Two founders, a converted kennel block and a city without a gin still.

Pickering’s Gin is made at Summerhall Distillery in Edinburgh, inside the Summerhall arts complex. The complex occupies the former home of the University of Edinburgh’s Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, which was sold to a private investor in 2011, English Wikipedia says; the distillery sits in the old dog kennels. The old veterinary school building has been Category B listed since 2002, English Wikipedia says. The company says its founders converted the kennel building and built the distillery by hand.

The distillery was set up in 2013 by Matt Gammell and Marcus Pickering. English Wikipedia, citing the business site Insider.co.uk, says Gammell had been an engineer at Edinburgh Crystal before becoming head distiller; citing The Herald of May 2014, it says Pickering had helped convert the veterinary college into a hospitality venue and had set up Barney’s brewery on the same site three years before the distillery.

The gin reached the trade in spring 2014. Scottish Licensed Trade News reported on 3 April 2014 that the two Edinburgh businessmen had launched a small-batch gin with nine botanicals at Summerhall, which also houses Barney’s, and quoted Pickering saying the idea had been brewing for around five years. The company says it has been distilling since 2014. English Wikipedia lists two 500-litre pot stills; the company’s own pictures name them Emily and Gertrude.

A recipe dated 1947, and a range that keeps branching.

The recipe is the brand’s founding document. According to English Wikipedia, it was written in Bombay, now Mumbai, and dated 1947, came to Pickering through a friend of his father, and is on display at the distillery. The company dates it 17 July 1947 and says it was kept as a family secret for more than 66 years before distilling began. The gin is a London Dry style with nine botanicals: juniper, coriander, cardamom, fennel, anise, angelica, lemon peel, lime peel and cloves.

The range grew quickly around that core. English Wikipedia lists a Navy Strength gin with a miniature bearskin on the bottle, a sloe gin and five oak-aged gins themed on Scotland’s whisky regions. A 2017 limited edition for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo used Scottish botanicals — heather, Scots pine, bog myrtle and milk thistle — according to the trade magazine DRAM in August 2017, and the company now sells a gin with Scottish botanicals alongside its signature gin, an Original 1947 gin and the Navy Strength at 57.1%. Bottlings followed for the Cunard line in 2017, and the Daily Record reported on a Brussels sprout gin among the distillery’s Christmas releases.

The idea that made the name travel was seasonal. English Wikipedia says the distillery began selling gin-filled Christmas baubles in 2014 at a Christmas fair on site, sold several thousand in 2015 and made 30,000 in 2016 with a custom filling machine supplied by Hacklab, an Edinburgh hackerspace; The i Paper told the story in December 2016 under the headline “How a tiny Edinburgh distillery broke America”.

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 gin to whisky, contract distilling and the Fringe.

English Wikipedia lists the owner as Summerhall Distillery Limited. Insider.co.uk reported in February 2017 that it had grown from two staff to seven and was exporting to 16 countries. During the Covid-19 pandemic it made hand sanitiser for key workers, the Edinburgh Evening News reported in April 2020.

Later years widened the business beyond gin. The drinks magazine Spritz reported in June 2022 that Summerhall had entered whisky with The Broody Hen, a blended Scotch, and DRAM reported in June 2023 on 1505, a limited blend made with Surgeons Quarter to mark the distilling concessions granted to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in that year. The distillery staged a speakeasy-themed theatre show at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh Guide reported. The Edinburgh Reporter said in July 2025 that Summerhall had begun distilling Toradh Gin for the supermarket Aldi, and Scottish Financial News reported in November 2025 that its staff had been appointed to manage casks at Royal Elizabeth Bond, a bonded warehouse in a former victualling yard at Dalmeny.

Fortune described in December 2019 a gramophone that mixed cocktails and a converted Japanese fire engine that poured gin through its hoses.

For a design guide, Pickering’s shows how a brand can be anchored by a single dated document — a handwritten recipe from Bombay — and how a novelty format such as the bauble can carry a small distillery’s name far beyond its city. Compare Edinburgh Gin, another gin from the Scottish capital, and Hendrick’s, the Scottish gin that made an unusual botanical its signature. For this guide we use Bombay navy, kennel brick and cardamom with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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