So he is distilling from scratch. What’s the output - a bottle a week?
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He has always had a still… And if it is the one which fitted into the kitchen at Rickyard cottage, yes, a bottle a week. Alternatively he has spent about £15K on a larger one out of Pip’s money.
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Well, it’s only a teeny tiny fit-in-a-cottage-kitchen still. You know, of the kind the excise absolutely love licensing…
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And yet it needs a whole barn all to itself.
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Maybe it Topsied.
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http://penderyn.wales/
What a small commercial still looks like.
ISTR being told on a visit, that just the stills themselves and the still-room cost in excess of £2M (and that was a few years back) so probably at least twice that to build today.
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The minimum price I could find on the internet for set-up of a still was £25,000 for the basic equipment, and then a fair bit of other stuff was needed. So I was assuming that Toby’s would have fallen off a lorry or in some other way not be quite as good as it ought to be.
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It sounds like one of the TA production staff had a water still bought for them as a gift (around £100) and this whole storyline was based on that. 
Penderyn Distillery is expanding and building another small distillery in Swansea. I think it’s probably safe to assume that that’ll be upwards of £10M to bring into production.
p.s. Penderyn is well worth a visit if you’re ever in the Merthyr area.
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Yes, but there was some debate a while back as to whether he was now buying in neutral spirit and going for a rectifier’s / compounder’s licence, which would be the only realistic possibility if he is to produce any sort of commercial quantities without investing a hefty five figure (at least) sum.
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He has got a licence; we were told that, a while ago. So he must have a still of a reasonable size; isn’t there a limit on how small they will give a licence for?
But what type of licence? According to that article, a rectifier’s licence is simply a rubber stamp job, which given the speed and ease with which Toerag received his sounds like what he has. Distilling from scratch is a very different matter.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that he’s trying to pass off a rectifier’s licence as a distiller’s and the operation is, er, still illegal.
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With him, I’d say that was a distinct possibility.
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That, joe, is the only scenario that could possibly stand up to (cursory) scrutiny. So that won’t be it.
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[quote=“Fanta, post:12, topic:316, full:true”]
With him, I’d say that was a distinct possibility.
[/quote]Not to mention the poor research done by the SW’s.
(How nice it is to say that without Cath flying of the handle)
“Say what ?”
“About the poor research”
“You said not to mention that”
“I didn’t”.
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No problem, then.
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There’s no formal lower size limit for a distiller’s licence, but they can be as arbitrary as they like below a certain size – basically it’s whether the revenue is going to be worth the collection. I posted links about this some threads back.
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