How much time do you have? I mean we’ve saved you a bunch by blowing the dust off a stack of dusty old documents at the Hackney Archives. Which, FYI isn’t a million miles from the location of our original home, the 3 Mills Distillery in Bromley by Bow. Yup, a 300-year-old brand sure does rack up those docs… ledgers, deeds and dossiers. We went through ‘em all.

If stats are your thing, then hang on to your britches, here are some numbers for you: at the brand’s peak: 85,000 square foot distillery, 15 different stills, 26 different categories with 200 different products, an export market of 130 countries, 1 brewery & 80 pubs.

If it's innovation that floats your boat, then look no further. It’s hard to say who exactly was the first at doing anything in this industry, but Nicholson was always up there. In creating orange and peach bitters, clove brandy, rum schrub, flavoured gin and dare we say it, we even had a part to play in the refinement of London Dry.

There were some impressively highbrow collabs: the distillery made gin for both the houses of Lords and Commons and the Savoy hotel. There was some sexy stuff too. Well, we think so. Nicholson Gin featured in several cocktail books written during the golden age of cocktails.

Which got us to thinking. What was it about the flavour of this gin that meant some of the world’s most celebrated and revered bartenders felt bound to name check it in their recipes?

So, we kept on searching and you know what we found. A recipe. It looked good, we were dying to try it. So, we sought the help of some of the world’s most preeminent gin distillers and to them uttered those now immortal words: “We’re putting the brand back together”

What with our long history of being the bartender’s choice in cocktails and also being at the forefront of creating some of the world’s most innovative products, it seemed only natural that we would return to what we once did best – some might say better than anyone else – and use our knowledge of producing great liquids in quite literally all the different shapes, sizes, colours and categories imaginable.

Do you remember us telling you earlier about all the different products we were slinging through our many, massive stills over at the distillery in East London in the last centuries? Well, we’re about to (re?) launch our own vodka made from British winter wheat - we were producing one back in the 1920s (fact check) you know. And there’s more than likely another Jamaican rum in the offing – though it’ll probably be a little more refined than the one from 100 years ago! Never the brand to stand still we are also creating a bunch more liquids with a slightly different slant. The exact sort that you lot are after at the moment. One’s that take all the fuss out of making great drinks. You know what we believe? There’s no harm in bandwagon jumping if you were the one that hitched the blooming wagon in the first place.


The Nicholson cocktail offering comes in two formats, let’s call them ‘Home and Away’. Home: Real Cocktails in a Bottle. Some people might call them RTDs we prefer RCBs. As good as anything you’ll get in a bar, with zero faff. Simply refrigerate, pour over ice, garnish if you’re feeling fancy. Away: the state-of-the-art cocktail Nicholson On-Tap offering means that even bars with no cocktail capability can provide you with a delicious libation. Not only can you now get a finely crafted cocktail in the sort of venue that might traditionally excel at pouring a finely crafted pint of mild, but did we mention they can have it in your hand in record time? 

We’ve incorporated some of the cocktail scene’s most cutting-edge innovation to bring to you versions of these drinks that you probably wouldn’t have tasted before.