Why so much of Britain’s gin is Scottish

Ask most people where gin comes from and they will say London, because London Dry is a style name that sounds like an address. It is not one. London Dry describes a method — all the flavour has to come from botanicals redistilled with the spirit, and almost nothing may be added afterwards — and you can make it anywhere. A great deal of it is made in Scotland.

The bulk of that is one site. Cameronbridge, near Windygates in Fife, has been distilling since 1824, and it is where both Gordon’s and Tanqueray are made. Those are the two best-selling gins in the world. Diageo put it at around three million bottles of gin a week. Set one Fife plant against the rest of the United Kingdom and the arithmetic stops being close.

The interesting half of the story is the other one. From about 2010 onwards, Scotland acquired something like a hundred small distilleries, and gin was how most of them started. The reason is unglamorous and entirely practical: whisky has to sit in a cask for at least three years before it is legally whisky, and a new distillery cannot wait three years for its first invoice. Gin can be made on Monday and sold on Friday. So the gin paid for the whisky, and a great many distilleries that now have a malt on the shelf only exist because a gin funded the first few years.

That has left Scotland with an unusual shape of industry — a handful of enormous producers and a very long tail of tiny ones, with not much in between. It also means a lot of Scottish gin is made in buildings that were built for something else: a veterinary school, a fire station, a railway goods shed, an RAF base on Unst, a farm steading in the East Neuk.

What none of it has is a legal definition. “Scotch whisky” is protected in law, with rules about where it is distilled and matured and for how long. There is no equivalent for Scottish gin. Nothing stops a brand with a Gaelic name, a stag on the label and a story about the islands from being distilled several hundred miles away under contract — and a fair number are. That is not fraud, and contract distilling is a perfectly respectable trade, but it does mean the label is not evidence.

It is why every distillery in this directory is one with a still house at an address in Scotland. It is the only claim we can actually stand behind.