Rock Rose Pink Grapefruit Old Tom Gin (700 ml)

Claire and Martin Murray founded Dunnet Bay Distillers in 2014 after testing 55 trial recipes across 80 botanicals — a deliberate act of cartography rather than convention, mapping what the sub-arctic coastal cliffs of Caithness could actually yield. The result was the world's first gin to incorporate Rhodiola rosea, an arctic root harvested from those same sea cliffs, whose earthy, Turkish-delight character anchors every expression in the Rock Rose range.

The distillery sits above the two-mile arc of Dunnet Bay, three miles from mainland Britain's northernmost point — a site exposed enough that rare botanicals thrive precisely because of the stress. Five of the 18 botanicals are locally grown or hand-foraged in Caithness, including rowan berries, blaeberries, and sea buckthorn.

Production runs through vapour infusion in bespoke 500-litre copper pot stills by John Dore & Co., the world's oldest still maker — vaporised wheat-base spirit passes through a botanical basket, preserving volatile aromatics that direct maceration would destroy. Cuts are made by nose. Each bottle is hand-filled, wax-sealed, and batch-numbered. The Pink Grapefruit Old Tom expression layers natural pink grapefruit over the dual-juniper architecture — Italian juniper for pine depth, Bulgarian for lemon-sherbet lift — in the lightly sweetened Old Tom style, a format almost no Scottish craft distillery pursues.

The Old Tom category designation is the transgression here: sweeter than London Dry yet drier than a liqueur, it gives the grapefruit botanical room to read as fruit rather than citrus peel sharpness.