We’re staying in our home city to bring you our Edinburgh Gin review. What does this gin from Scotland’s vibrant capital have to offer?
Well, we’ve made Edinburgh Gin our gin of the month for August 2019. Partially to acknowledge the massive Edinburgh Festival Fringe (and Festival) that runs during August, but mainly because it’s a fabulous gin. For those of you who’ve never made it to the Fringe, we can thoroughly recommend it. It’s another excellent excuse to see this beautiful, historic city with its thriving gin scene.
Edinburgh Gin have a range of gins and liqueurs available, as you can see on their website here. We’ll review those in time, but what we’ve tasted and reviewed here is their classic Edinburgh Gin as pictured above. It’s a clear gin bottled at 43% ABV in a 70cl bottle.
Edinburgh gin review
First up, Edinburgh Gin is cracking value. We were amazed recently to find it retailing at £20 (about $25 USD, $30 CAD) for 70cl. So much so that we made it top of our best cheap gins (gins of a high quality at a great price point).
It’s a traditional gin produced in relatively small batches, either in the centre of Edinburgh or in Leith. Despite living locally we’ve yet to take the tour of the Edinburgh Gin distillery at their city centre location.
It really is central, at the west end of Princes Street (which is Edinburgh’s long shopping street overlooked by the castle). If you do take the tour yourself [on the Edinburgh Gin website here], please let us know what you think and we’ll sort ourselves out!
On opening our Edinburgh Gin bottle, we found quite clean notes. Pine is something that comes through – there’s no shyness about the juniper here – but were also taken by some subtle citrus. Picking up on that pine reference, there’s almost a bit of woodland on the nose too. It’s really all very pleasant, and there’s nothing that overpowers.
To taste, there was a bit of a surprise. Certainly the juniper leads, and the promised citrus helps out, but we weren’t quite expecting the spiciness and background floral taste. The latter might perhaps be coming from the heather in the botanical mix. Our old friend coriander is likely providing some of that that spice.
It wasn’t until reading up on the botanicals for writing this review that we’d appreciated that there were pine buds and cobnuts on the botanical list here; they certainly do help explain those glimpses of woodland that we’d scribbled down.
How to serve Edinburgh Gin
Call us traditionalists if you like (we’ve been called worse!), but we think that classic Edinburgh Gin works best in a classic gin and tonic. It may well have a few wee twists in the botanical list but, to us, it’s first and foremost a traditional gin.
Try it with a gin:tonic ratio of about 1:2 (as we would normally suggest as a starting point) but don’t be afraid to experiment. Make sure you use plenty of ice too. We were quite relaxed about our garnishes, but felt that citrus fruits seemed to work best; lime if we were forced to choose.
Overall, Edinburgh Gin is a really satisfying, traditional gin. It leaves you with that calm, cosseted feel that warmer gins like this provide.
Buy Edinburgh Gin UK
You can buy Edinburgh Gin from a wide range of stockists in the. Make sure you compare prices at Amazon (link below) and Master of Malt.
Buy Edinburgh Gin US
The good news is that you can buy Edinburgh Gin in the US. See if you can get in delivered in one hour from Drizly.
