Ben Lomond: The Gin Competition Heat Nectar Never Attended

I have written about Nectar's cocktail competitions before, and they have mostly been stories about getting close. Panos reaching the Bumbu Originals final. The jalapeno syrup that came out of preparing for the Patron Margarita Challenge and ended up living permanently in Warmth Within. Those articles were about the process of competing, win or lose.

This one is different, because for once the story is not about how we did in a competition. It is about how we never actually got to find out.

Why Ben Lomond mattered more than the others

Ben Lomond Gin is the Official Gin of The Open, which tells you roughly the size of the stage we are talking about. Every year they run a competition called the Official Serve of The Open, open to bartenders across Scotland, built around the 155th Open at St Andrews. The brief was the cleanest I have seen from any competition we have entered. Create a serve that features Ben Lomond Gin as the star ingredient, give it a name and a story that connects to St Andrews and its surroundings, and make sure it can actually hold up as a long serve poured at volume for a golf crowd rather than a fussy one-off show drink. Judging is on taste, name and story, not technical showmanship, which suits how we think about drinks at Nectar anyway. The prize was serious too: a thousand pounds, a Ben Lomond hamper, and two VIP hospitality tickets to the 155th Open itself.

We always want the same thing when a competition comes up. We want everyone's drink to make it through. Once we are in the room competing, the bar takes a back seat and it becomes about each bartender on their own. That is deliberate. A competition like this rewards an individual voice, not a house style, so the fairest thing we can do as a team is push everyone to enter and then get out of the way.

Ben Lomond could have been our biggest result yet. All three of our bartenders entered. All three were invited to a heat.

What made the brief so good

Ben Lomond's own brand story is built around the idea of an adventurous spirit, and the gin itself gives you a lot to work with. Eleven distinct botanicals go into it, including foraged rowan berries from Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, Scottish blackcurrants for sweetness, Szechuan pepper for warmth, rose petals for the floral note, and whole orange zest. That is a genuinely versatile spirit to be handed as a brief. It is bold enough to be the obvious lead in a drink and balanced enough that it does not fight whatever direction you take it in.

What I found genuinely satisfying, watching our three bartenders work through this one, was seeing how differently they each read the same gin. We sat down together first, the way we normally do before a competition. We went through the brief line by line, looked at the specs, talked about what The Open and St Andrews actually mean as a setting, and talked at length about the gin itself. Where the rowan berry sits against the blackcurrant, how the Szechuan pepper changes the finish, what the rose petal does once you put citrus next to it. That part is always collaborative. We want everyone starting from the same understanding of the spirit and the same read of the brief.

Then it splits. Each bartender goes away and decides what story they actually want to tell with it, because the brief is not really asking for a technically correct gin cocktail. It is asking for a drink with a point of view. That is where individuality takes over, and it is the part of competition prep I enjoy most, because you get to watch three people who work the same bar every week arrive at three completely different answers to the same question.

That is exactly what happened here. Three very separate drinks came out of that process, built around the same eleven botanicals and the same brief, and all three were different enough and strong enough that every one of us was invited forward to a heat.

The package that arrived

Before I get to why none of us made it to a final, I want to mention something that genuinely stood out about how Ben Lomond ran this. After the drinks were submitted, each of us received a personalised package. Not a generic promo box, but a bottle and a glass sent individually to each bartender by name. It is a small gesture in the scheme of a national competition, but it is the kind of detail that tells you a brand is run by people who actually care about the bartenders they are asking to represent them, rather than treating the competition as a marketing exercise they can run on autopilot. I felt genuinely grateful receiving it, and it set a tone. This was a competition being run at its finest, by people who understood what it takes from the people entering it.

Where it went wrong, and why I am not going to dress it up

The first heat we were invited to was the St Andrews and East Scotland qualifying round, held at The Physician. I was on holiday that week, which on its own would not have stopped us, since a bar our size is not supposed to depend on one person being present. But we did not have a second server scheduled that day either, and between the two gaps it became impossible to release a bartender to travel through to the heat. That is on us. It was a planning failure, not bad luck, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

To Ben Lomond's enormous credit, when I explained the situation, they did not simply write us off. They invited us instead to the Central Scotland qualifying round in Glasgow, held on the Monday at Kelvingrove Café. That is a genuinely generous thing for a brand to do, and it gave us a second run at exactly the outcome we wanted.

This is where the bad luck actually starts. That Monday, Aris was scheduled to work in his own separate business, a commitment he could not move at short notice. On the very same day, Panos and I were travelling to Zurich for our takeover there, a trip that had been locked in for months. Three bartenders, three completely separate and completely legitimate reasons, all landing on the same Monday.

So we had a team that qualified for the final round of the Official Serve of The Open with three separate drinks, and we never found out how any of them would have done, because between one planning gap and two unmovable commitments, none of us could physically be in either room on either date.

What I take from this

I am not going to turn this into a lesson dressed up as a silver lining, because honestly the biggest lesson is a boring operational one. We need a genuine bench, not just a full-time team, if we want to keep entering competitions at this level without a single absence or a single travel clash being able to take out an entire heat. That is a staffing and scheduling problem, and it is one worth fixing before the next brief like this one lands.

What I do not regret is entering at all. Watching three bartenders take the same eleven botanicals and the same brief and arrive at three genuinely different drinks, built around three genuinely different stories, is exactly why we keep doing this. Ben Lomond ran one of the best competitions we have been part of, treated us properly even after we missed the first date, and we still walked away with nothing to show for it except the drinks themselves and the process of making them. That is a real cost. It is also, in its own frustrating way, a fair one. We asked for a second chance and got one. What we did with it was on us.

If you want to taste where that competition prep actually goes, some of what came out of past competitions is still on our menu, including Warmth Within, which owes its jalapeno syrup to a competition brief in exactly the same way. Book a table at Nectar Bar and ask which of our cocktails started life as a competition entry. We are always happy to tell that story properly, in person, over the drink itself.

Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 5pm to 11pm Monday: Closed