THE SCOTTISH FIELD GIN CHALLENGE
Get into the spirit of competition as Scotland's best gins go head-to-head
With 84 brilliant bottles to sample it’s not a bad gig really.
What is it we love about gin? Curious imbibers will have their own reasons – and favourites. The Scottish Field Gin Challenge aims to be a compass for gin lovers of all kinds. Much like our well-established Whisky Challenge – which appears in the June issue – we appoint respected figures in the industry to sit on our panel and blind taste a fabulous array of gins. With 84 brilliant bottles to sample it’s not a bad gig really.
On the panel this year are merchants Matthew MacFadyen, Douglas Wood, Robin Russell and Ewan McIlwraith – all stalwarts of the Whisky Challenge. Annabel Meikle, Keepers of the Quaich Director, also joins us this year. And rounding off the panel we have up-and-coming whisky consultant and writer Blair Bowman.
It has been an incredibly tight competition this year, so much so that a number of joint winners have been announced. This is testament to the high standard of gins produced in this country. We have also included an ‘Outside of Scotland’ category, which, as the name suggests, covers gins distilled outside of Scotland (though the companies may still be Scottish).
We hope you enjoy looking through these exceptional gins and we encourage you to go out and taste some of them for yourself. Take a look at the next column for a bit more information on how the competition works.
Blind tasting
What makes this competition so unique and importantly, so impartial, is that our judges taste the gin completely blind. With the branding and packaging completely stripped away, only the gin is left, to be judged solely on its own merits. At Scottish Field’s offices the 84 bottles were decanted into 10cl sample bottles with only a number for identification. These were then posted to the six participating judges for tasting and scoring.
Scoring
The judges were asked to award each of the 84 gins a mark out of five. We then took away the lowest and highest scores and used the remaining marks to produce an average score for each. We also asked the judges to provide us with detailed tasting notes.
The results
Once all the judges’ scores were in, we separated the gins into their relevant categories to find the winning bottles in the over £30 and under £30 categories, along with the winners in the Outside Scotland and Liqueur categories. As the results of the challenge were extremely close this year, we have also listed the top 12 highest scoring gins.