Isle Of Bute Gorse Gin
The Isle of Bute or Eilean Bhòid or An-t-Eilean Bhòdach to give it its Gaelic moniker, is situated in the Firth of Clyde off the west coast of Scotland. Rothesay, its principal town, is home to the Isle of Bute Distillery whose story began in 2018. Several friends who were sailing around the island swapped yarns about their visits to Bute in years past and got to wondering why no distillery had established itself on the island for many years.
Fast forward a few months and equipped with a 200-litre Portuguese copper still called Audrey and two recipes in mind, they began to produce small batch craft gin, using locally sourced botanicals. Since 2020 they have steadily been increasing their range of spirits, which now includes five gins including the world’s first oyster gin, and a rum. Initially the spirits were distilled in Glasgow, but production has now been transferred to the island under the careful eye of Simon Tardivel, the head distiller. Isle of Bute Gorse Gin came from one of the original two recipes.
Their Gorse Gin uses juniper, handpicked gorse, coriander, angelica, lemon, vanilla, and coconut as its botanicals which are macerated in the still with grain spirit and water from the nearby Loch Ascog. As Audrey is gas-fired, she gives greater depth of flavour and added complexity to the distillation, they claim. After a distillation process lasting precisely eight hours, the ending distillate is collected and diluted with loch water until it reaches the required ABV, 43% in the case of their Gorse Gin.
The spirit is then bottled and labelled by hand into their distinctive perfectly round, squat bottles. Made of clear glass it has a rounded shoulder leading to a small neck, a wider lip, and a wooden cap with a synthetic stopper. The label on the front of the bottle is simplicity itself, a black square with the profile of the island on top and the name of the gin in white and copper lettering. There is a good reason for the small label as it allows the illustration of the yellow gorse flower which is printed on the reverse of the rear label to be seen through the bottle.
The label at the rear is more informative, although in need of a good copywriter, telling me that “the glorious gorse flower, sourced exclusive (sic) from Mount Stuart, gives our gin a floral nose with hints of coconut and vanilla reminiscent of a summer’s day walk along the Argyll Coast”. My bottle is number 279 from batch 23, distilled on May 12, 2021.
There is no doubt that the gorse is the star of the show, the juniper content to take its place in the background to give the perfectly clear spirit some body and allow the creamy, slightly sweet coconut and vanilla flavours to come to the fore before more herbaceous and peppery notes give a lingering and lasting aftertaste. In the mouth it belied its strength and the selected botanicals worked well to provide a refreshing and moreish drink, perfect for an early evening snifter.
Isle of Bute distillery is another of the small batch distilleries that are opening up on the Scottish islands with a mission to exploit and showcase their local botanicals, a brief that they have well and truly fulfilled. Fans of the more floral, herbaceous gins should enjoy this. You never know, I might pluck up the courage to sample their Oyster Gin, a concept, at the moment, I am still trying to get my head around.
Until the next time, cheers!
