Four years of recipes and a name from Dickens’s London.

Daffy’s is a London Dry gin made in Scotland by Chris Molyneaux and his wife, Mignonne Khazaka. When it reached the trade in January 2015, The Spirits Business introduced Molyneaux as a former wine maker and whisky distiller and the brand as based in Edinburgh, with listings in bars and shops in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and London. Inside the Cask, profiling the brand in May 2019, said it had been on the market since 2014, that the couple had met in Scotland, and that Khazaka was known as “the nose” of the gin. Companies House lists Daffy’s Gin Limited as incorporated in August 2014 and still active.

The recipe took time. The company says it spent four years trying to make a gin of the highest quality it could achieve, using the best botanicals it could find and some that were new to gin. Inside the Cask reported that Molyneaux worked through around 400 recipes, often tasting about 15 variations a morning, with the aim of a well-balanced London Dry that could be drunk neat over ice.

The name is older than the brand. The company says “Daffy” was an affectionate British slang word for gin in the 1800s, one that Charles Dickens used, and that there were Daffy’s bars and clubs in London and elsewhere in Britain. Inside the Cask traced the word to a children’s remedy, often mixed with gin, that appears in Oliver Twist. The brand calls the figure on its bottle Daffy, “the Goddess of Gin.”

A commissioned painting, a whisky still and mint from Lebanon.

The brand’s face is its label painting. The Spirits Business reported in January 2015 that the figure of Daffy on the bottle had been painted the previous year by Robert McGinnis, the illustrator behind the posters for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, James Bond films and Barbarella, and Harpers called the illustration the “Goddess of Gin.” The company says the image was created for Daffy’s in 2014, after Molyneaux contacted McGinnis about the project, and that the artist made several paintings and sketches of Mignonne before settling on the final design, which it presents as the personification of the gin’s taste and character. Inside the Cask likewise credited the bottle art to McGinnis.

The making leans on whisky practice. Both 2015 trade reports said the gin was distilled in an ancient copper pot whisky still and bottled with Scottish water, and Harpers said it used the distillation techniques of malt whisky, so that it would work with a mixer or simply over ice. The company describes a “slow-cook” maceration and distillation on a single-batch copper pot still, and says its base is a wheat grain spirit from northern France.

The botanicals carry the second half of the story. Inside the Cask listed eight — juniper, coriander seed, cassia bark, angelica root, orange and lemon peel, orris root and Lebanese mint — and said the mint came from Khazaka’s father, who grows it in the Bekaa Valley. At launch Molyneaux described them to the trade press as “unique and rare botanicals not used by any other gins.” The company gives their origins: juniper and coriander from the Balkans, cassia bark from Indonesia, angelica root from Belgium, lemon peel from Italy, orange peel from Spain and orris root from Morocco, dried for five years, it says, alongside lemons of a rare variety. The trade press gave the gin’s strength as 43.4% abv at 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.

From an Edinburgh launch to a Highland shooting lodge.

The gin’s home is now in the Highlands. The company says Daffy’s is made at Strathmashie Distillery, in the grounds of Strathmashie House in the Cairngorms National Park, which it describes as a Victorian shooting lodge visited by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the summer of 1847; it says the River Mashie supplies the distillery’s water. Companies House gives the company’s registered office as Strathmashie Distillery, near Newtonmore. In August 2018 the brand announced a gin school there, and in 2019 Inside the Cask described a three-hour course at Strathmashie combining foraging with gin making.

The setting has fed limited editions. In November 2017 the company described a Red Gooseberry gin made with Red magazine after a joint foraging trip in the national park around the distillery, using Cairngorms juniper, Spey river mint, yarrow and red gooseberries. In March 2019 it announced its first Foraged Edition, made exclusively with the London department store Harvey Nichols.

For a design guide, Daffy’s shows how a single commissioned painting, by an illustrator known for film posters, can carry a whole brand — and how a real person can stand behind a mythical figure. Compare Edinburgh Gin, another gin with its roots in the capital, and Hendrick’s, William Grant & Sons’ gin from Girvan. For this guide we use a midnight ink, a Lebanese mint green and a lemon peel yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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