A small group, a new style of gin and a launch to bars.

Brockmans is an English gin brand founded by Neil Everitt and Bob Fowkes. The Spirits Business gave its founding year as 2008 in January 2021, while Food Ingredients First, reporting in January 2014, described the brand as London-based and said it was launched in England in 2009. When the gin was presented to on-trade buyers, Restaurant Online reported in April 2013 that it had been developed by a group of four people, naming Bob Fowkes as a director and one of the founders, and that it was made in England.

The founders set out to make something other than a classic London Dry gin. Food Ingredients First called Brockmans an “ultra-premium, new style gin” and said it was designed to be smooth enough to drink neat or over ice. The botanicals, the same report said, are steeped in pure grain spirit for up to 24 hours and then distilled in a traditional copper still. It described the result as opening with juniper and angelica, moving through citrus and finishing with rounder top notes of blueberry and blackberry. Restaurant Online listed coriander from Bulgaria, juniper from Tuscany, the dry peel of Valencian oranges and, as the distinctive note, blueberries and blackberries, and suggested serving it neat over ice, in a Bramble or in a Martini.

Growth came market by market. Food Ingredients First said Brockmans expanded from England to Switzerland and Spain in 2010 and began distribution in the United States on 3 February 2014, with Fowkes crediting what he called the brand’s “sensual brand personality” for its popularity in Europe. By January 2021, chief executive Guy Lawrence said the gin was sold in 54 countries, The Spirits Business reported.

Juniper and citrus, with berries as the twist.

The recipe is the centre of the brand. On its website the company describes its flagship, Brockmans Intensely Smooth Gin, as combining traditional juniper and citrus botanicals with what it calls “untraditional” berry notes. It lists each botanical with a place of origin: juniper and orris from Italy, lemon peel from Murcia, orange peel and almonds from Spain, coriander from Bulgaria, angelica from Belgium and Saxony, cassia bark and liquorice, and berries from northern Europe. One product page names those berries as blueberries and blackberries; another names blueberries, blackcurrants and hawthorn berries.

The range grew in 2023. Orange Kiss, made with Valencia oranges and triple sec, was released in the UK online in early May 2023 at 40% abv, according to the trade newsletter Drinks Intel, and The Daily Pour described it as the brand’s first new product in about fifteen years. In October 2023, at the TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes, Brockmans launched Agave Cut, its gin “cut” with agave spirit from Jalisco and a hint of pink grapefruit, first for the travel-retail channel, The Drinks Business reported. Lawrence described the idea as Brockmans Gin cut with agave spirit, and the brand linked it to New York bartenders who split gin cocktails with agave spirits. The Spirits Business called it a spirit drink at 41.2% abv.

The bottle has changed too. In August 2025 the German importer Sierra Madre said a new Brockmans bottle weighed 500 grams, down from 650 grams, used 51% recycled glass and had a slimmer shape, a structured aluminium cap and a new hatched pattern, according to about-drinks.com; the company called it the lightest bottle in the premium gin segment. The website also sells a limited-edition “Supernova” bottle created with the designer Jack Irving, filled with the same Intensely Smooth gin; the company’s line for it is that the bottle changes while the spirit inside stays the same.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all gin and vodka names: The Botanist, Bulldog, Malfy, Gin Mare, Brockmans, Cîroc and Skyy. Gin and vodka brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small distilleries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A gin or vodka brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit itself than by a bottle, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its gin or vodka is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Properly Improper, and still independent.

The brand’s voice today is summed up in a single phrase. Its website calls Brockmans “The Properly Improper Gin” and says the company refuses to be bound by “outdated notions” of what a gin is, when it should be drunk and how. The same tone carries into its product names, from Intensely Smooth to Orange Kiss.

Brockmans is not part of a large drinks group. In January 2021 The Spirits Business reported that Lawrence had taken over as chief executive from Everitt, who remained on the board as the company’s largest shareholder. The same report said Brockmans had applied to East Cambridgeshire District Council to turn disused farm buildings on Everitt’s farm near Ely into a distillery of its own, in a 55-acre setting, with plans to grow blueberries, blackberries and other botanicals on the site, and with bottling at a separate location.

For a design guide, Brockmans shows how one flavour idea — dark berries set against juniper — can carry a young brand’s colour, copy and product range for well over a decade. Compare Sipsmith, another gin brand of the English craft-gin era, and Plymouth Gin, the English gin made in Plymouth since 1793. For this guide we use bramble black, blueberry ink and juniper silver with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Brockmans’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.