EP75 | Luke Smith | Stills, Slugs and Sausage Rolls | Local Heroes Podcast

This week on the Local Heroes podcast, Chris and Dan met Luke Smith - a distiller who survived an explosion that blew his hat off, built his first still at fifteen, and once sent Chris home from a rum-making night so happy he nearly ate a slug outside a Newcastle church. Luke is head distiller and co-founder of a Newcastle distillery, ten minutes from Central Station, where he makes white and dark rum from molasses, a bourbon-style whiskey, and gin. He got there via a home brew kit at fourteen, a garden centre where he sold 15,000 bottles of ginger wine a year, and a chance conversation at Durham Farmers' Market that landed him a job at Sonnet 43. From there: head distiller at Poetic Licence, one of the North East's earliest gin distilleries, then Mason's Yorkshire Gin - where a pinhole in a Portuguese copper still ignited on a gas burner and took the whole building down in ten seconds. Nobody was hurt and they never missed an order. Chris and Dan dig deep to try and understand the science and the art of it - why ambient room temperature changes your ABV, why Scottish distillers still ding a rock against the still to listen for bubbles, and how a batch that tasted inexplicably salty for three weeks turned into one of the best things Luke's ever made. There's the history too: Gin Lane as government propaganda, quinine and the accidental birth of the G&T, and why gin boomed here while tequila never could. Chris tastes the spiced rum he made at Luke's rum academy and gets a six and a half out of ten, there's two new product ideas born live on the mic, and the Greggs order is settled. And remember, a sausage roll is always the thing you eat before the other thing.