We say it every year but what a freaking year.

Some particular highlights; winning our second Double Gold at the prestigious San Fran World Spirits Competition, our Islay winning Best In Class World’s Best Islay Whisky at the same award effectively handing us Indie Bottler of the Year, we scored a 98/100 with the IWSC, a Gold Outstanding medal from the IWSC too along with a number of silvers and two Gold Medals from the London Spirits Competition.

Not bad eh?

2022 has had its challenges sure; from the continued omnishambles that is Brexit making UK – EU shipping awkward at best to finding out our bottles were produced in Ukraine to there being both a fuel crisis and a cost of living crisis impacting customer spend and our event day and online sales.

All of the above have lead to an, I’m going to say it, unprecedented rise in production costs – something that, unlike our much larger peers, we have not passed on to our customers as we didn’t think it was fair, but naturally this has impacted our business operations and we have had to change elements of our production to be leaner… although there was one incident where we used a new type of bottle that looked nearly exactly like our existing bottle shape apart from having no punt (that’s the think bit of glass at the base), all went really well until we found out, after doing a full bottling run, that whatever substrate they used in the glass compound for the bottle was, it would not allow labels to stick to it. Awkward. All needed to be opened up, decanted, refilled into other bottles, resealed and labelled.

Elsewhere we signed our first export contracts so our humble husband and wife indie bottler brand is now being exported to China and Japan. These deals took a phenomenal amount of time and effort but wow it’s already been worth it for the people we have met, the opportunities it has given us and the doubling of production volumes as a result of these business wins.