Two founders, a still called Elizabeth and a plant from the cliffs.

Rock Rose gin comes from Dunnet Bay Distillers, which Martin and Claire Murray set up in the village of Dunnet, on the Caithness coast of Scotland’s far north, in August 2014. Food Manufacture reported in September 2014 that the husband-and-wife team had launched their micro-distillery on 21 August, after commissioning a new still, named Elizabeth, the month before.

The founders came to gin from different directions. At the launch, Martin Murray was working in the oil and gas industry in Aberdeen; he held an MSc in process engineering and was studying for a PhD in brewing and distilling at Heriot-Watt University, Food Manufacture said. The company’s own history describes his background as chemical and process engineering and Claire Murray’s as hospitality and tourism, and says the plan of “coming home to the north of Scotland” began while the couple were at university.

The name came from the cliffs. According to Food Manufacture, a local herbalist, Brian Lamb, showed the couple Rhodiola rosea — roseroot, the “rock rose” of the title — on a forage along the Caithness cliffs, and the gin was named after that first forage. Claire Murray researched local botanicals with experts in the county. In 2014 she said the gin’s Caithness botanicals depended on the local climate, and promised that “each year we will create a new vintage.”

Copper stills, a ceramic bottle and a pouch that goes in the post.

The company says it now runs two bespoke copper pot stills: Elizabeth, in use since 2014 and named in honour of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, a frequent visitor to Caithness, and Margaret, named after Claire Murray’s mother. The Northern Times reported in July 2024 that the distillery’s stills came from John Dore & Co. The company says it distils in small batches of 500 litres, and that each bottle is hand-filled, wax-sealed, batch-numbered and signed.

The bottle is the brand’s most recognisable object. Rock Rose is sold in a ceramic bottle — the company calls its “signature ceramic bottles” collector’s items in their own right — and that weight lies behind one of the brand’s best-documented design decisions. In October 2019 The Spirits Business reported that Dunnet Bay had launched 700ml refill pouches of Rock Rose, developed with PA Consulting after 12 months of research. Drinkers decant the gin into their empty bottle and post the pouch back to the distillery: its address is printed on the back, so no envelope or stamp is needed, and the pouches can be recycled through Terracycle. The magazine gave the pouch’s weight as 65 grams, against 700 grams for the ceramic bottle, and said the company hoped to have a fully biodegradable pouch by 2025. The company says it is also upcycling its empty ceramic bottles into soap dispensers.

The label has been opened up to outsiders, too. In March 2017 Scottish Licensed Trade News reported an Artists’ Edition of Rock Rose, the result of a nationwide competition inviting artists to design its label. The winner, Hope Blamire, drew rock roses and other Scottish flowers. Martin Murray, named as co-founder and master distiller, built a recipe to match the design, with pink grapefruit peel and muscovado sugar added after distillation for a hint of the Old Tom style, and said he had “a lot of fun” doing it. The range the company lists today includes a Pink Grapefruit Old Tom.

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.

Seasonal editions, a vodka, a rum and a whisky mill.

Dunnet Bay has built a family of spirits around the gin. Its website lists Rock Rose editions for spring, summer, autumn and winter, a Navy Strength, a Smoked Orange and a Citrus Coastal edition, alongside Holy Grass Vodka and Mapmaker’s Rum, a spiced rum. For the company’s tenth anniversary it released a Rock Rose Gin 10th Birthday Edition in an illustrated ceramic bottle, with a timeline wrapping around it that marked moments from its first ten years, the Northern Times reported in July 2024; the paper added that the gin was flavoured with Caithness summer berries and vanilla alongside the core botanicals.

The business is still run by its founders. In August 2024 Scottish Financial News described Dunnet Bay Distillers as family-run, with Martin Murray as managing director, when it reported funding from HSBC UK for the company’s next project: the restoration of Castletown Mill, a stone-built, water-powered grain mill of the early to mid-19th century at the west end of Dunnet Bay, as the home of Stannergill whisky, the newest addition to the range. The company said then that the site was due to open by late summer 2025. A month earlier the Northern Times had reported that the mill’s two replacement roofs, one of Caithness flagstone and one of Welsh slate, were nearly complete.

For a design guide, Rock Rose shows how a far-north distillery built an identity on a local plant, a heavy ceramic bottle and a lightweight refill designed to keep that bottle in use. Compare Isle of Harris, another distillery on Scotland’s remote edge, and The Botanist, Bruichladdich’s Islay gin. For this guide we use a roseroot pink, a north sea slate and a ceramic white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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