Carnivalgoers get a taste for British brandy start-up

The life of a founder isn’t all glamour, even if you’re in the business of partying. Just ask Simon Wright, the founder of Burnt Faith, a British brandy business, who was helping clear up rubbish from the streets of Notting Hill at the crack of dawn on Tuesday morning.
Burnt Faith had been shaking up “brandy blossom” cocktails and selling its new pre-mixed cans at the three-day Notting Hill Carnival, which attracted more than one million visitors over the bank holiday weekend. Getting involved with the mammoth clean-up operation was part of the deal, said Wright, 41, who sold his previous business, a cider brand called Hawkes, to the beer company BrewDog in 2019 for an undisclosed sum.
“You sell your company and think, ‘Now I can sit behind a desk and tell other people what to do’, but the next thing you know you’re at Notting Hill at 6.30 in the morning clearing up rubbish.”
It was worth the effort. Over the three days of the carnival, his products were tried by more than 2,500 partygoers, who may not have picked them up off the shelves of stockists including Waitrose, Tesco, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols.
“For the guys and girls at the carnival who are really loyal to brands like Hennessy and Courvoisier as something of a status symbol, we need to convince them that we’re a brand for them. The challenge is trying to create a buzz and cachet as a British brand,” Wright said.
Burnt Faith’s brandy is made at its purpose-built distillery in Walthamstow, east London, which was formerly the site of a Pentecostal church, hence the “Faith” in the brand name. “Burnt” is a nod to the fact that brandy derives its name from the Dutch word brandewijn, meaning “burnt wine”.
The Walthamstow site also includes a bar, which is open to the public Thursday to Sunday evenings, and is used as a space to host buyers and educational sessions for bartenders, who can be crucial ambassadors for start-up spirit brands
Being British is more of an asset than a liability, says Wright, who claims his is the only dedicated brandy distillery in the UK.
Whereas cognac producers are bound by many rules that govern production methods, naming and ageing of the liquor, Burnt Faith can experiment with different flavour profiles to appear more tempting to non-traditional brandy drinkers. For example, a sold-out limited-edition batch was aged in bourbon casks to give the flavour of “Kentucky Smoke”, while another was stored in a charentais barrel, to give “notes of butterscotch” and fruit.
“You can only call it cognac if it’s made in Cognac in a certain way. And the reality is that that really stifles innovation. We don’t have any of that — we can make our brandy however we want, we can make it using any grape variety we want and we can age it however we want. So it makes us a more modern spirit for people who like and want innovation,” Wright said.
The size of the prize is not insubstantial — Wright points to data from Euromonitor International, the market research firm, which shows the global brandy market was worth $22 billion last year, and is the third largest spirit category after whisky and vodka.
Wright started the business in 2021, after completing two years working for BrewDog following the sale of Hawkes. Unlike many founders who vehemently dislike working for their acquirers, Wright said he “loved it” because “for the first time in forever I was getting paid a load of money and for the first six months I didn’t have to work that hard”. But he soon had itchy feet and decided the brandy industry was ripe for disruption after a series of trips to Cognac in France.
After funding Burnt Faith’s start-up costs through the proceeds of Hawkes, he enlisted investors including Keith Greggor, an early investor in BrewDog and a member of its board until his resignation in 2022, and Matthew Freud, the founder of the PR firm Freud Communications.
Wright has raised about £2 million to date and says he will sell more than 40,000 litres of brandy this year, hitting sales of about £1 million. “We are still pretty small but from small acorns mighty oaks grow and all that,” he said.
The weekend’s carnival provided him with “affirmation” that Burnt Faith is on the right track, he added. “Every time someone tried the liquid, having not heard of us before, and loved it was just amazing. Because we think we’ve got something but to see people try it and then go on and buy one, it makes all the hard work worthwhile.”