Forgan Distillery
The camera switches between the front and the rear views every 20 seconds, there’s currently a third camera on the work being done on the construction of the new distillery building, it's more interesting when actual work is going on of course. The work is a bit intermittent, but it’s getting there, the cement has been put down, and a couple of courses of brick work have gone up.
Buried under the concrete pad of the distillery is a stainless-steel time capsule. Sealed inside are 20 years of photographs of me, my wife and my cat and some music that’s important to me on a USB stick. There’s a photo of me, Viking Martin and Solar Dave who built the new distillery building, there’s one each of the bottle labels and a 30ml bottle of each product in there as well along with a letter to the finder with some basic history about me, my life, and the history of the distillery. Before sealing it up I threw in a load of silica gel capsules to help keep it dry in there and wrapped the whole thing in 50 or so layers of industrial plastic.
Now that it’s sealed and buried there’s some other stuff I would have liked to have included, but that ship has sailed, so maybe I’ll just do another one.
I'm based in rural Lancashire amongst cereal crops – in the back field this year they’re growing maize, some of it has been tagged for my Forgan 48 bourbon whiskey. Around here there’s also vegetable farming, horses, rural life in general, and an abundance of fresh air. From my garden – the rear view - there's nothing but a few fields some trees, the sea and then Ireland across the sea. Out front is a residential but quiet lane where you'll see horses, the occasional horse-drawn buggy, farm machinery, cyclists, hikers, and me wandering back from the pub drunk occasionally, usually on a Friday around 7:30 and Saturdays at some point.
Cam views are the lane out front, the view out back, the bug motel, the garden, sunsets, sunrise, and rural life. The Chilean Pine or monkey puzzle tree you see in the field view, was a birthday present in 2006, given to me in a pot by my wife, it was about 30cm tall, or 12 inches for you American folk. It's around 6.6 metres tall now (22 feet) and is an excellent specimen of a monkey puzzle and indeed my most prized possession. There was a cherry tree in the other corner but that’s gone to make way for the new building. There’s a small wind turbine on the right, this feeds a battery array and runs in conjunction with a solar array, on sunny windy days apparently, they feed energy back into the national grid.
There are a lot of birds of prey around here, kestrels, peregrine falcons, sparrow hawks, barn owls, small owls, buzzards and 3 or 4 species of bats. We also get the Euro Fighter test flying over the bay, BAE Warton is visible from the garden (I used to work there last century) When the Southport and Blackpool airshows are on, I get a free viewing of the airplanes which is great.
The Forgan Distillery gets its name from William Forgan, born in Fife, Scotland in 1626. William Forgan was the founder of the hamlet of Forgan, near St Andrews, and I'm a direct descendant. It has been family tradition that every generation one boy gets the middle name Forgan, in my generation it was me.
It took me over a year of applying for a full distiller’s license instead of the easier to obtain rectification license, which allows me to create alcohol from scratch instead of buying it in, therefor allowing me absolute control over the quality and integrity of my products and really emphasising the importance of handcrafted, high-quality produce. Forgan Distillery prides itself on honesty and integrity, and the process of learning, experimenting and continuous improvement.
If you’ve got any questions drop a line to hello [at] forgandistillery.com
Forgan Distillery