White Rock has had its foot in the spirit world for a little over a year now and has made an impression with a product that has won several awards and continues to receive outstanding feedback from customers.
In February 2018, White Rock launched Unit Six, a gin that has become a favourite across Guernsey. Since its launch the team has targeted sales to multiple locations across the globe, but it was clear that in an overcrowded market place the key for successful sales was to ensure the product had a unique selling point (USP) and a brand identity which showed this off.
The team set about focusing on what makes the product unique, and what differentiates the product from the competition. The first aspect is the distillation process, unlike conventional distillation whereby heat is applied to boil the alcohol, the team at White Rock use vacuum distillation in order to lower the boiling point of the spirit to 10 degrees by placing the still under reduced pressure.
Commenting on why this process matters in terms of the gin quality Ross Gledhill, Managing Director of White Rock Brewery makes comparisons to a tea bag.
“When you place a tea bag in boiling water it stews, but place it in cold water it infuses. Likewise, with our gin production process, it means when we use less heat, we can extract even the most delicate flavours from each of our six carefully selected botanicals.”
This got the team thinking about the whole production process. Whilst a handful of distilleries use vacuum distillation, it is uncommon for the botanicals to be fractionated. Wanting to incorporate this into the design, the team added a prism to the bottle and created a label background which depicts multiple prisms. Just like when white light enters a prism and is split into its component colours, each of the six botanicals that make up the gin are split into 13 fractions based on their aromatic oil change length. This allows the distiller to identify the most desirable flavours from each botanical while discarding the less palatable ones, before finally recombining them to produce the gin.
From this, the new brand name ‘Ten Degrees’ was born. Ten Degrees is unique in its production process and the end result continues to be well received across the market place. Articulating this USP in a way that would attract the diverse range of gin drinkers was always going to be a challenge. However, feedback from the White Rock customer base suggest the new branding has done just that.
