Is Didsbury Gin Still in Business? (2026 Update)
Still after Didsbury Gin?We have not confirmed a current listing, so this searches Amazon for you.
Look for Didsbury Gin on AmazonFull story →Liam Manton and Mark Smallwood named their spirits brand after the Manchester suburb where it began, bringing it into series 16, episode 13 on the back of the craft gin boom of that period.
Public reporting paints a much harder ending than the brand's early years suggested: the company behind it has since gone into liquidation.
One Dragon, the full amount, no argument
The founders wanted £75,000 for a third of the business, and Jenny Campbell funded it solo rather than splitting the risk with another Dragon, drawing on a career built around cash machine operations before she turned to angel investing.
One investor covering the whole cheque on her own tends to read as confidence rather than caution, and for a while that read held up, with the brand adding new products and building a loyal following around its home city.
What the public record says happened next
Insolvency and trade press covered it directly: Alderman's Drinks Ltd, the entity trading as Didsbury Gin, entered voluntary liquidation, and directors told creditors at a late-2024 meeting that its liabilities made continuing impossible. Debts owed to creditors were reported at close to £200,000, with a licensed insolvency practitioner appointed to handle the wind-down.
This was a formal, appointed wind-up rather than a quiet pause. Craft gin as a wider category cooled sharply through the early 2020s, and climbing costs for bottling, glass, duty and energy squeezed out smaller producers who could not absorb them the way a bigger drinks group might have.
A reminder for anyone still citing this one as a win
This pitch spent years as a go-to example of a clean Den outcome, one investor funding the whole ask followed by genuine retail growth, which is what makes the liquidation so striking.
Anyone hoping to buy a bottle today should know the brand is not being restocked through its original company, and anyone still pointing to this pitch as an ongoing success is working from an outdated picture.