A year in one post
Blame writers block, being fully booked on the house, a long winded remortgage or the lazy ease with which I can throw things at our facebook page but after 5 years of solid updates I haven’t posted anything since September.
Here is a potted version to fill in some gaps.
September – Jack and Anna got married. The concrete pad gets poured for the new hen house.
October – We fire on with the turret for the chickens, finish the bar part of the shed and the new stills arrive from Portugal. We win ‘Trailblazer of the Year’ award at the Sawdays 20th anniversary bash and the first batch of fully Inshriach manufactured Crossbill Gin makes its way through the stills. Then sells out in 3 days. The bothy project gets a refurb.
November – The Herald put out a lovely piece about Inshriach becoming the home to a new all Scottish Gin. The John Langan Band played in the farmyard for our pre bonfire night party. A flock of 50 blackface ewes arrives. Work continues on the proposed distillery by bashing some holes and making a mess of the bit we had finished. A major rationalise of the car projects gets underway and we lose an old landcruiser, a 1950s bus, a crappy motocross bike, a landrover and an MG.
December – Bookings are a little quieter on the yurt in December so despite a howling blizzard we swap it for a doppelganger and Paul from Red Kite Yurts goes to work steaming up a new set of ash rafters, repairing the wall trellis and reproofing my canvas. Its been 5 years since we built it and it was looking a bit wonky. We rent the house out for Hogmanay for the first time.
January, February – Cold, snowy, lots of changeovers, a smattering of smaller weddings. Artists in the bothy. We finish the distillery (if it can ever be described as finished), started work on the horsebox bar and a new recycled greenhouse replaces the cold frames in the veg garden and promises to revolutionise our gardening. Bottling number 2 comes back from the plant.
March – Heavy floods and sheep rescues. We make another round of gin and enter Shed of the year.
April, May – The first Inshriach lambs are born and Dash the tiny sheep comes to live in our house. A daft vote winning campaign gets underway and the Herald and STV and even the BBC pick up on it and start writing about us. The Horsebox bar took its first outing at Brew at the Bog and pedalled considerable gin and good times. Voting ended for SOTY at the end of May.
June – Build commences for the Gentlemen of the Road festival with 25 multi coloured pub benches. People keep buying them so we end up making 37. A little break for filming for SOTY then strictest secrecy. We win the pub category and the tension mounts.
July – We get busy building the backstage bars, artists areas, furniture and so on for Gentlemen of the Road and a media frenzy explodes around us as we are crowned overall winner in Shed of the Year. Radio, TV, newspapers and general sheddie fame threatens to take our minds off the endless repetition of pub benches.
August – Gentlemen of the Road arrives at the same time as a Dutch TV Travel show. Mumford and Sons ask to have their afterparty in the shed. We say no because we are knackered. The horsebox bar serves a scarcely believable 1800 gin and tonics.
That pretty much brings us up to date. It has been a rollercoaster of a year and I will try to be a little more regular with this blog. If you want to see any more of this in detail you can head for our facebook page or the photographic version over on Flickr.
Good to be back.
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