Last week Matt the blender at Nc’nean Distillery popped in for a visit and a catch up.
As it was the season for foraging beech leaves we roped him into helping out.

There’s a very narrow window in the season to collect these leaves. We’ve only got about a week each year where the leaves first emerge and have a brilliant sweet citrus flavour. If you’re too late picking them the tannins quickly increase and they become bitter. It’s also not the kind of ingredient that you can just pop out to the shops to buy!

The leaves emerge on each tree at slightly direct times but usually within a few days of each other so we keep a close eye on them at this time of year. This year they seem to have come into leaf a couple of weeks earlier than previous springs.

After picking we vacuum pack and freeze the leaves, labelled with the foraging date and the what3words coordinates of the tree they came from. We then can use this information on the scan yer dram QR code on the label and show a map of all of the grown and foraged botanicals in our Aberdeenshire Foraged Gin.

#LBDgin