The Botanist

The Free Bacchus Story

Twenty-two of the thirty-one botanicals in this gin are picked by hand on Islay. Not grown for the distillery and not bought in — found, in season, from hedgerow, machair, bog and hillside. Bog myrtle, meadowsweet, gorse flowers, water mint, heather, wood sage. The other nine are the standard gin botanicals any distiller can order.

The still is a Lomond pot-still rescued from the closed Inverleven distillery, 11,600 litres of it, so unshapely that the distillery calls it Ugly Betty. A normal gin distillation takes a few hours. This one runs about seventeen hours at low pressure, which is what it takes to draw character out of material that was picked rather than specified.

None of that foraged material can be organically certified. The schemes were built to audit farms, and there is no farm here to inspect.

The absence of chemical input follows from the fact that nobody is spraying a wild bog myrtle stand. That is a different kind of evidence from a certificate, and it is why this sits on Track B rather than Track A.

It also leaves a real question open. Nobody audits how much is taken, whether the populations are monitored, or what happens in a bad season — questions unsettled across the whole industry. The distillery holds B Corp certification, and we would rather name that gap than let the certificate imply the foraging itself is inspected. It is not.