Balmenach, one of Speyside’s first licensed distilleries, and the home of the gin.

Caorunn is made at Balmenach, a working malt whisky distillery at Cromdale, near Grantown-on-Spey, on the banks of the River Spey and inside the Cairngorms National Park. English Wikipedia says the distillery was founded in 1824 by James McGregor, from a Tomintoul family of farmers and illicit distillers. Its water comes from a spring in the Cromdale Hills, and the site sits beneath the hill where Jacobite forces were defeated at the Battle of Cromdale in 1690.

The distillery changed hands several times. According to English Wikipedia, which draws on Paul Atterbury’s railway history All Change! (2009), Balmenach was bought by Glenlivet in 1897 and became part of The Distillers Company Ltd in 1925. It closed in 1941 and reopened in 1947 after its facilities were expanded, and its private branch off the Strathspey Railway stopped running in 1969. In 1997 the distillery was sold to Inver House Distillers, which still owns it.

Balmenach runs three wash stills and three spirit stills for its Speyside malt and has a capacity of about two million litres of alcohol a year, English Wikipedia says, and it sits in a group of Inver House sites that also includes Speyburn, Knockdhu, Balblair and Pulteney. English Wikipedia says Inver House asked one of its own distillers, Simon Buley, to create a gin on site, and the result was released in 2009.

Five Celtic botanicals and a chamber built for perfume.

In an interview with Scottish Licensed Trade News in April 2018, Buley — then assistant manager at Balmenach as well as Caorunn’s gin master, and by then making the gin for more than eight years — said full-scale production began in May 2009, when a 1920s copper berry chamber was moved to the distillery. English Wikipedia, citing Difford’s Guide, says the chamber was originally used in perfume making. Buley told SLTN the process is slow, in small batches, using pure grain spirit and Scottish water.

The recipe pairs six traditional gin botanicals with five Celtic ones: rowan berry, heather, Coul Blush apple, dandelion and bog myrtle, which Buley told SLTN he picks by hand from the hills around the distillery. The rowan berry gave the gin its name, English Wikipedia says. Buley’s suggested serve, in the same interview, was tonic with slices of red apple to bring out the Coul Blush apple.

The number five runs through the design. From the first release the bottle had a pentagonal shape and a base moulded as a five-pointed asterisk, one point for each Celtic botanical; English Wikipedia describes the asterisk as the brand’s logo. SLTN reported on 1 February 2018 that a redesigned bottle kept both features but “redefined” the base for a contemporary edge, added raised gloss varnishing to the label, moved the red five-point asterisk to the top of the bottle and carried Buley’s signature.

Packaging Insights reported on 26 February 2018 that the new bottle was designed by the agency JDO and made by Allied Glass in extra-white flint glass, with embossed detail on the pentagonal form, and that the gin inside was made to the same recipe as at its 2009 launch.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Scottish gins: Caorunn, Pickering’s, Rock Rose, Daffy’s, Eden Mill, Lussa and Arbikie. Scottish gins in general come from many different kinds of producer, from whisky distilleries that make a gin alongside their malt to small independent distilleries, family farms and island businesses, and a single bottle can be sold everywhere from a local shop to a bar list abroad.

A gin brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit itself than by a name, a bottle, a label and the place it promises, because gin needs no long ageing and can be distilled almost anywhere. The company behind a name may have changed hands, moved its stills or had its gin made under contract somewhere else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its gin is actually distilled 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 gin is made, which botanicals it says come from its own surroundings and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An Airdrie company with a Thai parent.

Caorunn’s owner, Inver House Distillers, is based in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1964 as a subsidiary of Publicker Industries of Philadelphia, passed to Standard Brands in 1979 and was bought by its management in January 1988. The Morning Advertiser reported in October 2001 that the 1988 buyout had been led by Bill Robison and Angus Graham, and that Inver House had now been sold to Pacific Spirits, part of the Thai spirits and beer group Great Oriole.

Since 2006 Inver House has been a wholly owned subsidiary of International Beverage Holdings (InterBev), the international arm of the Thai drinks group ThaiBev, according to an InterBev press release of 30 October 2006 cited by English Wikipedia. Inver House’s other brands include the Old Pulteney, anCnoc, Balblair and Speyburn single malts and the Hankey Bannister and MacArthur’s blends, English Wikipedia says.

Caorunn’s own story sits inside that whisky business: the gin is distilled at a working malt distillery, by a distiller who also helped run it, from Celtic botanicals that Buley says he gathers on the surrounding hills.

For a design guide, Caorunn shows how a single number can organise a whole identity — five botanicals, five sides, a five-pointed asterisk — and how a maker’s signature on the glass can stand in for a founder’s story. Compare Old Pulteney, the Wick malt from the same Inver House group, and The Botanist, another Scottish gin made at a whisky distillery from foraged botanicals. For this guide we use rowan red, bog myrtle and heather with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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