Warwickshire distillery toasts new partnership with hotel in Kenilworth

Published by

Peter Davison

Luke Weetman, Hazel Pilling, Georgina Mitchell, Richie Bartle

A hotel in Kenilworth is serving customers with four brand new gins – and they are being distilled just a couple of miles away from the venue.

Holiday Inn Kenilworth is offering the four gins from the Heritage range, which are made by East Chase Distillers based at East Chase Farm, off Chase Lane.

The two companies began working together after being introduced by the Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce and it is already proving to be a perfect match.

The hotel, which has recently refurbished its public spaces, is stocking Heritage’s London Dry, Citrus Orange, Rhubarb & Apple and Summer Fruits flavours and has already put in an order for more bottles just four weeks after they initially went on sale.

East Chase Distillers is the brainchild of Kenilworth School friends Luke Weetman and Richie Bartle and, after several years in the planning, they launched in November 2022.

The Distillery opens every Friday night to the public but is also producing gins for the corporate market. A new flavour, Winter Berries, is set to launch later this year and rums, whiskies and brandies will follow.

And Luke and Richie are delighted to see the products on offer at such a prominent hotel in Kenilworth.

Richie said: “We both decided we wanted to move into distilling over a chance conversation in a bar around seven years.

“There were a few hurdles in the way of us being able to launch – one being Covid – but we have overcome all of those and have invested in the best possible still from Germany and we’re making sure we use the very best ingredients.

“Gin distilling is quite a crowded market and there are some good ones in Warwickshire so we’ve had to differentiate ourselves.

“Part of that is the story behind the gins we are producing but also the fact that we are using the very best natural ingredients. We don’t add sugars or additives to our product and, coupled with using the best still, it creates a really smooth drink for our customers.”

Luke added: “It’s going phenomenally well at the Holiday Inn in Kenilworth and, when you talk about local suppliers, we are literally a couple of miles down the road – you could walk here if you wanted to!

“We’re really pleased to be here and it’s great to see it proving so popular.”
Georgina Mitchell is the business development manager for Bowling Green Asset Management, which operates the Holiday Inn Kenilworth.

She joined eight weeks ago and immediately reached out to the Chamber.

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Georgina said: “I was keen to network and to buy locally and when I spoke to the Chamber they suggested I talk to East Chase Distillery and I am delighted I did.

“I’ve only been in post for a couple of months but I see the importance of embedding yourself locally and there’s nothing like working with great suppliers to do that and we’re grateful to the Chamber for introducing us.”

Hazel Pilling, membership manager at the Chamber, said: “It’s great to see two local businesses working together in this way and that’s what belonging to the Chamber is all about. I think we can all raise a toast to that!”

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.