Welcome
To John Dore & Co Ltd
John Dore & Co. Ltd supplies copper and stainless steel fabrications, especially: distillation plant for potable alcohol (whisky, gin, vodka, rum, liqueurs, neutral alcohol, etc), essential oil stills, caramel pans, tanks and heat exchangers for a global market.
Background
John Dore & Co. Ltd Is the oldest distillery engineering business in the world. It is the successor company to Aeneas Coffey & Sons, established in Dublin, Ireland in 1830 and in London, England, UK in January 1835. On 25th March 1872 the business was made over to John Dore, the works foreman, by the sons of Aeneas Coffey. John Dore moved the works to his cottage garden in Bromley-by-Bow, London. The business was now known as John Dore & Co.
In the late 1960s John Dore & Co. Ltd were forced to move their factory from Bromley-by-Bow, by the local council who built a tower block of flats on the site. They relocated to Essex and eventually moved into Surrey where the last Dore owner sold the business to the current company director David P. Pym in 1992.
The bronze man door illustrated above has
been used on both rum and gin stills. It was on
our gin stills which entered the United States of
America (USA) immediately after the ending
of prohibition in 1933.
The image to the right is a John Dore pot still
manufactured in 1903 and being used to this very
day to distil Martin Miller’s Gin
.
Aeneas Coffey
Aeneas Coffey was born in Calais, France, in 1780 to Irish parents. He worked for Customs and Excise in Ireland and rose to become Inspector General of Excise. He applied for a patent for the continuous still that bears his name in 1830; the application was granted and sealed by King William IV in 1831; UK Patent No: 5974.
The early Coffey Stills as illustrated left were rectangular and constructed out of sheets of perforated copper sandwiched between wooden frames. The preferred wood was Kauri Pine from Australia, New Zealand or Fiji. Although Oregon Pine (Douglas-fir) was also used and Greenheart in Guyana, South America.
