It started at the end of 2020 in our old site in Penryn, in a space about a quarter of the size of where we are now, though at the time we walked in and thought, quite sincerely, “this place is absolutely massive, we are never going to fill this.” Bless us.
A normal day back then looked like filling bottles with a jug and funnel, sticking labels on by hand with a little wooden jig while rocking the distillery baby in her bouncy chair with a toe, and trying to keep on top of teetering piles of assembled cardboard boxes that never seemed to stay stacked for long. There was a single shelf holding neat rows of our one product at the time, hi Falmouth Dry, and everything else felt like a constant shuffle of making space where there wasn’t any.
Daisy would dash in to distil around her day job, and I was juggling emails and production with a new baby, both of us trying to squeeze something that felt like a full-time business into evenings and weekends. We kept circling the same problem, which anyone who’s ever started something will recognise: if I could just give this more time it could become my full-time job, but I can’t give it more time until it’s already there. So we just… kept going. Late nights, early mornings, weekends.... you know the drill.
At that point, the ambition was fairly simple. We thought it would be nice for Loveday to be behind the bars at our favourite pubs in Falmouth. And we wanted to make an income working for ourselves. That felt like enough.
The hardest bit, without question, was wearing every single hat. The first few months ran on adrenaline, excitement, coffee, and, evenings hydrated with our own gin. We remember trying to get the very first batch out the door, confidently thinking we’d bash it out before tea time, only to still be there at 2am after realising we’d ordered the wrong filter for the bottling machine and had no choice but to go back to the jug and funnel.
What nearly didn’t work, in the end, was the timeline. We were running out of cash because everything took longer than we expected. It took 63 goes to finalise the recipe. Label design and printing dragged. Chloe having her baby at just about the same time as we had planned to launch, which, in a surprise to no one but Chloe, slowed things down. We were paying for the distillery site with no income for a good five months longer than planned, which, looking back, was slightly unhinged.
We had underestimated the sheer manpower needed to do every single part of production, but what kept us going was the fact that we were having such a jolly nice time doing it. We had wanted to work together for years, so there was something genuinely giddy about finally being in the same space, building something of our own, even if it was slightly chaotic. That, and a kind of unwavering “this can’t not work” optimism that probably only comes from very little sleep and the general strangeness of lockdown upending all our normal lives and routines.
Then the first batch sold out within 24 hours! It was only 96 bottles, but it was income, and more importantly it was proof. That was the first moment where we looked at each other and thought, this is actually going to work. Not long after, Baileys became our first wholesale stockist, and that felt like another quiet shift, something starting to take shape beyond just us.
Now, things look pretty different!
A normal week now has Daisy out on the road chatting to customers, or in the production room with Toto, plotting recipes and distilling, while I’m doing this side of it, writing, designing, telling the story, hosting tastings, trying to keep everything moving forward. Production itself feels smoother, largely because Toto and Katie are running it, and because we finally have proper space for everything. Even something as simple as having all of our stock on site still feels like a small luxury. We used to store pallets of bottles elsewhere and have them delivered one by one, which was both a faff and expensive, and now it just… works. hurrah!
There are a million things to do and not enough hours in the day, and I suspect that part hasn’t really changed, but we’re better at reminding ourselves to lean into the process of getting there rather than waiting for some imaginary point where everything feels “done.”
The biggest difference is probably quite a boring answer, but it’s the truth. It’s working. It’s properly working now. We’re growing, we’re moving forward, we’re becoming a good employer, which still feels slightly surreal when we think back to those first few months.
What hasn’t changed is our enjoyment of doing it together, and the fact that we get to be creative as part of our actual work, which still feels like a novelty! What we didn’t fully anticipate, though, is the community that has grown around it. The regulars who we post bottles to every month, the locals who come and have a drink in the taproom, the moments where someone tells you that one of your bottles has become their “my gin.” Those things are special in a way that’s quite hard to explain.
In short, the sleepless nights and constant sense of juggling a bit too much has paid off. (is paying off?) We feel it most clearly when the distillery is full, during tastings or events, when we're talking directly to the people who have chosen to spend their evening with us.
There are small things that still ground it all as well. The smell of molasses when a rum ferment is on. Handwriting a note to go into every online order. Those little rituals that haven’t changed, even as everything else has grown around them!
If you’ve been part of it, whether you bought one of those first 96 bottles or found us somewhere along the way, you’re part of this as much as we are- Thank you!!
