Toast as lover’s gift turns into moneyspinner

AVALENTINE’S Day gift turned a love of gin into a business for young entrepreneur Colin McLean.

After making his fiancée Jess a bottle of homemade gin as a gift last year, Colin is now the smallest commercial gin producer in the country.

The 28-year-old has turned the cupboard of his tenement flat into the home of McLean’s Gin.

And now he and Jess, a junior doctor, are supplying their five special blends to suppliers across Scotland.

Colin said: “Jess’s mum and dad had bought us a gin making kit for Christmas so I used it to make Jess a bottle for Valentine’s Day.

“We were surprised at how good it was, it was really nice.

“So we made more as Christmas presents for friends and family, we put it in Kilner bottles and handed them out and everyone loved it.

“Families members were fighting over the last drops in the bottle - so we thought why not get it to more people?”

That recipe is now the McLean’s Signature Gin, joined by Floral, Citrus, Spiced and Cherry Bakewell.

In just under a year since they started, Jess and Colin have produced around 500 bottles of gin from the 1.5 metre square cupboard off the living room of their one-bedroom flat in Cathcart.

Colin added: “We definitely the smallest gin producer in the UK and we think we might also be the smallest in the world.”

In the last few years, gin has become the UK’s most popular spirit with gin-only bars popping up across the city as Glasgow embraced the trend.

Latest figures from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) show Britons bought more than 47 million bottles of gin last year – thanks in part to craft producers such as Colin and Jess.

UK gin sales have doubled in value over the past six years, reaching £1.2 billion in the 12 months to the end of September last year.

And a YouGov poll found gin is the most popular spirit in the country with 29 per cent of voters claiming it is their favourite, putting whisky into second place and vodka to third.

While there’s definitely a market for the drink, is Colin worried about standing out among all that competition?

He said: “The fact we are so small and everything we do – from creating the gin to sticking labels on the bottles and making the wax seals on the bottles – is done by hand in the flat is a real draw for people who want something unique and handmade.

“We also have a collection of unique flavours now and have plans for the coming year to create some more.

“I’m really keen to create a tiramisu gin this year and we have lots more ideas up our sleeves.”

For their gin production, Jess and Colin buy in a base spirit and then use a method known as compounding to add their own flavours to it in 30 to 40 litre batches at a time.

The tiny tenement cupboard is packed with tubs of exotic herbs that Colin lets me smell.

There’s everything from Mahlab