
Fathers are rather fortunate that Demijohn exists in my Fatherly opinion, as the choice for Father's Day presents got somewhat better from about July 2004 onwards when we opened.....
If you are faced with the annual challenge of buying a Father's Day present this year, here are some quick ideas for presents that I personally would like to receive (my Wife take note please!):
- Gooseberry Gin Liqueur 17% - Newly back on tap, this drink makes a cracking Gooseberry G&T!
- Father's Day Box Set - A great idea for a whisky drinker who also appreciates a hand crafted wooden box.
- Daddy's Sauce - Not every Father drinks, but we all eat. Salads will never taste the same again with this 25 YO Balsamic Vinegar.
- Father's Gold - If your Father is a whisky lover, then this smokey Islay Single Malt will certainly appeal.
- Father's Spiced Rum Ration - A velvety smooth, dark Caribbean rum that is every Sailor's treat.
- Somerset Cider Brandy 42% - If your Father is a little cheesy, consider this alternative digestif to Whisky.
- Demijohnnie Gin 50% - My own cup. At 50% abv, this is not for the faint hearted. Disturbingly good straight over ice!
Order over £40 online by Monday 10th June to ensure you receive a free* delivery prior to Father's Day on Sunday 16th June. (*Please note free delivery applies to UK mainland delivery addresses only).
Events News
We are building up to the start of our Summer Show period which kicks off with the BBC Good Food Summer Show between 12-16 June. We will be exhibiting on Stand F502 in Hall 20 of the Birmingham NEC. Read more....
Mark Perkins, formerly Shop Manager of our York Shop, is returning to the Staff of Demijohn and will join me on our stand in this the first show of his new roll as our Events & Marketing Manager. Expect to see Mark at many events around the country, dancing and singing as only he knows how!
A full list of all our events we are planning to attend for the year can now be found on our new dedicated Fairs and Events page. We look forward to seeing you at some or all of them.
A New Recipe or Two
Frances, my lovely Wife, has been busy in the kitchen experimenting with both her own recipe ideas and others that you kindly have sent in. Please keep the ideas coming as you may be rewarded with a £30 Demijohn Gift Voucher for any recipe or cocktail that we decide is good enough to publish. One of Frances's most recent creations is her Rhubarb and Mead Pavlova. Easy to make, perfect for a BBQ pudding and utterly delicious to taste....need I say more? Read our new recipe blog for other inspiring recipe and cocktail ideas.
Please don't forget to place your Father's Day orders before Monday 10th June. Have a wonderful weekend!
Yours,
Angus
At last the sun is shining but crumbs, it has taken its time to come out! The Summer BBC Good Food Show is a spectacular event at which all the nice things in life come under one roof. It combines a rather large Food Festival, with a plethora of Garden and Lifestyle amusements thrown in.
As the blossom is now exuberantly blossoming outside Demijohn HQ it is a delight to bump into the occasional bumble bee during my increasingly frequent forays into the garden. I hope soon to start encountering a honey bee too and such thoughts bring
Our Citrus Sundowner Cocktail is a drink designed to make you feel alive and kicking. Best drunk on a warm evening with friends as the sun goes down, it will revitalise the parts that other cocktails fail to reach.
If you are a rhubarb fan then our Rhubarb Bellini Cocktail will be your drink. Its creation, using our very popular
Sometimes simple flavours pair together in the most magical way, and such is the case in our deliciously fresh tasting Raspberry Fresh Cocktail. Combining our seriously fruity
This cocktail is dedicated to our Demijohn boys in York, Mark Perkins and Tim Fox. They have created a great cocktail drink using our hugely popular
Edinburgh was voted in 2008 as the Mojito capital of Europe, impressed? It is only right therefore that we let you into the little secret of the Demijohn Dark Mojito that may have been encouraging this vibrant trend!
This cocktail was inspired by our visit to Bermuda for Hogmanay 2010 where we took some of our Scottish weather with us and left Bermuda with unseasonal storms, a temperature of around 13 degrees Celcius and a power cut! The recipe is a play on the classic Dark 'n' Stormy cocktail which uses Bermudan Dark Rum and Ginger Beer. Get ready for a surprise as this Scottish Dark & Staurmy version makes a deliciously tempting drink with warming Glaswegian Spiced Rum and smooth Ginger Wine.
Demijohn Classic and a good one to get a party going!
Our Morello Fizz Cocktail is designed an an easy, fun cocktail to get your party started! It combines our uniquely delicious Morello Cherry Brandy Liqueur simply with fizz.
If you are a gin and tonic drinker who simply enjoys a delicious tasting gentle drink at the end of a hard day, then our Evoque Cocktail is your drink. At its core is our
I absolutely love pasta! Well done Italy for inventing such a food. However, you do need to have the odd inspirational thought when creating a pasta dish to ensure you don't get stuck in a "Pasta Bake Rut" or PBR for short.
Having just returned from our action packed adventures at the Dales Food Festival at the start of May, we return next week to Leyburn in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales to support another good cause the
I had an experimental evening last night with duck breasts and a discovered remnant of Demijohn
Spring has finally brought some sun and with it a fabulous crop of rhubarb in Inverness, where our delicious
this will add more than a little fizz to the proceedings! If you like something with spice, then I can recommend our
been worth it or if you have any suggestions for further improvements, from simple spelling mistakes to real humdingers, then we definitely would like to know. So please send us a quick
I have always loved brown bread ice-cream, I think it's an inspired recipe that sounds so worthy, yet tastes so delicious. And now I have found a way to make it a bit more decadent.
Demijohn has gone global with the launch of a £50,000 website to enable its customers to more easily source and buy its delicious artisan
use than the previous site and better explains what we do and how we do it. Despite these challenging times we have seen a steady growth in sales of about 15% year on year. We hope with this website that this should increase to 20-25% growth, allowing us to widen our product range.
Don't follow the herd this year when choosing your Easter Eggs, but instead consider our more grown up liquid Easter Egg as a fun alternative!
This recipe has been kindly sent to us by Angela Wilson in response to our call for recipes using our products. Angela has been rewarded with a £30 demijohn gift voucher as a thank you for this wonderful recipe.
Our handmade
If you like your drinks sharp and refreshing then this might be just your tipple!
Blow your friends away with this one!
The Pink Gin was invented by the British Navy, and the inclusion of our
This is a very good cocktail for you to get your Burns Night Supper festivities off to a cracking start.
All credit for this little genius of a drink goes to our erstwhile Edinburgh Shop Manager, Alastair Simpson. Always one to appreciate a good thing, Alastair seems to have found a way of spicing up Oz Clarke's favourite liqueur from Demijohn, our
Our Shop Manager in Glasgow, Carrie Hay, is credited with inventing this delicious little cocktail. It is simple to make and dangerously easy to consume! Another twist on the traditional Whisky Mac Cocktail, the combination of ingredients here produces a beautifully sweet, smooth and gingery drink. If you like rhubarb and ginger, you are going to love this!
A twist on the traditional Whisky Mac Cocktail, this definitely has its roots in Glasgow. Glasgow's fame for its artists, such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, heavy rain and eccentricity makes Rhubarb MaKintosh an appropriate choice of name for this inspiring cocktail! The combination of ingredients sharpens the rhubarb flavours and produces a dry drink with lemon overtones. Clever, with a few surprises up its sleeve...
The name Scottish Rose does not refer to the colour of the drink itself but rather the colour of one's cheeks after drinking it! This cocktail recipe was created for the Demijohn 2008 Staff Christmas night out by Alastair Simpson at which a cocktail competition was held between our Edinburgh and Glasgow shops. The Glasgow cocktail is called a
This cocktail recipe was created for the Demijohn 2008 Staff Christmas night out by Carrie Hay as our Glasgow team's entry to a cocktail competition between our Edinburgh and Glasgow shops. The Edinburgh cocktail is called Scottish Rose. Although a draw was declared on the night, your comments on the success of each recipe would be much appreciated and could be posted online if witty enough!
It may look simple, but this drink has the ability to turn spring into Summer, even in Scotland. So, break out your BBQ and head for the garden as our Elderflower Cooler cocktail will start your party with refreshing style!
We wil be exhibiting at our first event of the year, the fantastic Leyburn Food & Drink Festival again between Sat 4th and Mon 6th May 2013. For those who have never witnessed this tremendous event I urge you to come.
Make like an expert mixologist and create this concoction. It’s a bitter sweet drink that’ll warm you and your guests up in a flash. As recommended by Rebecca Twomey in Cosmopolitan Magazine in December 2009!
In October 2009, just after we launched our new shop in York, we launched our Grapefruit Vodka Liqueur 20%. Made for originally for us by Ian and Rosemary Mills in Powys in Wales, this is a truely fabulous drink for all citrus vodka lovers. The cocktail possibilites for this drink are endless, but one cocktail creation stands out from the crowd as having been deliciously successful and was developed on the back of the popularity of our Demijohn Dark Mojito. In fact our Grapefruit Vodka Mojito is so drinkable that is now used on a regular basis to start our Demijohn Tasting Evenings. Not a bad way to start an evening I think you will agree!
This cocktail was created to mark Saint George's Day, normally on 23 April. It needed to be quintessentially English, seasonally fresh and with a bite like Saint George's slain dragon! The result is a sharp, fresh cocktail with a little history of its own. Our Somerset Applecart cocktail combines the brilliantly smooth apple taste of our
The 2010 election fever certainly needed a little ice to cool it off. We created our Election Twist cocktail to be just the long drink needed to keep us up late and survive a long night of vote counting! Our Election Twist is a Demijohn variation of the seductively sweet classic Long Island Iced Tea cocktail and has been invented by one of our Glasgow team members, Carlos Wheeler. It was first drunk by a group of guests taking part in one of our organised tasting evenings in Glasgow. Their enthusiastic noises of approval have now written it into the official Demijohn Cocktail Book.
For
Edinburgh Apple Royal was a cocktail created to celebrate The Royal Wedding between Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton which took place at Westminster Abbey on 29 April 2011. It is a deliciously spring fresh aperitif, with a distinctive taste of apples and a hint of citrus. This drink brings together the finest taste of British apples used in the production of our
Like everything at Demijohn there is a good story behind the creation of this new cocktail drink. Our Royal Wedding Cocktail was to be both fitting, appropriate and drinkable in Royal circles. To encourage some ideas we held a friendly competition between our 3 shops, with the intention of the newly created drinks being judged at our annual Staff Christmas Party. In 2011 it was held in our Glasgow Shop in early February.
What mother doesn’t love a little spoiling foodie treat on Mother’s Day? Demijohn has unveiled a beautiful new
You may not be able to dance like a Cossack, but there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to drink like one! Invented by our York Shop Team in early 2012, this is a fun cocktail combining our handmade
Our Wild Plum Bellini Cocktail is a fun play on a classic Bellini Cocktail and was designed specially for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Celebrations in June 2012.
If you like cheese and need something for your nibbles at a drinks party, then this might be the perfect soloution.
John Quigley’s Hot smoked salmon, ruby grapefruit, shaved fennel, pistachio and watercress salad with minty crème fraiche and
This is a simple to make vinaigrette which was first invented by Mrs Wilson of Biggar, one of many enthusiastic Demijohn customers.
A generous glass or two of our
Our Festival Blackcurrant Ice-Cream is made with our deliciously rich
This is fantastically simple, yet delicious recipe for a lunch or dinner party dessert.
This is a Zabaglione recipe of the most untraditional nature and is perfect for whizzing up for unexpected guests.
This delicious Highland Bread and Butter Pudding Recipe serves 3 with a good appetite!
This delicious recipe, using our much loved
Deciding on a suitable present for your Mother on Mothering Sunday on 10th March is never going to be easy. Choosing something unique will be sure to surprise and hopefully delight. Your answer may lie with our beautiful new
Whatever you decide, forget her day at your peril and good luck making your choice! If you are quick, we are still offering a 10% discount on any Demijohn bottle refills until the end of February 2013 (i.e Thursday this week!). Simply request your refill discount from a member of Staff in store. If you haven't got a bottle to refill or are too far away don't panic! We are currently offering free delivery for orders of £40 or more to all UK Mainland addresses, so place your order online now. Terms may apply.
Our News: Development of our new website continues at full speed and thankfully is nearing its completion. Those who have kindly signed up to help us test it will be getting the call up shortly, so stand by your beds! However, we have also been busy with running many tasting events, both within our shops and without. For groups of friends and work colleagues, for corporate entertainment and just good fun. At the start of the Month at one such evening I had the fortune to talk to about 40 of the knowledgeable members of the Institute for Wine and Spirits in Scotland (IWSS) about our products. Held in a private room at the Royal Scots Club and starting with a few warm up cocktails and delicious breads from Bakery Andante in Morningside in Edinburgh to taste our oils and vinegars, the evening was tremendous fun and in danger of never ending. This is always a good sign! If you are interested in organising your own event and would like more information about what we can offer for groups of two or more persons, then please look at our Tasting Events web page initially and then contact us to discuss a booking.
We are fortunate in Scotland to have a very good excuse for a party in January and blow away the blues of a harsh winter, to celebrate the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns, born on 25 January 1796.
To make matters more pleasant still, we are offering a 10% discount on any Demijohn bottle refills until the end of February 2013.
I hope you have also had a good start to the new year? Thankyou for all your support and custom during 2012, it led to another successful year at Demijohn and we are enormously grateful to you for it.
A big thankyou to those who have already sent in their recipes for consideration, we will be coming back to you with our verdicts shortly.