Smoked Orange Gin (700 ml)

Claire and Martin Murray founded Dunnet Bay Distillers in 2014 on the windswept shore of Caithness — three miles from Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of mainland Britain — specifically because that exposed sub-arctic coastline grows botanicals found nowhere else in Scottish gin production.

Rock Rose Smoked Orange takes the distillery's dual-juniper architecture (Italian juniper for warm pine depth, Bulgarian juniper for lemon-sherbet lift) and layers it with cold-smoked orange over the core of hand-foraged Caithness botanicals: Rhodiola rosea root, sea buckthorn, rowan berries, and blaeberries.

Production runs through two bespoke 500-litre copper pot stills — Elizabeth and Margaret, built by John Dore & Co. Ltd — using vapour-basket infusion, which passes vaporised wheat-grain spirit through the botanical charge rather than macerating it, preserving the volatile citrus-smoke top notes that direct maceration would flatten.

Cuts are made entirely by nose by the master distiller. Rock Rose was the first gin globally to use Rhodiola rosea as a botanical; its earthy, Turkish-delight-like quality anchors the smoke so it reads as depth rather than aggression. Bottled at 41.5% ABV, hand-filled, wax-sealed, and batch-numbered in the distillery's ceramic bottle.

The smoked orange expression breaks the distillery's own rule of building citrus character purely from botanicals — here, smoke-treated orange is an explicit structural element.