Glendalough: what does it take to be a professional gin forager?
While most people are glued to some form of technology most of the day, Glendalough Distillery’s forager, Geraldine Kavanagh, lives a vastly different experience.
Kavanagh has always been enamoured with nature and being outdoors, which she credits somewhat to her childhood growing up in County Wicklow in Ireland.
Since then, she has turned her passion for nature into a full-time career as forager for Glendalough Distillery. Kavanagh forages the botanicals for the Irish distillery’s award-winning gins.
She recalls how she built her knowledge and skillset to become a professional forager: “I don’t think you can study foraging yet,” she shares on the latest episode of The Spirits Business Podcast. “You can do weekend courses, but I don’t think there’s any official course.
“There was no internet as well [when I started], so I would rely on books mainly at the start – and there weren’t even that many. I was just self-taught.
“I think because I had all of that experience of being with plants, of observing them, that I was able to learn the rest quite easily. I know lots of plants and some plants are, of course, poisonous, and some are edible. So, it was leaning which ones were edible and getting the confidence to taste them.”
Glendalough’s flagship gin is the Glendalough Wild Botanical Irish Gin. Kavanagh forages wild botanicals in the Wicklow mountains and surrounding areas throughout the year, which are brought to the distillery to be used mere hours after being foraged.
It’s a labour of love, as Kavanagh explains, but one she sees as totally worth it to bottle up a real sense of place in each batch of the gin. Finding botanicals that could be sourced throughout the year to create consistency was a challenge.
“It took myself and Rowdy [Ciaran ‘Rowdy’ Rooney], our head distiller, about nine months thinking: ‘How can we scale up? How can we make things easier? How can we make a gin that we could actually make some money [from] and not only be making a few bottles?’” Kavanagh recalls. “So, we chose botanicals from each of the seasons to create a recipe that would express Wicklow in one sip across four seasons.
“So, we chose spring, summer, autumn and winter botanicals, and then what we decided to do was to harvest and distil those, and just put them to one side, and put them all together at the end of the year. So, that’s how the Wild Botanical Gin is made. It takes from about March till around now [October] to create this year’s gin.”
Kavanagh goes into further detail during the episode about the challenges of foraging botanicals year-round – and also, surprisingly, how easy it can be.
She also shares some useful tips for anyone keen to step away from the digital world and embrace some foraging of their own.
The full episode with Kavanagh is available to listen to now on all major streaming platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. It is also available for free via the link below and on Acast.
On last week’s episode, Zachary Poelma, senior vice-president of commercial intelligence at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, shared the latest on-the-ground insights into the spirits industry in the US.
Another recent guest was Emily Harris, founder and director of award-winning PR agency May Fox Communications, who discussed in detail how brands can harness the power of PR to succeed.
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