A whisky couple turns to gin.

Edinburgh Gin was launched in 2010 by Alex and Jane Nicol, a married couple who ran the Spencerfield Spirit Company, an independent spirits business in Fife. Before the gin, the company was known for blended Scotch whiskies, Pig’s Nose and Sheep Dip, which English Wikipedia says it acquired from Whyte & Mackay; Alex Nicol had earlier worked for Glenmorangie, Laphroaig and Whyte & Mackay, according to the same article.

The first bottling appeared in June 2010, English Wikipedia says, in an Art Deco bottle that looked back to the gin craze of the 1920s. The gin was not at first made in Edinburgh: it was distilled under contract at the Langley Distillery in England, in a copper pot still nicknamed Jenny, before the company brought production into the city. In 2014 it opened a small distillery and visitor attraction in a basement on Rutland Place in the West End, with two small stills named Flora and Caledonia, and in 2016 it added a second distillery at the Biscuit Factory in Leith, so that distilling took place wholly within the City of Edinburgh.

Early awards included a silver from the IWSC and a Great Taste gold in 2011, and in 2015 its higher-strength Cannonball gin won IWSC gold, English Wikipedia says.

From Stranger and Stranger to a full repack.

Edinburgh Gin’s packaging has been redrawn several times, and the trade press recorded each step. In August 2015 the Scottish trade paper SLTN reported a new bottle designed by the London studio Stranger and Stranger and made by the Italian glassmaker Bruni Glass: slimmer, so bartenders could handle it more easily, with a cork stopper, embossed lines at the base, an Art Deco influence and the brand name etched into the front of the glass. “In an increasingly crowded category we needed to stand out from the competitive set,” Alex Nicol, then managing director, told the paper.

In June 2021, SLTN reported new labels that showed each variant’s botanicals — milk thistle, pine buds and orange peel on the Classic — with a QR code leading to an animation of the botanicals and a guided tasting with head distiller David Wilkinson. Neil Boyd, UK managing director of Ian Macleod Distillers, described the Classic as “the juniper-forward London Dry at the heart of our entire range,” made with 14 botanicals.

The largest change came in 2023. Unveiled at the TFWA show in Cannes in October, the repack brought a new bespoke bottle with an embossed brand marque, a new logo replacing the previous “EG” logo, hand-drawn illustrations of flavours and botanicals and a cobbled pattern referring to Edinburgh’s streets, according to The Moodie Davitt Report. The company said all formats used 49% recycled glass. William Ovens, its global travel retail director, called it “the first full brand re-pack since Ian Macleod Distillers acquired Edinburgh Gin in 2016.”

In January 2025 Creative Boom reported that the Glasgow team of the design studio D8, which had worked with the brand since 2019, had built a wider brand world around the line “Filled with Wonder”: 3D renders of the bottles with butterflies, dragonflies, botanicals and fruit, and an arch motif taken from the new distillery. The logo, monogram and typefaces carried over from the 2023 redesign, and the colour palette was simplified to three core colours, with teal remaining dominant.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all whisky, gin, grappa, calvados and rosé names: Tomatin, Jura, Edinburgh Gin, Roku, Poli, Boulard and Minuty. Spirits and wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A spirit or wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit or wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit or wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A gin brand inside a whisky company.

In September 2016 Ian Macleod Distillers bought the Spencerfield Spirit Company, including Edinburgh Gin, Pig’s Nose and Sheep Dip, Drinks International and the whisky blog Dramscotland reported. Ian Macleod, the family-run Scotch whisky company that owns the Glengoyne and Tamdhu distilleries, had already been the exclusive UK distributor of the brands; the Nicols stayed on for a transition period, and gin production continued at Rutland Place and in Leith. English Wikipedia says the Spencerfield name was afterwards wound down.

The brand then moved again. In 2018 Ian Macleod bought a site on East Market Street and on 6 December 2024 opened The Arches there, a distillery and visitor centre designed by Staran Architects on the former site of Trinity Church, English Wikipedia says. Its two main stills, Annie and Lina, and a small experimental still, Matilda, are named after the first women gardeners at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and in 2025 the site won Gin Distillery of the Year and Gin Tourist Destination of the Year at the Scottish Gin Awards.

The range has also carried limited editions with public figures, including a 2021 bottle designed by the writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge and a 2023 edition with Eddie Izzard. English Wikipedia says the Classic uses juniper from North Macedonia, and Seaside and Cannonball use Italian juniper.

For a design guide, Edinburgh Gin shows how a gin can borrow a city’s architecture — Art Deco glass, cobbles and an arch — and keep one colour through each redesign. Compare Hendrick’s, another Scottish gin made by a whisky company, and Plymouth Gin, a gin named after its city. For this guide we use teal, deep teal and a sandstone gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Edinburgh Gin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.