Gin close to our hearts
In the north west Highlands of Scotland at Ardelve, with looks out across Loch Ailsh to Eilean Donan Castle and the Isle of Skye, Thomas Gottwald and his wife Manuela founded their Fairytale Distillery.
Out of their love for Scotland they moved there from their home in Germany in 2013 and opened a bakery. A few years later, their daughter Joline, the current distillery manager, extended the small enterprise with a pizzeria.


Picturesque little wooden houses accommodate all the areas and blend perfectly into the mystical surroundings.
Here you can also find the āwitchās kitchenā. The laboratory where they create their gins, a true passion for Thomas and his internationally experienced team.
The distillery grew out of a fruitful meeting between Thomas and a German herb master, who was happy to pass on his knowledge about manufacturing small gin batches.
Variety & Fairy Dust
Keen to develop sustainable business practices, the gins are filled into black stone bottles, whereby each gin recipe is given its own number that also labels the bottle.
The hand crafted gin produced by the distillery marries traditional ingredients with carefully selected botanics and water from the spring fed burn Alt Mor na Dornie to create local and exotic products.
The recipes are carefully refined; herbs such as locally-sourced meadowsweet are used, as are traditional standard botanicals such as juniper, coriander and citrus fruit ā and to top it off, a little āFairy Dustā.

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We creating Fairytales
The teams international skills enable the Distillery to produce a variety of non-chilled filtered, highland gins that appeal to a wide range of cultures and palates.
These skills have been drawn from three generations of Botanists, the latest having grown up with a keen interest in distilling.
The team consists of Thomas (1) the Founder, CEO and Distiller; Joline (2) the Distillery Manager; Roger (3) the Consultant, whose Uncle was in command of the First Class Lounge of the Queen Elizabeth Liner; and Martin (4) and Stephan (5) the Botanists. The team has highly experienced and professional acumen.
