Craft distilling on the Odense waterfront

The Odense waterfront is not, on first glance, the obvious home for a craft distillery. It is a working harbour — low and grey, mostly grain silos and old fishing sheds, with the wind blowing in cold off the canal from October to March. There are no postcard windmills. There is no copper-domed visitor centre. There is, instead, a long brick warehouse with a blue door, and behind it two patient copper stills, and a small team of people who are, on any given Tuesday morning in February, almost certainly making something slowly.

This is a quiet attempt to explain why we are here, and what craft distilling actually means once the marketing language is stripped out. It is also, in part, a long answer to the question we hear most often at the tasting room — but how do you actually make this? — which deserves a slower reply than ninety minutes and a flight of glasses can usually allow.

Why Odense

We chose Odense Havn for three reasons, in this order: water, space, and silence. The water that runs through our condensers is drawn from the Funen aquifer, soft and almost tasteless, which suits the kind of bright, restrained gin we wanted to make. The space — a former chandlery — gave us room for two stills, a small mash tun, a maturation cellar, and the long wooden table on which our labels are still hand-numbered. And the silence, the most overlooked ingredient of all, is what lets us hear when a cut is running clean.

There is a particular sound a copper still makes in the last hour of a gin run, somewhere between a hum and a sigh. If you cannot hear it, you cannot catch it. Distilleries built next to motorways or airports cannot, in our view, make the same kind of spirit. Whether this is romanticism or chemistry we leave for the reader to decide. We only know what we hear when we run a still on a winter afternoon, and we know that we hear it more clearly here than we would anywhere else.

Odense itself is a small city — about two hundred thousand people, give or take — with a long maritime history and a comfortable indifference to fashion. It suits us. We are not trying to be Copenhagen. We are not trying to be Edinburgh. We are trying to make five spirits very well and then to make them again, slightly better, the year after.

The process, in seven steps

People often ask, politely, what we actually do all day. The honest answer is: we wait. But here is the rough order of operations for a single batch of our flagship craft gin:

1. Source the base spirit. A neutral grain spirit, redistilled by us in-house to lift it to bottling strength.
2. Weigh the botanicals. Juniper from Macedonia, coriander from Bulgaria, angelica from Saxony, and Funen sea buckthorn. Eleven botanicals in all.
3. Macerate overnight. The botanicals sit in the base spirit for sixteen hours at cellar temperature.
4. Charge the still. The wash is moved into the smaller of our two copper pots, and the heat is brought up slowly over the course of an hour.
5. Make the cut. The first run — heads — is set aside. We bottle only the heart, the middle and cleanest portion of the distillate.
6. Rest the spirit. The cut is rested for a fortnight in glass, which softens the texture without dulling the aromatics.
7. Bottle by hand. Every bottle is filled, corked, labelled and numbered on the wooden table at the back of the building.

Our stills

Our two pot stills — a 300-litre and a 150-litre — were hand-beaten in Bavaria and delivered by lorry in the winter of 2018. We named them, eventually, after the two cats who had been living in the warehouse before we moved in. Copper, as any distiller will tell you, is not just an aesthetic choice. It binds with sulphurous compounds during distillation and pulls them out of the final spirit. It also rewards an attentive operator: the colour of the copper changes with the run, the smell of the room changes with the cut, and the still itself sings, very faintly, when things are going well.

A still does not lie. If the cut is wrong, the spirit is wrong. There is nothing you can do later to fix it.

We make a small ceremony of the first cut of a new run. Whoever is on shift writes the date, the time and a single tasting note in the still ledger. The ledger now runs to almost two hundred pages.

Tasting notes

The Smallcraft house gin opens with juniper and lifted sea buckthorn — that faintly saline northern brightness — and settles into a long, slightly peppery, coriander-led finish. It is built for sipping at room temperature, but it holds up beautifully in a martini stirred for forty seconds and not a moment longer. Our tranebær gin, made from hand-picked Danish cranberries in late autumn, is darker, slightly tart, almost bitter-orange in character, and pairs astonishingly well with smoked Funen herring.

The absinthe, a winter project, is the one most likely to surprise you. We use Danish grand wormwood, anise from Andalusia and fennel from southern France, and we distil it in the smaller of our two stills over six gentle hours. The result is paler than most commercial absinthes, less aggressively herbal, and louches into a soft northern green when you add cold water. It is intended to be sipped slowly, the traditional way, over a sugar cube and a slotted spoon.

The whisky and the rum are both works in progress — which is, perhaps, the most honest thing you can say about any whisky and any rum. Our first cask of single-malt was filled in 2019 and will not see a glass until 2027 at the earliest. Our rum, fermented from raw Danish sugar in the old Munkebo stout vats, currently rests in ex-bourbon barrels along the north wall of the cellar. We taste them, quietly, every three months. We will release them when they are ready and not a day before.

If any of this has piqued your interest, you might enjoy our recent long note on cranberry gin, or read more about how the distillery came together on the about page.

Smallcraft spirits are intended for adults over the age of eighteen. Please drink responsibly, and never on a January morning when the canal has frozen — that is what coffee is for.