This is a smooth gin with well-balanced juniper, honey and raspberry flavours. It tastes a little stronger than its 40%. The Orcadian honey is handled with a deft touch. Floral notes add complexity but don’t overwhelm the gin.

Known Botanicals

• Juniper
• Orcadian honey
• Scottish raspberries
• Coriander
• Angelica root
• Nutmeg
• Cassia bark
• Ramanas rose (beach rose)
• Burnet rose
• Borage
• Bere barley
• Meadowsweet
• Calamondin orange

Tasting Notes

On the nose, Beyla has a sweet fresh fruity fragrance like crushed raspberries. Juniper is evident and blends well with the raspberry aroma.

This is a smooth gin with well-balanced juniper, honey and raspberry flavours. It tastes a little stronger than its 40%. The Orcadian honey is handled with a deft touch. Floral notes add complexity but don’t overwhelm the gin.

The finish follows on from the nose and palate and leaves a gentle lingering piney fruitiness.

Beyla is an Old Tom style of gin that tastes like honeyed sweet raspberry pie with a piney juniper kick. It is definitely a more ‘feminine’ gin (the pink metallic labelling denotes that), soft and gentle on the palate with a good clean raspberry taste that avoids the overly sweet stickiness of some gins in this category.

To Serve

Orkney Distilling recommend serving with light Indian tonic over ice, garnished with raspberries. The citric acid in the tonic cuts through the honey to create a sherbet note.

It was tempting to try Beyla in a few classic gin cocktails and what better than a Bee’s Knees; a Floradora celebrates its rich raspberry botanical profile and Clover Club is the ultimate gin cocktail featuring raspberries.

About the Reviewer

Sue Telford is a gin writer and blogger for her website For the Love of Gin. Her book The Secrets of Sloe Gin is out on Kindle and How to Drink Gin will be published in October 2019 by Red Door Press.

A free bottle was provided for this review. All opinions remain those of the reviewer. 

Since their beginnings in January 2016 Orkney Distilling, run by Kirkwall based husband and wife Stephen and Aly Kemp, have racked up an impressive amount of gins and awards to match. Beyla is their fifth release in three short years. Kirkjuvagr (pronounced kirk-u-vaar), Old Norse for Kirkwall where they live, was their first and temporarily a third party gin, produced by Strathearn Distillery, until their own distillery and visitor centre was completed and open for business July 2018.

Beyla is the Norse Goddess of Bees and the gin uses the original expression Kirkuvagr as the base. Honey from a local beekeeper (the bees frequent the botanicals grown in the local Agronomy Institute) and Scottish raspberries are the key botanicals for this Old Tom gin, suffused with a lovely pale blush colour.

Orkney Distilling are proud of the Viking heritage which gives their brand strength. The symbol on their bottle tops is a Vegvisir, a Viking compass. And if the goddess Beyla had a powerful connection to the earth then so do Orkney Distilling with locally grown botanicals, albeit some quite exotic (to Orkney) such as angelica, allegedly brought to the island centuries earlier by the Vikings.