Scilly Spirit distillery up for sale

Arthur and Hilary Miller have put their gin distillery on the Isles of Scilly, in southwest England, Scilly Spirit, up for sale with an asking price of £1.5 million (US$1.8m).

The Millers founded the distillery in 2019 and said the decision to leave the island for the mainland was not an easy decision to make, but the business is in a very healthy and strong position.

New buyers will walk into a “plug in and play” type of scenario, which will include all intellectual property rights, the webs, all social media handles, the recipes and full instructions to continue to make the gin in the same style. In addition, the distillery comes with a one-bedroom apartment.

Speaking to The Spirits Business, Arthur Miller said: “We just felt like this is a great time for a similar couple, a small company, or an existing brand owner that wants to add a strong brand to its portfolio, which is sitting on the first whisky ever made on the Isle of Scilly and also in a barrel ready to go. It’s certainly a very beautiful and delicate place to live and work and make your living – and that was our intention.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for a couple like us that might be sitting in a house in London that’s very desirable, but they don’t like what they’re doing anymore. This provides an opportunity for them to move to the islands and take on a plug-in-and-play business that is ready to go, with us assisting them for a period of months to make sure they’re up or running.

“Even for a brand owner where they can put staff in the flat upstairs who can run the thing and then develop it using their own connections and their own channels to build the brand even further, where we are operating at a fraction of the full capacity of the equipment that we have.

“So there’s definitely scope to scale this business up no problem at all.”

Miller said the addition of the apartment ticks the immediate challenge of finding accommodation on the island, which can be difficult.

He explained: “That’s how we operated for four years. Your commute to work is suddenly downstairs and not 20,000 miles in a car over the year. And then equally when you’re not working, you have all of the sea and tranquility and other things that you can do here in terms of beautiful coastal walks, getting on a boat and going to another Island and having a nice lunch, and whether you can have that delightful work-life balance.

“That is what this opportunity offers to someone, if they want it as we did.”

The business already has an excellent built-in distribution network and listings in the UK with retailers such as John Lewis, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, and online through Amazon and Master of Malt. It’s also available in Italy and conversations are already in place to take it to Canada and other markets in Europe.

Infrastructure – distillery equipment, stills, stainless steel storage tanks, bottling machine and the rest – is all in place, but additional costs for prospective buyers would include wet stock and dry goods such as bottles, packaging and labels.

The distillery’s Island Gin expression won a Master medal at The Spirits Business’ 2019 Gin Masters blind-tasting competition.

“I think it’s the time for another younger couple like us who seek the opportunity for a lifestyle change to come in and take the reins,” Miller added.

“We’ve got state-of-the-art equipment, and all the operation sides of the business, including connections and contacts, we would run alongside any new owner to make sure they’re familiar with our systems, and how we’ve achieved what we’ve achieved as a husband-and-wife team.

“It’s only five-years old and I think it punches extremely well above its weight. We’re not looking to have anything that would impact the existing distribution and the support that we have across the trade. This is about exploring if there is a couple or business that would like to add this to their portfolio and take it beyond the foundations we built.”