I'm Ben Iravani, I'm one of the founders of Porter's Gin.
I'm also alumni of Aberdeen University
and it was there I met Josh, co-founder of Porter's.
I'm Josh and I am a
co-founder of Porter's Gin and
also alumni of Aberdeen University.
After I graduated university I opened a bar in Aberdeen
called Orchid and it was a few years into
that that myself, Josh and our third co-founder
Alex turned the basement of the bar into a
micro-distillery, and we started to create the recipe for
Porter's Gin.
This year's a big year for the University with the 525th
year anniversary and, I mean, both myself and Josh being
at the University and then come to set up the distillery
here in Aberdeen, it just seemed like a really good
collaboration that we could do with the University to
make a unique gin to mark this occasion.
We're creating the final recipe at the moment and I'm
pretty sure it's going to be a pretty tasty little number.
We wanted to have something that really evoked people's
imagination when they see the product, and we wanted to
tie it into the 525 years
and also just the history of Botany at
Aberdeen University so we worked with Mark from
the Cruickshank Garden and we picked
botanicals that kind of represented each
century that the University has been around.
It's a huge delight,
as curator of Cruickshank Botanic Garden, to be
associated with this project and when I was approached,
I was asked "are there plants in this temperate
collection that would be suitable to help flavour gin?"
The immediate answer was "yes".
After that came the slightly more
enjoyable but difficult task of narrowing down
exactly which plants would be suitable.
[But that flavour's going to stay with you for the rest
of the day now.
It's a strong flavour and you need so little].
It was necessary to choose a plant that would represent
or be appropriate in original use of the 15th century,
16th century, 17th century, moving up to today's
21st century.
[Does it have a medicinal use particularly, sage?]
Of the botanic collection here
across the 11 acres of Cruickshank Botanic Garden,
heather is a plant that
I have suggested; nettles; dandelions;
sage; pears; apples
and myrtle. And those bring us through the centuries.
We take the botanicals, either they're dried or fresh,
add them to a certain type of alcohol, with
us it's 100 percent British wheat spirit,
and we macerate them, so we leave them for a certain
length of time. We then put them through our still.
We distil at low temperatures under vacuum,
using a more scientific piece of equipment
called a rotary evaporator.
What this means is we can lower the boiling point of
alcohol and distil at much
lower temperatures than traditional stills use.
That means we can capture lighter, brighter, fresher
flavours by not applying heat during our process.
[So the alcohol is going to start to evaporate,
it goes up here as a gas, hits there and condenses
back, cools down, so it turns back into liquid, and then
down here you've got the strawberry alcohol.]
The point of gin really is about taking those natural
plants or fruits,
all kinds of botanicals and taking the actual
essence from those which creates a balanced
flavour in the gin.
It's actually closer to perfume-making than to
making whisky, for example.
I think it's going to give quite a complex
flavour to the gin, but
hopefully in a good way.
There's an ongoing relationship that we've had with the
University and hopefully there's a lot more we can do in
the future as well.
It's been a pretty awesome journey and we've got a great
team here in Aberdeen that do some really cool,
innovative stuff so hopefully we can
put that into this project as well
and create something special.