A SMALL family-owned distillery in Renfrew is experiencing a sales boom for what it thought to be the oldest gin in the world, which has its own twist.
Jane MacDuff and her son Iain run the House of Macduff, which launched its Fifty/50/Gin last July, which started its life as something of an experiment.
She had the chance to buy gin from another supplier more than 20 years ago, before tastes for it had developed into today’s booming market.
It was stored in virgin oak casks for 10 years then, as an experiment, switched to former whisky casks for another decade.
The idea for the unusual product came from the company’s experience with single cask whisky where the flavour and colour develop during their time in the casks.
When new markets began to emerge, the gin – matured in Scotland for 20 years – was combined with a newer spirit gin and Fifty/50 was born.
The resulting unique, premium product has absorbed some of the whisky-cask characteristics and
has proved to be a hit in the domestic market.
Speaking to The National, Iain MacDuff said: “Most of our business is in single-cask whisky bottling predominantly for export, so that is all ticking over, but the gin is our first foray into the domestic market and it’s going pretty well for us being a small company.
“We’re not expecting to beat everybody instantly but it’s been very good so far.
“If you’re a whisky drinker you’ll not think that Fifty/50 is a whisky – it’s definitely not whisky.
“It’s a different flavour to a standard gin, it’s interesting. Most of the barrel-aged gins I’ve tried haven’t got the depth of flavour the Fifty/50 has.
“Effectively it’s the impurities from the distillation process in whisky that give whisky so much of its flavour after it’s been in a barrel for X number of years.
“In gin the impurities are the botanicals that are added that change the way it ages – it’s a different kind of flavour.”
MacDuff continued: “As far as we know, this is the oldest gin in the world.
“From all the research I’ve done, the only other aged gins that are available at the moment are around a year to maybe a two-year mark in barrels, so unless something has been forgotten about or not been written about, 20 years is about the oldest gin that is available on the market.
“We halved it with the new gin to bring back more of the juniper flavour and more of the citrus in what perhaps would be more expected of a gin.
“We felt this was a good time to launch it because people are more open to the idea of something that’s different.
“This is a naturally flavoured gin but still a variation of the more traditional spirit.”
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