We’re now into our third period of lockdown which means parents with youngsters are already familiar with the routine.

Home schooling, probably while trying to work from home as well.

Many parents in the food and farming industry will also be trying to keep their businesses up and running, at a time when many have been hit by the closure of the restaurant and hospitality sector.

Food and Farming spoke to Tiffany Kerruish, co-owner with husband Paul of the Fynoderee Distillery.

Tiffany and Paul have two children, Amelie and Theo, and as Tiffany will tell you it isn’t always easy keeping all the balls in the air.

She says: ’You want to be organised and say: "Right, from 9am till 11am I’m going to do home schooling, then I’ll do some work" but it doesn’t really work like that. Emails come in and they have to be dealt with.’

Paul, who deals with the legal and technical side of the business and helps out with production, is able to go into the company’s offices and work while Tiffany, who looks after the marketing communications, website and social media, is working from home and looking after the kids.

She says: ’Amelie, who is seven, is quite good at opening her computer and getting on with something but Theo is only five and needs some help.’

They both get online schooling sessions, as Tiffany explains: ’Their teacher goes on every morning and puts some tasks on and they have a daily Teams meeting at 10am - that’s a good reason for them to get out of their pyjamas and go and wave to everyone.’

Fynoderee enjoyed an enviable period of sales growth from its start in 2017 right up until the first lockdown last year.

Suddenly their future business plan, including opening a food and drink venue in their warehouse distillery in Ramsey, had to be rewritten.

Tiffany says: ’We’re in this awful predicament as a business: we were in a growth phase, where we have a new still system just arrived and our new premises. Hopefully we’ll be in a good position to hit the ground running when all this ends but we’re in limbo at the moment.’

In 2020, in order to make up the shortfall in income, Fynoderee switched to making sanitiser to help meet the surge in demand.

Because of the high ethanol content, Fynitiser - as it is called - is highly effective and they were able to supply Noble’s Hospital, who are still using it.

Tiffany recalls: ’Sanitiser saved the day for us last year: it stepped in and filled the gap in our income. We lost all our UK sales, we lost the visitor economy in the island and we also lost two of our biggest sales channels, which were the boats and the flights - our gin had been the perfect thing for people to pick up and take away with them as a present for family and friends.

’It was a massive knock to our sales channels.’

This year, she adds, the world’s supply chain for sanitiser has caught up and they can’t compete with the big factories in China who are now churning it out.

As soon as the current lockdown is over, the Kerruish’s have some exciting plans for the business. They were able to test the water with their planned new venue in the run up to Christmas last year: ’We opened a pop-up bar and that was fabulous, something really different for Ramsey and people really enjoyed it,’ says Tiffany.

’We were aiming for an Easter reopening but that’s slipped a bit now I think.’

To cheer all our spirits, the Spring edition of Fynoderee gin has just relaunched and is available on their website and the first trial batch of their whisky will be matured and ready in December for people to try.

Tiffany says: ’It’s a taste of things to come as we get our commercial production up and running.’

The whisky will be produced in a new still system, made for them in America, which has just arrived at the distillery. The still, a Figgins Reciprocator, was originally invented in the States by Fynoderee’s production manager, Rusty Figgins, and it’s a design still in commercial use in a number of distilleries there.

Rusty is leading the production of Fynoderee’s premium Manx spirits after relocating from the USA in October last year.

A long-time gin lover, Tiffany is now a whisky convert. She says: ’I’ve been a whisky lover for about three years now when we started visiting Scottish distilleries.

’I realised I’d been missing out on something special.’

For now, a new Manx whisky and a distinctive new venue are just two more things for us all to look forward to when life returns to normal.