Brewing and Distilling

00:13
The partnership between Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh Gin is what's called a knowledge transfer partnership. It's designed to bring kind of recent graduates and businesses in line together so people with a lot of academic knowledge but perhaps no knowledge of the actual industry can bring that knowledge to a local business and they can get the benefit of it.
The Seaside Gin was a project between four of the current MSc Brewing and Distilling students and Edinburgh gin. So we recruited four students who did some product development work in the labs, they designed the gin from scratch, sourced out some unique locally sourced botanicals to make the gin stand out in the markets being something unique and then I worked with them until we reached something where we said okay we're happy to actually take this up and make it on a commercial scale and then launched it for World Gin Day.
01:10
The Seaside Gin is a bit different because it features coastal botanicals that we went and foraged for just off the coast of Dunbar. So there's bladderwrack, seaweed, ground ivy and scurvy grass in there. The bladderwrack makes it a bit sweeter which is nice and...
01:26
The scurvy grass is really spicy. That's my favourite. It's part of the mustard family so it's kind of got that spicy after taste to it and then the ground ivy just kind of rounds and fills it out.
01:36
The whole experience with Edinburgh Gin has been really, really useful to our distilling knowledge so it was actually a really, really good learning curve and we could slowly go through things and work with experts at the University and the Distillery as well.
01:53
It has been great to work with Heriot-Watt University. I was here myself as a student just two years ago so it's nice to be able to pass on the opportunity to work in industry to four of the current students.