ISLE of Harris Distillery and its customers are celebrating the end of a gin “drought”, following delivery of a consignment of 22,000 elaborately-crafted bottles for the spirit.
This delivery yesterday morning enabled the distillery, which has experienced far greater-than-expected demand for its gin but started running out of its award-winning bottles at a time when the furnace at which they are made was closed for refurbishment, to start bottling again.
Isle of Harris Distillery warned of an impending “gin drought” in late August as it ran short of bottles to fill. It introduced rationing, with each person only allowed to buy one bottle of gin through its key online sales channel.
Isle of Harris Distillers managing director Simon Erlanger, reflecting on events, said yesterday: “We realised that still wasn’t stemming demand enough…We very quickly realised that we were not going to be able to meet the one bottle allowance.”
Only days after the rationing was introduced, Isle of Harris Distillery had to stop shipping orders to online customers.
Since then, it has been allowing customers to pre-order the gin, with free delivery, and yesterday began working its way through a backlog of nearly 2,000 orders that now have to be dispatched.
Isle of Harris Distillery has kept bars and restaurants that stock its gin supplied by sending them the spirit in plain bottles.
These supplies have been dispatched with a funnel to allow these customers to refill their empty Isle of Harris gin bottles.
Mr Erlanger said that, during the “drought”, the last bottle of Isle of Harris gin on the shelves of the distillery shop had been sold at 12.45pm on September 9.
He noted Austrian company Stoelzle’s specialist furnace at Knottingley in Yorkshire, where the Isle of Harris gin bottles are made, had been closed for refurbishment at the time it became clear the distillery would have to bring forward its next order from November.
Mr Erlanger said demand for the gin, which sells for £35-a-bottle, had far exceeded expectations during the summer.
As well as bringing its November order for bottles forward, so they were produced last week at the reopened Knottingley furnace, Isle of Harris Distillers also doubled the size of the order. The first 22,000 bottles of the enlarged order were delivered by haulier D.R. Macleod yesterday. Another 22,000 empty bottles will arrive on Harris in coming days.
Mr Erlanger said: “We have a huge backlog [of orders] to clear. It will take us a few days.”
However, noting Isle of Harris Distillers had been able to return to its usual three to five-day delivery schedule, he added: “The good thing about the Hebrideans is they are quite unfazed by supply disruption. It is par for the course during the winter months on Harris.”
The Isle of Harris Distillery, which has a core staff of 19 and employs about 25 people during the peak summer season, was opened in 2015.
It is the Isle of Harris’s first-ever legal Scotch distillery, and will in years to come be selling The Hearach single malt, when this whisky is ready to be bottled.
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