These Two Scottish Gins Just Earned One Of The World’s Toughest Food And Drink Honors

Scotland may be best known for whisky, but two tiny distilleries in the Highlands are giving gin drinkers a pretty good reason to look beyond the brown stuff.

Great Glen Inverness Gin and Seven Crofts Fisherman's Strength Gin were the only two gins to receive three stars at the 2026 Great Taste Awards , the highest rating handed out by the Guild of Fine Food's annual competition.

And getting three stars isn't exactly easy.

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More than 15,000 products from 3,919 companies across 116 countries were entered in Great Taste this year, a record for the competition. Of those, just 306, or a little over 2%, received three stars. Within spirits, 230 products earned at least one star, but only 10 received the maximum three-star rating.

When it came to gin, just two bottles made the cut. Both happen to come from small producers in the Scottish Highlands, although what you'll find inside those bottles is dramatically different.

What Three Stars Actually Means

Great Taste is organized by the Guild of Fine Food, a U.K.-based organization that has supported independent food and drink producers and retailers since 1995. The Guild today represents a community of more than 12,000 business owners and also runs the annual World Cheese Awards.

And this isn't just a spirits competition. Gin is judged alongside a massive assortment of food and drink, with this year's entries ranging from spirits and beer to cheese, chocolate, meat and pantry staples.

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Products are blind tasted by panels drawn from more than 500 experts, including chefs, buyers, retailers and food writers. Judges don't see the packaging or branding, so a fancy bottle or big-name producer isn't going to earn any extra points.

The organization describes one-star winners as "simply delicious" and two-star products as "outstanding." Three stars are reserved for products judges consider "exquisite and extraordinary."

This year, 28.5% of entries received one star and 10.61% earned two. Just over 2% walked away with three.

For gin, that left two bottles at the top.

Great Glen Inverness Gin

Great Glen Distillery sits in Drumnadrochit, about 15 miles outside Inverness, on the banks of Loch Ness. It calls itself one of Scotland's newest and smallest craft distilleries, producing its own base spirit and using water drawn from Loch Ness.

And the location isn't just something that looks good on a label.

Great Glen has leaned into its Highland surroundings when developing its spirits, incorporating some unexpected local flavors into its gins.

Its three-star Inverness Gin is a 43% ABV London dry-style gin made through vapor infusion. The botanical lineup is where things get interesting: elderflower, sugar kelp, chanterelle mushrooms, fennel, lingonberry and pink peppercorns all make an appearance.

That combination takes things well beyond the juniper-and-citrus profile you might expect from a traditional London dry. Kelp and mushrooms add savory and earthy notes, while elderflower and lingonberry bring floral and fruit flavors into the mix.

Great Glen isn't entirely new to the awards circuit. Inverness Gin previously earned honors at the Gin Cooperative Awards in 2023, while the distillery's pink gin was named Best Scottish Pink Gin at the Scottish Gin Awards that same year.

Still, the Great Taste win is a pretty significant achievement for such a young producer. Great Glen only started operating in 2021, and Inverness Gin is now the distillery's second product to earn three stars from Great Taste.

There's also an interesting food connection behind the bottle. Master distiller Adam Dwyer spent more than 20 years working as a chef before getting into spirits, a background that makes a botanical lineup involving mushrooms, kelp and berries make a little more sense.

Seven Crofts Fisherman's Strength Gin

Head about 50 miles northwest of Inverness and you'll reach Ullapool, a fishing village on the shores of Loch Broom and home to the Highland Liquor Company.

Founded by Helen Chalmers and Robert Hicks, the distillery has built Seven Crofts around its hometown. Ullapool was established as a fishing settlement in 1788, with its early residents including boat builders, rope makers, coopers and fish curers.

Seven Crofts gets its name from the first seven dwellings built there.

Fisherman's Strength is the considerably bolder of this year's two three-star winners. Bottled at 57% ABV, it's a navy-strength version of the distillery's flagship Seven Crofts Gin.

That's a lot of gin.

But the idea isn't simply to overwhelm you with alcohol. The distillery describes Fisherman's Strength as juniper-forward, with ripe blueberry, black pepper, pink pepper and coriander on the nose. Blue and black fruits and baked apple follow on the palate, along with more pepper and coriander on the finish.

The distillery recommends keeping things simple with a relatively neutral tonic that lets the gin do most of the talking. That higher proof also makes it an interesting candidate for a Martini.

Fisherman's Strength has picked up some other hardware along the way. In 2024, it was named Distilling Product of the Year in the White Spirits category at the Scotland Food & Drink Excellence Awards. It also received a silver medal from the International Wine & Spirit Competition in 2026.

Scotland's Other Spirit

Whisky casts a pretty enormous shadow in Scotland. Scotch is one of the country's most famous exports, and distilleries have spent centuries building the reputation it enjoys today.

Gin offers something a little different, particularly for small and relatively young distilleries.

Scotch whisky has to spend years maturing before it can legally be sold as whisky. Gin can go from the still to the bottle considerably faster. That makes it an attractive spirit for younger distilleries, while its anything-goes approach to botanicals gives producers plenty of room to play around with local ingredients.

Great Glen and Highland Liquor Company have taken two very different approaches.

Inverness Gin essentially puts a bit of the Highlands into the bottle, combining kelp, mushrooms and berries in a relatively approachable 43% ABV spirit.

Fisherman's Strength goes in the opposite direction, cranking things up to 57% ABV and building the experience around juniper, dark fruit and spice.

What connects the two is that neither feels like a generic gin that just happens to be made in Scotland.

And considering fewer than one in 50 products entered into Great Taste earned three stars this year, two small Highland distilleries taking the only top spots for gin is a pretty compelling reason to make some room next to the Scotch.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com