Our Vision
"Everything in nature is about balance and we believe that everything we do should try to reflect that balance"
Nature is at the heart of everything we do: from the way we grow our plants and hand harvest our botanticals to the way our gins are packaged. For us, being "sustainable" isn't just using less plastic and recycling wherever possible, although that is important, it really means working hand in hand with nature: a relationship that should be nased on give and take. It is all about balance and the collective outcome of that balance is sustainability.
As a Distillery Garden we specialise in our gin botanicals and flowers that we use for colouring our gins as well as native wild plants, all of which benefit nature. Our range of gins, honey and herbal teas follow the same ethos and are a celebration of all things wild.
In 2023, we received LACER funding from Midlothian Council to help us connect our onsite borehole to the rest of the site providing us with a sustainable source of water for the Garden and for the Distillery helping to reduce our carbon-footprint. We are always looking to improve our emissions and we are not perfect yet but strive every day to be better. We are working with Climate Springboard and RBS to help us develop our Carbon Planner so we can measure how the changes we are making are driving down our carbon-footprint. Our short-term aim is to be carbon zero before 2025 but our longer term goal is to be carbon negative by 2030.
To this end we have created an entire business that revolves around the health of the earth because although we are a Distillery, a cafe and a shop, most importantly we are a Garden: one that is truly rooted in nature.
Sustainable Gardening
Our garden is completely natural. We use no chemicals, pesticides, or herbicides. It is created in a way so that it is sustainable as well as self-sufficient, this is also known as permaculture.
Our plants are hand-harvested, there is no machinery in the process, helping to reduce our carbon footprint. When soil is ploughed, it breaks up and releases the trapped carbon, therefore we limit digging in our gardens, which means, not only are we keeping the trapped carbon in the soil, but we are also actually capturing more. We are in the process of converting the garden to "no-dig" beds.
We only use organic compost to ensure no chemicals touch our soil. In the garden, we limit our plastic consumption to only using recyclable plastic pots and offering discounts when these are returned. We have planted trees and juniper as hedging and allow wild corridors between the cultivated areas of the garden to encourage wildlife, carbon capture and soil health.
If you want to read more about the way we garden and harvest we have a whole blog dedicated to the Garden. The blog details month by month how we use sustainable practices in the garden to improve our carbon-footprint.
Our Bees
There have always been bees at the Garden and our hives produce fragrant and pesticide-free honey which we use in some of our gins and sell some in our Shop if the bees have had a good season.
In 2023 and 2024 the summers were damp and cool and we have left our bees with the honey they made to help them survive the winter months.
In 2022 we had 5 hives and in 2024 we have 10 as our bee colonies are healthy and growing. It can be startling for our visitors to see the bees swarm in the Spring looking for more space but it is a sign that the bees are thriving in our Garden. Our team capture the swarm to guide them to a new hive.
More importantly though, we garden specifically for our bees well-being. We keep wild corridors in our garden, where the grass isn’t obsessively cut and ‘weeds’ can prosper and grow. We embrace these wild botanicals (weeds), such as the dandelion, not only for its beautiful sunny face that floods our lawns in Spring, but most importantly because it’s an early and critical source of pollen that is a life saver for the bees. We even use these wild plants in some of our gins and our Wild Gin celebrates this heritage.
Sustainable Packaging
In 2024 we introduced our new bespoke bottles. They are made of up to 70% recycled glass here in the UK. The 70cl bottle weights 600g compared to the smaller 50cl which weighed 620g and had no recycled content. Being made in the UK means it is only 357 km to transport from the manufacturer in Leeds compared to the 2347 km required to transport from Italy. It has real sustainable chops.
Our labels continue to be made with 30% grass and only 70% virgin pulp. This material is manufactured without the use of any chemicals, so compared to normal labels, ours require 97% less energy and 99% less water to be produced. This results in CO2 savings of around 20%.
We use viscose shrink bands to seal our bottles because they are biodegradable. All our shipping materials only consist of paper which is completely recyclable.
Our Story How we make our gin
