Tyree Gin, 70 cl

Product Information

The island of Tiree is the most westerly of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. It is a relatively low-lying island with an area of 7,834 hectares and a population of around 650. Isle of Bute Gin’s small-batch spirits take inspiration from where it’s made, the quaint Scottish island of Bute, each bottle crafted with care in the heart of Rothesay using a traditional copper still. We formed Tiree Whisky Company to preserve and promote the island’s distilling heritage and from that moment on, we began researching the possibility of releasing a local gin. We were put in touch with Thames Distillers Ltd in London and arranged a meeting to provide them with some local Tiree botanicals and kelp.

This link with the music festival continued this year with the bars serving Tyree Gin and launching an exclusive bottling of TMF10 whisky - created to mark the festival’s tenth year. Distillers from across Scotland have been selected, with those on the picturesque Hebridean island of Tiree offering up one of the festival’s most far flung gins. The Isle of Tiree lies to the north of Islay and south of Barra and is the most westerly island of the Inner Hebrides. In the eighteenth century it was home to ‘no less than fifty distillers’, yet the island’s connection with the Scotch Whisky Industry has long been lost. Tighter regulation, both from the estate and the government, also squeezed the industry. The minister's 1792 report went on: "The parish [of Tiree and Coll] [a few years ago] had upwards of thirty stills, but is now reduced to three small licensed one."

We have no access to three phase power so our still had to be adapted accordingly. We also had to pay for the installation of a new electricity connection to allow us to utilise the power capabilities of the equipment, an additional cost that we hadn’t planned for. I have a very keen interest in local history and one thing that kept on popping up while doing various research projects on aspects of Tiree’s history was the amount of distillers that operated on the island between the 18th and 19th Centuries (both legally and illicitly!). Myself and my business partner are very into the local history - we love reading about the island’s written historical accounts and one of the things I discovered was that between 1790 and 1791 there were 157 people caught distilling illegally, and one in every ten was evicted from their croft or holding. We thought this history was fascinating - there were hundreds of years of history of whisky production on the island - and we thought, why has nobody tried to revive that?” The whisky was named after a ship that ran aground off the shores of the island and it has cases of whisky - a story similar to Whisky Galore,” says Ian. We launched that at the Tiree Homecoming and only bottled 230 which all sold out. That was the first step - to publicise the whisky company and to let people know what we were doing.” Starting with gin Picture: Tyree Gin Facebook There was also a long-standing concern about a rise in drunkenness on the island, which the authorities linked with the number of stills. James Turnbull had reported in his Statistical Account of 1768: "The people drink more than they would do, which is a means of spoiling their morals and keeping them idle."

So in a bid to do just that, The Tiree Whisky Company launched a whisky titled The Cairnsmuir - a 19 year old Speyside malt. They produced a sample gin using the botanicals we’d sourced and after a couple of tweaks, we finalised the recipe. We then officially launched at Tiree Music Festival 2017. Beinn an Tuirc Distillers, South Loch Gin and Linlithgow Distillery also won multiple taste medals.The Duke responded three years later by asking about "the most effectual methods of crushing distillery". In 1794, the Duke chided the chamberlain, accusing him of allowing "the tenants to drink their barley" rather than paying rent.