Behind the Bar: The Distillery Partnership Shaping Our Cocktails

Walk into Ebury by Fat Macy's on a busy Pimlico evening and you'll notice something a little different about the bar rail. The bottles aren't pulled from anonymous global warehouses or polished off a glossy wholesale catalogue. Many of them come from a working distillery a short walk across the Thames, where the stills hum, the botanicals are weighed by hand, and the head distiller knows every name on the team. Our cocktail programme has grown up alongside that distillery, and the story of how it came together explains a lot about who we are and what we want to pour.

The partnership did not begin with a business card exchange or a quick negotiation over percentages. It began with a conversation about training, second chances, and the kind of neighbourhood we both wanted to belong to. From that first meeting, a working relationship developed that now shapes the drinks we serve, the way we train our young team, and the kind of hospitality we want to put forward to anyone walking through our doors.

How the Collaboration Began

The first time the distillery team walked into the restaurant was on a quiet Wednesday afternoon. They had heard about Fat Macy's from a mutual contact in the London food scene, the sort of overlapping network where a baker in Bermondsey knows a forager in Walthamstow knows a distiller in Bermondsey. We poured them a small tasting of arak, some of our house-made shrubs, and a glass of orange wine, and the conversation quickly drifted away from the usual transactional small talk. They wanted to know what we did with the young people on our training programme. They wanted to know who supplied our bread. They asked about our neighbourhood rather than our margins.

By the end of that afternoon, an idea had taken shape. Rather than simply buying from a catalogue, we would build a working partnership. They would develop small-batch spirits tailored to the flavour profile we wanted to express, and we would give those spirits a real home behind a busy bar where they would be tasted by hundreds of people every week. The distillery team were not interested in chasing the kind of mass distribution deals that the bigger Australian-style craft producers might chase, the sort of broad reach you see from distilleries popping up in Brunswick or Fitzroy trying to ship cases across continents. They wanted depth. They wanted a relationship that mattered in one postcode.

Shared Values Beyond the Bottle

What made the partnership feel right from the start was how closely our two operations lined up on values. Both businesses exist to prove that doing things the slow, considered way can also be the most commercially viable way. Both believe in paying people properly, training them thoughtfully, and giving them real responsibility rather than just a uniform and a till number. Both think that a neighbourhood pub or deli should be a kind of community living room, somewhere you walk in for a flat white at midday and a Negroni at sundown without anyone making you feel out of place for either.

The distillery runs its own apprenticeship scheme for people who have found the conventional education system difficult to navigate. Sound familiar? We sat in their back room one morning, watching a young apprentice bottle a botanical infusion with the kind of quiet concentration that told us she had been trusted with real work, and we realised that the two organisations were basically running parallel versions of the same idea. That overlap is what gives the partnership its weight. It is not a marketing arrangement. It is two mission-led businesses deciding to make each other stronger.

Building a Cocktail List with Soul

Translating that shared philosophy into a cocktail list took several months of trial, error, and a fair amount of late-night tasting. The distillery created a bespoke edition of their house gin for us, with a slightly higher proportion of coriander and a whisper of toasted sesame that pairs beautifully with the Lebanese-leaning flavours on our food menu. They also produced a small-batch arak-style spirit using anise and green grape, which has become the backbone of our most ordered serve, a long, refreshing highball finished with soda, lemon zest, and a single olive.

We wanted the cocktail list to feel personal rather than borrowed. Every drink tells a small story. One uses a fig-leaf infusion inspired by a recipe from the head chef's grandmother. Another leans on sumac and pomegranate molasses, which is the sort of flavour pairing you might find in a busy Adelaide Hills cellar door if you wandered through on a Saturday arvo. Our bartenders, many of whom came through the Fat Macy's training scheme, were involved in shaping the list from the start. They tasted every batch, gave honest feedback, and rewrote the garnish spec more times than anyone wants to admit. The list is theirs as much as it is ours.

Sustainability in Every Sip

The sustainability questions were never an afterthought. The distillery sources botanicals from growers within a short radius wherever possible, and they bottle in returnable glass that we send back through a weekly courier. Any leftover citrus from our bar goes into their next maceration batch rather than into landfill. We trade ingredients the way neighbours trade cups of sugar, except the sugar gets turned into a Negroni and the lemons end up in someone's gin.

There is also a quieter sustainability story running underneath all of this. When you train a young person properly, give them real responsibility behind a bar, and let them contribute to a working menu, you are building something that does not have to be thrown away and remade every few months. A trained bartender who has spent two hundred hours learning the craft stays in the industry, looks after their colleagues, and raises the standard of every shift they work. The distillery understands that, because they do the same thing. Together we are trying to prove that hospitality can be both generous and durable, the kind of place you come back to next month and the month after that.

Training the Next Generation Behind the Bar

The 200-hour training programme at the heart of Fat Macy's has always been about more than just learning to plate a dish or pour a glass of wine. It is about confidence, belonging, and the small daily wins that build a working life. Having a distillery partner who takes our trainees seriously has changed what is possible in that programme. Twice now, apprentices have spent a working week at the distillery, learning how to measure, dilute, and taste, then bringing those skills back into our service.

One of those trainees, who joined us after a stretch in temporary accommodation, now leads our Wednesday night cocktail shift. She designs the staff drink every week, trains new starters on the list, and occasionally pops over to the distillery to help weigh out botanicals for a new limited release. Watching her explain the difference between a London Dry and a contemporary distilled gin to a table of curious diners is the kind of moment that reminds everyone on the team why this partnership exists in the first place. It is not about volume. It is about doors opening.

Looking Ahead to What's Next on the Bar

The next phase of the partnership is already taking shape. We are working on a seasonal cocktail that uses only ingredients available within a tight London radius during a specific fortnight of the year, a kind of edible snapshot of the city at a particular moment. The distillery is releasing a small-batch vermouth made with botanicals we helped select during a tasting session that ran long into the evening. There is also talk of a charity collaboration event, where the proceeds of one night's service will fund an extra training bursary through Fat Macy's, the kind of giving-back loop that both organisations believe in deeply.

Anyone curious to taste the partnership in action can find the full cocktail list, current seasonal serves, and details of our regular tasting evenings on the Ebury restaurant website. We update it whenever a new batch lands, because these spirits do not stay on the shelf for long. Come in for a quiet lunch, a celebratory dinner, or a slow glass of something interesting at the bar, and the team will happily talk you through what is in your glass, where it came from, and who helped make it. That, more than anything, is the point of the whole thing.