
Drug discovery — the discipline of testing an idea properly before believing it.
synthesis
Chemical synthesis — understanding how ingredients behave together, not just apart.
analysis
Analytical science — measurement, repeatability, and a record of every batch.
commerce
Commercialisation — because a good spirit that never leaves the still helps nobody.
Family Run Business
Still the same three people.
Tim, Elaine and Andrew run pHure between them. The method is being kept by the
people who set it.
pHure had been a Shropshire secret: artisan markets, good local pubs, a handful of wholesale accounts. They wanted it on shelves and back bars across the country, without turning it into something made by machines in a shed the size of a runway.
So the batches stayed small, the dates stayed handwritten, and the record of what went into each one stayed exactly as obsessive as it had always been. What changed was the packaging, the reach, and the willingness to tell people why any of it matters.
Shropshire
Small on purpose.
There is a size at which a distillery stops being able to answer questions about itself. We have deliberately not reached it.
Being small means we know which supplier sent which botanical, and when. It means the still runs on electricity we generate here, and the heat from cooling goes back into the building rather than out of a vent. It means the packaging our raw ingredients arrive in gets reused before it gets recycled.
It also means you will still find us at artisan markets around the county, pouring for people one at a time. That is not nostalgia. It is the fastest honest feedback there is.
Method
Four steps, written down every time.
01
Source
Botanicals from suppliers we can name, chosen for sustainability before price. If we cannot trace it, we do not buy it.
02
Maccrate
Sixty-two botanicals, weighed and rested. The ratios are recorded, not remembered — which is why batch nine tastes like batch one.
03
Distil
A small copper still, run on power generated on site. Cuts made by taste and confirmed by measurement, in that order.
04
Fill & write
Bottled, tagged and dated by hand. Batch numbers are filled in, not printed, because there are few enough of them to write.
The short version
What we do when
nobody is checking.
None of the following is a campaign. It is just how the distillery is set
up, and it has been from the start.
Power
The still runs on electricity we generate on site.
Heat
Cooling heat is captured and put back to work rather than vented.
Sourcing
Botanicals from suppliers we can name, chosen for sustainability first.
packaging
Raw-ingredient packaging is reused and recycled as a matter of course.
Waste
Spent botanicals leave the building as something useful, not as landfill.
Community
We co-sponsor charitable events across the county.
EIGHT CORE GINS
Now taste the arguement.
Eight core gins and a special release, each made the same way in the same small still.
