Alice Pearson: My age doesn’t define me
She may be the UK’s youngest distillery manager but the Cotswolds’ Alice Pearson is confidently forging her own path, defying stereotypes of what it means to be a woman in whisky and proving age is nothing but a number.
At the age of 23, Alice Pearson is the youngest distillery manager in the UK, if not the world. But don’t let her age fool you – Pearson is one of the hardest-working and brightest emerging stars in the global whisky scene.
Abandoning a childhood dream to work in the theatre, Pearson joined the Cotswolds Distillery’s bottling line in 2018 straight from school. The plan was to spend the summer figuring out her next move – except she never left. “I realised I wanted to stay in one place and live rurally, and making whisky in a rural distillery is perfect,” she explains.
Within months she was working full-time, moving from bottling to hosting tours, and eventually into R&D for Cotswolds’ gin range, training under distiller Sarah MacLellan.
Although the distillery only opened in 2014, becoming one of England’s first new modern whisky producers, Cotswolds’ distribution was booming. The decision was made to build a new, separate distillery on-site to handle 100% of the whisky output. But while existing distillery manager Nick Franchino was to continue overseeing the original site’s production of gin, vodka and other spirits, the team needed a new head of whisky. Step in Pearson.
New era: The Cotswolds Distillery opened its second, dedicated whisky distillery in 2023
“I’d done a lot of sensory work before taking the distillery manager role, but I’d never made whisky until 18 months ago,” she explains. “Which sounds crazy to say out loud because it seems whisky is now my whole life.”
Pearson had already completed her General Certificate in Distillation (GCD) and within two years had also passed all three modules of the IBD’s Diploma in Brewing & Distilling, which is no mean feat. “It really took it out of me because I did it in two years when it should take three. During that time we also commissioned the whole distillery, so I did two modules while working 12-14 hour days. This year I’ve decided to have a life again and I always joke I won’t do the Masters until I’m at least 30.”
Thrown into the fire
Despite demonstrating an enviable gift for academia, sensory analysis and engineering, Pearson describes the transition from working on gin to running a brand new, fully fledged whisky distillery as ‘being thrown into the fire’.
“Taking on the distillery manager role from someone else you usually have systems and paperwork in place already and it’s just a case of finding your feet,” she says. “But taking on that role pre-commissioning is quite an experience. It taught me a lot about implementation as well as people management and how you get a team through an intense period like that.”
Dedicated distiller: Pearson describes life making whisky in a rural distillery as ‘perfect’
Pearson is clearly accomplished, as well as impressively resilient and determined. She speaks with captivating wisdom and confidence, yet she says some other personal attributes make her job more challenging.
“My experience as a young woman has been generally quite positive, but it really depends,” she says. “Dealing with suppliers can be challenging; it’s one of the few places I feel quite ignored. It’s hard to tell which part of me it’s about because I look very young – I am very young – I’m small in stature, and female. It could be a combination. In any case, you just have to fight your corner.”
Defying stereotypes
She adds that even though things have improved dramatically for women in the whisky industry, she still experiences the occasional bias.
“One of my pet peeves is when people assume I only do the blending because they hear women's palates are genetically better than men’s. The underbelly of that is, ‘here’s the small piece of the whisky pie that we've carved out for women because there’s a genetic advantage; we’ll have the rest of it’.
“Some people say it innocently and I’m never insulted, but I like to prove the point that it’s not the only thing women are good at in the industry. The stuff I really like is the messy, heavy work – fixing things, polishing the spirit safe, squeegeeing the floors, disgorging casks, even just forklifting barrels around the warehouse. I find physical work really satisfying. I’m often talked about as the sensory person but it’s such a small portion of what I enjoy and do.”
Legacy Dram: The Cotswolds One of One created for the Demeter Collection
Whether it’s passing her Diploma in rapid time, setting records as the UK’s youngest distillery manager or throwing herself into heavy warehouse work, Pearson is defying conventional stereotypes of female whisky makers. It’s something that serves as the inspiration behind her bespoke creation for the Demeter Collection, the inaugural online auction from the OurWhisky Foundation held in partnership with Whisky Auctioneer.
Called simply ‘One of One’, the whisky is a marriage of the first casks filled by all three female distillers who’ve worked at the distillery. “One of the things I love about whisky is that it’s like memories in a bottle,” she says. “So this expression is a legacy piece – I wanted to honour the female distillers who came before me who proved you don't need to be tall, strong men to do the job. I thought it was important that they were included.”
The Demeter Collection
The Cotswolds One of One is a marriage of a 2016 Pineau des Charantes cask filled by Zoe Rutherford, now director of the World Whisky Forum, an ex-Bourbon cask filled in the same year by former distiller Sarah MacLellan, and a PX Sherry cask, one of the first filled by Pearson in 2018. Robyn Butler, one of Cotswolds’ current distillers, only joined the team in 2022 so ‘put the foil on the bottle so she has some sentimental investment’.
Pearson adds: “I’ve always loved our older Bourbon casks, so I was so happy that Zoe had filled one of those. A lot of the Cotswolds’ core SKUs are STR-focused or relatively heavy on wood taste, so I was really happy to have the Bourbon as a backbone, creating a much lighter style which is more my preference for a whisky.”
Defying stereotypes: Pearson enjoys being hands on with the more physical aspects of running a distillery
Pearson benefitted from mentorship and a bursary from the Worshipful Company of Distillers, without which she says she ‘wouldn't be anywhere near as confident to do what I’m doing’. She adds that passing on similar opportunities to others through the OurWhisky Foundation’s Demeter Collection is a ‘no brainer’.
“I’m not in a position to provide direct support to people who want to get into the whisky industry, but I know how to make a good bottle of whisky,” she says. “It’s the best contribution I could make to a cause that I think is important. It’s easy to talk about supporting women in whisky, but there’s a difference between saying it and doing something about it.”
While Pearson is all about the quiet country life, often foraging for mushrooms before returning to her cottage to play folk music on her guitar, she understands the wider role she plays in encouraging more women into distilling.
“I prefer the industry to figure it out themselves, but if it takes a picture of me rolling a barrel on Facebook to show one person it’s an opportunity that’s open to them, that’s good enough for me.”
The Demeter Collection auction will run 29 March - 8 April 2024 at whiskyauctioneer.com.
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