FAQ'S

Blue Slate Gin/Jin Llechen Las is distilled in the mountains of Snowdonia in our tiny Distillery in the lakeside town of Bala, in the Snowdonia National Park

We do! We are Jess & Lew, husband & wife team & founders of Dinorwig Distillery. We carry out every process involved in the production of our gin from distilling to bottling & labelling, marketing & shipping. Many of our botanicals are also grown in the grounds of the distillery & we use water from our own mountain well which has to be maintained to strict standards.

You can buy our gin direct from us we also sell through a number of discerning retailers in North Wales & beyond, send us an email at fiona@blueslategin.co.uk & we will see if there is a retailer near you.

Yes!  The distillery is situated at the back of STORI – our welsh specialist drinks shop and bar.

Our distillery is beautiful, but oh so tiny!  We are too tiny to ‘tour’ but have a viewing window where you can sit in our bar with a G&T (or a welsh craft beer/cider etc) and view the distillery. For the full story - please check out our Facebook & Instagram

Jess spent many hours over many months exploring the flavour profile of juniper & painstakingly distilling a range of native botanicals to identify which to use. Lew had to sample a lot of gin! Eventually, they found the combination that they felt reflected the essential components of a contemporary London Dry gin, while also capturing some of the essence of the Dinorwig flora & imbibing something of the rugged beauty of this area. Nothing is added after distillation other than our fresh, mountain well water.

In making our Original gin, we use juniper from Macedonia for its rich spicy notes; coriander seed from the UK for warm citrus tones; & dried angelica root from Poland for earthy undertones. We add seasoned Welsh oak bark from the Dinorwig woods & pick coriander seed, rosemary & bay leaves fresh from the garden; these botanicals are present in the aroma & throughout the sip. As lemons don’t grow well in the mountains, we needed to get creative to give our gin a tangy edge. We use coriander seed green from the garden to enhance the green herbal elements & locally sourced rhubarb to give an elderflower-citrus edge. Raw heather honey is sourced locally to soften the rhubarb & give a wild-flower hint at the end of each sip. Finally, we draw fresh mountain water direct from our own well to distil & blend the gin to 42% ABV.
Although we have not been able to source all the ingredients locally in the quantity that we need, we established the principle: use nothing that cannot be harvested in North Wales.

We craft our gin to our own unique recipes. Each tiny batch is started with a slow infusion of sustainably sourced botanicals in a quality British neutral grain spirit. While most gin mak-ers use either pot distillation or vapour infusion, we use a combination of the two methods.
We use only the very heart of the distillation run. Each distillation produces enough gin for just 65 standard size bottles per batch. Our gin is blended to drinking strength using pure mountain water; soft & sweet with perfect acidity levels. This water is filtered through slate & comes direct from our own well. Treated with care from start to finish, our gin is bottled, sealed & labelled on-site, by hand.

We enjoy this gin served long over lots of ice with a Premium Indian tonic & a slice of juicy orange. Our gin has a high botanical content & you may find that a single 25ml serve is as flavoursome as a typical 50ml double, making your gin last twice as long!

We currently make just under 2000 standard size bottles a year. We don’t have any intention of making much more, keeping Blue Slate Gin/Jin Llechen Las a pretty unique tipple.