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Jordan Lunn has been around alcohol for most of his life and no, as far as I’m aware he’s not an alcoholic! His mother Sharon Lunn worked in the pub trade and instilled in a young Jordan a fascination with distilling, added to the fact that his uncle was a home brewer, he spent his teenage years distilling spirits in his bedroom as opposed to playing football in the streets with his mates like most teenage boys!
This pastime led to an expansion of his distilling hobby, and he would make various spirits for friends and family. I would imagine that at some point his mother suggested that he should look to expand this hobby into something bigger and this led to him purchasing an old 1930’s camper van off eBay with his friend Dean Nolan, in order to turn it into a mobile bar to sell and promote his spirits at food events and festivals around the country.
In 2017, they had a very successful year, which included picking up their first on-trade customer, that being a pub company with dozens of outlets. In the December of that year, Jordan decided to quit his job in sales in order to fully focus on developing his nascent business. As he has gone on record to explain, he had saved enough money to pay his bills for six months, so that was his time limit to get the business to a point where it would generate a big enough income that he wouldn’t have to return to being someone else’s wage slave. Thankfully for him, things seem to have worked out pretty well!
In 2018, Jordan opened his first distillery site in Netherton, with his mother Sharon and sister Taryn Darby joining the business to help with the growing demand for his gin. Sharon took on the responsibility for distilling as well as being the food and beverages manager, Taryn also handled distilling duties and was head of bar operations. The team was rounded off with Jordan’s brother-in-law Hamza Darby who is lead designer and bar manager along with Dean who is the distillery operations manager and lead distiller.
The initial focus of the distillery was on contract distilling for commercial clients, which has grown to the point that they produce spirits for around 50 different brands; however, they still found the time to release their own gin range called Dr Eamers. As you will know, theses days it’s not enough just to produce a great tasting gin and the Dr Eamers range does indeed taste great, but it also has to stand out from the myriad of other bottles of gin on the shelves and this is where the Dr Eamers Gin is unique, in that each bottle is hand decorated or daubed, or splattered with paint, thus you could say that each one is an individual work of art in its own right. Given how many bottles of their gins they are selling one imagines that there must be a 24 hour shift of paint splattering going on at the distillery!
I don’t know if Jordan has always had a desire to produce whisky, it does seem like that that is often the case with a number of people that set up gin distilleries, but after moving to a large premises in Rowley Regis in 2020, which probably has a larger painting room! It also allowed them to install a pair of copper Alembic stills and begin laying down casks of whisky the following year. Now, given Jordan’s obsession with innovation, there was no way he going to distil just any old whisky, no, given their relatively small set up, this has enabled the team to source 100% English barley of a variety of strains including heritage varieties from dedicated farms, which is then floor malted to their specification.
From there they mash, brew and ferment in small batches whilst experimenting with a variety of yeast strains and pretty much tailor each new make spirit for the type of cask that it will be filled into. This adherence to distilling whisky differently to other distilleries extends to them not actually re-distilling their feints and foreshots. In fact, they just dispose of it, rather than recycling it, which, although somewhat wasteful, I guess ensures the purity of their spirit. This spirit is then filled into a variety of different sized virgin, first and second fill American and European ex-Bourbon, rum and wine casks.
Their first Whisky was bottled on the 10th August 2024, with bespoke packaging that celebrating the Black Country and the Birmingham area. This inaugural release comprised four single cask bottlings, with each cask selected to represent one of the four founder members of the distillery, those being a first fill ex-Bourbon cask, a re-coopered ex-Bourbon quarter cask, an ex-Plantation Caribbean rum cask and finally a fresh Oloroso quarter cask release. The fifth and final bottling was called the Matriarch, and it is a skilful blend of those four casks which has been dedicated to his now late mother Sharon. As Jordan has mentioned, that if it wasn’t for his mother there would be no chance, he would have ended up making the first ever whisky to be produced in the West Midlands. And fittingly he delayed its release until the 11th July 2025, as that would have been Sharon’s 66th birthday.
Having had the opportunity to taste all five of those releases I can confidently claim that the team are creating unique and extremely high quality whisky!
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