Rock & Rye: How Doghouse Distillery is bringing bourbon to Battersea

What do you picture when you think of a whisky distillery? The crystal clear streams and heather-strewn hills of the Highlands? Or maybe it’s a whisk(e)y distillery, a bourbon still barn out on the range and balmy, hazy days.

What you probably won’t be picturing is an industrial estate tucked away in Battersea, south west London.

The capital may be the home of many craft breweries and gin distilleries, but it’s never been the home of whiskey. Doghouse Distillery is hoping to change that. Founded by husband-and-wife combo Braden and Katherine Saunders, it’s taking a rock-and-roll approach to distilling whiskey in the Big Smoke, an end-to-end grain-to-bottle process built from the ground up with a DIY punk ethos and an aim to take on the big bourbon makers.

Independent from the whiskey heritage brands, Doghouse Distillery does things a bit differently. There are no cigars and smoking jackets here — the Foo Fighters blast out of the small office speakers above the distillery warehouse, with walls covered floor to ceiling in hard rock posters — Soundgarden, Led Zeppelin, riffmakers and renegades. It’s here where we met Braden.

“It’s edgy, unconventional for our markets,” he says, settling into a cracked leather armchair.

“You look at whiskey, and we've already had a couple of people turn their nose up. It’s non-traditional, it’s grungy.”

It’s an aesthetic that carries over to the Doghouse bottle art — the distillery’s Debt Collector range of moonshines and first whisky are adorned with a skeletal motif that’d make Iron Maiden’s Eddie blush.

“I used to run beer tastings and stand up and say, ‘it's not about craft’. If Budweiser makes an incredible beer and we all drink it, it's about the company you’re in, the spirit. It's just about the moment and where you are. What you are drinking then becomes secondary to who you are with,” he says.

“We love music and we have a certain type of personality. We want to get that out into the brand. And yes, that's not always everyone's cup of tea.”

A new take on tradition

Braden and the Doghouse team are looking to remove some of the stuffiness associated with the high-end whisky world, and part of that comes with a transparency into their processes. In a move that would be almost unheard of in the whisky world, its Debt Collector range includes new-make, unaged spirit, as well as 1-year old and 2-year old ‘Moonshines’, alongside the freshly-bottled 3-year Debt Collector Whiskey — the youngest a spirit can be and still be marketed in the UK as a whiskey.

It offers a fascinating insight into the evolution and taste development of a whiskey, letting Doghouse fans join the team every step of the way from conception through the maturation of liquid.

“Now, not everyone's going to order that in a bar,” says Braden of the surprisingly smooth, unique unaged moonshine.

“And not everyone's going to have it at home. But why aren't we talking about it? It’s the big boys setting the tone — some people might not like that, it might turn them off buying their older stuff.

“But with our drinkers it's almost like they're waiting for the next vintage, you know? We bought out the whiskey, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, what's next?’ Again, we're in London. There's no real tradition of this. So we've now got a blank canvas.

“We sell it one: because of necessity, and two: because it's bloody good.”

Anti-establishment independents

Saunders and his fellow Doghouse founder (and wife), Katherine, are no strangers to taking on established names. Hailing from Australia, Saunders and his British spouse opened Brisbane’s first craft beer pub in 2011, taking on Foster’s Carlton and United, and XXXX’s (aka 'Fourex') Castelmaine Perkins breweries.

But being independent does bring its difficulties.

“It's more a weakness at the start than a strength, because you don't have a big body behind you,” admits Saunders.

“What you do is you just find those guys that care about that independent spirit — and there are more and more of them as the world's evolved into this faceless high street! But it takes a while. It's a lot of years and a lot of pounding pavement to find what I call true ambassadors.”

London, and the UK generally, has as many lovers of a good dram as anywhere else in the world, and is a culinary hotspot. So why hasn’t London made a mark on the whiskey landscape previously?

“A big part of it is, I think London on the whiskey map, it's not sexy, right? Scotland, the highlands, it's sexy. But London? ‘Oh, you get your water from the Thames,’” laughs Braden.

“London, it's that global centre, but it has a bit of a rough undercarriage to it, and that suits us too! Because we're urban, we're industrial, we're not the Highlands of Scotland or Ireland with the streams and the ‘pristine conditions = perfect whiskey’ mentality. But we take our water too and we filter it until it's perfect — there's no barriers to us. Reverse osmosis water is the purest water on the planet, even more so than a mountain stream.”

Part of it, Braden believes, comes from that very British condition of being self-effacing, with the Aussie able to shine a light on London’s whiskey potential in a way that a home-grown spirit fan might not be able to.

“The real story, the global opportunity for us, is about bringing some real British provenance. And you know what, me being an Aussie, people take me more seriously. I'm flying the British flag, I’m not even from here, trying to make a point!

“There needs to be a little more of championing Britain and actually being proud of that.”

Born in London, inspired by the bourbon states

The Doghouse Distillery Debt Collector Whiskey may be born in London, but there’s a traditionally-American influence to the taste without a doubt.

“We want that little bit more purity in bourbon — you're looking for a slightly cleaner profile, and that's because some of what is in the fermenter you don't want, so you go slightly higher, and basically that then gives us 75%-ish ABV, it varies, but of new make, which we then dilute to 62.5% for the barrel.”

“We will use water which has a level of salinity in it, for the same reason that we use salt in food. It helps in the whole. It's like not putting butter in your cooking. So we use a little bit like that. Kentucky is all about limestone, so they have a high level of limescale in their water. So again, arguably, water from here is not that bad for bourbon creation.”

Braden describes the flavour as having a “beautiful cherry, zesty nose and up front, there's a fair bit of vanilla and other things on the nose, but when you first put it in your mouth, there's a lot of crisp cherry from the wood, caramel, vanilla spice, which is oak driven and corn driven.”

“It’s become more of that traditional bourbon,” on the journey from unaged to its 3-and-a-bit year bottled state.

The liquid is winning over fans from bourbon’s traditional home, too — American visitors to the distillery have been blown away, and enjoy the comparisons to their locally-distilled products.

“We had some guys in here the other night from Colorado, and they bought some bourbon, we gave them some of ours,” says Braden. “And there's a unique difference. And I thought this is cool, actually — this is its own thing.

“It's like music — you can play the same chord a million different ways. It's about finding our spot, and that's our sort of expression or song, if you like.”

One unexpected benefit of Doghouse’s unlikely location could prove a unique distilling advantage, too — London’s particular micro-climate, and its effect on the cask ageing process.

“I also think of all the places in Britain, London is the most suited to whiskey distilling,” suggests Braden.

“It's its own little micro climate here. It has the latent heat of the society. Even in the Home Counties we wouldn't get the fluctuation. Fluctuation means wood in, out, expansion, contraction, which increases maturation.

“The verdict’s out on whether it actually works, because in five more years, people will be able to judge our eight year old whiskey and score whatever it is out of 10. As you know, Kentucky is in that valley, and it's cold at night, hot in the day, so they probably naturally can age things faster than us. But again, in summer, they're extremely hot, whereas we have this hot/cold climate all year.”

Debt in the name, but not in the price

In the process of developing their own-brand speakeasy bar space, Braden and the Doghouse team are keen to bring Debt Collector to the masses. And they’re pricing with that in mind, at £49.95 a bottle for the debut whiskey.

“We don't want to be just for the premium or elite punter. We want everyone to be able to drink this. £50 is a psychological price point. We want to keep it relatively inclusive, which means not exclusive, champagne style craziness.”

As for any potential black-sheep branding? Doghouse is ready to wear it as a badge of honour.

“We're not well known enough to be a black sheep, but we might end up there,” says Braden.

“If you can find us in nice bars, Michelin star restaurants, or just the local boozer, that would be a dream, that would be my goal. And then at the end of that, I'm happy, I can just rinse, repeat!”

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