Bottled Up: Christmas Drinks Gift Guide

Craft Beer

We'll start with beer, and a host of craft beer subscription services that'll keep your friends and family in bottles and cans well into 2017. Eebria run a pair of subscription services – their Brewery Club (from £30) features a dozen beers from a brewery’s repertoire, while the Discovery Club (from £32) collates 12 beers from across the UK craft beer scene and invites you to ‘discover’, or ‘drink’, them. Meanwhile, Beer52 (from £24) mixes things up each month while also pairing their beers with a copy of Ferment magazine, as well as some snacks to nibble on while cracking into cans of suspiciously high-percentage craft ale.

Glasgow’s own Hippo Beers offer a beer club (from £28) with a serious incentive for keeping things local – two extra beers every month if you pick your box up from the shop rather than waiting for your post-person to give themselves a hernia lugging them up the stairs. For the pickier recipient, Honest Brew’s Tailor Made beer boxes (from £26) allow drinkers to rate their beers and in turn influence what turns up in their next delivery; Flavourly (from £23) allow you to arrange for all-light or all-dark beer boxes instead of the standard ‘bit of everything’ approach; and Beerhawk’s Beer Club (from £24) provides a good mix of classics and new beers, plus a notebook in which the recipient can scrawl their ideas for their own beer.

Or, alternatively, just give your loved one the chance to actually make their own beer. Stewart Brewing’s Craft Beer Kitchen offers the chance to make professional-quality beer under the tutelage of trained brewers. Pick from one of over 50 recipes, rejig it to your tastes, make it up under expert supervision, and end up with bottles and bottles of the stuff. Truly, the gift that keeps on giving. From £185 (for 40 litres), stewartbrewing.co.uk

Scottish Gins and Liqueurs

If you want to blend Christmas novelty with local spirits, grab a set of gin baubles (£30) from the Pickering’s Gin gang at Summerhall. As has been pointed out in the office, there’s around half a bottle of gin in these bad boys, making them a suitably high-powered present if you need a bit of a boost to get through Christmas day. Get on their mailing list now for the chance to nab a set.

Alternatively, the 12 Gins of Christmas (£69) from Eden Mill in St Andrews features a dozen mega-festive flavoured gins. Seriously, it’s like Christmas flavour bingo up in here. Apple and Cinnamon, Spruce & Cranberry, Mulled Gin – all your favourite festival scents and tastes, but in the form of gin.

Come to think of it, a bottle of gin is, in a sense, the ideal Christmas present. It’s easy to wrap, it’s local, and you can probably nick some of it for yourself without anyone noticing. Of course, it helps if your present looks the part. The Botanist, from the Isle of Islay, features a whole load of embossed lettering that makes it resemble some kind of alcoholic totem pole, while the sea-kelp infused Isle of Harris gin is all sans-serif lettering and cool seashell-like ridges. Then there’s Achroous by Leith’s Electric Spirit Co. – delicious juniper goodness, in the brightest orange bottle you’ve ever seen in your life. Seriously, it’s like a traffic cone from Tron, but filled with gin. It’s amazing.

And if you aren’t a gin fan – sorry, if ‘the person you’re buying for’ isn’t a gin fan – there are other local options on the table. There’s the first Scottish-made spiced rum, Dark Matter, distilled in the tropical climes of… Banchory. The tasting notes say it’s “the equivalent of warping into a liquid black hole but without every atom in your body being crushed to an infinitely small point” – we approve of those notes. And if you fancy something a bit leftfield, grab one of a pair of brand-new liqueurs – Aelder, an ‘elderflower elixir’ from the duo behind the Buck & Birch pop-up, and Crossbrew, a coffee liqueur by the team at Edinburgh’s Lucky Liquor Co.