The annual Shetland Up Helly Aa fire festivals may be cancelled this year because of Covid-19 but that doesn’t mean we can’t still raise a glass to mark the occasion.
We were due to officially launch our new, limited edition Not Up Helly Aa 2021 Gin today, to coincide with the Lerwick Up Helly Aa festival, which would have taken place on the last Tuesday in January.
This special London Dry Gin was lovingly developed by our distillery team and marked the first in a series of limited edition Single Batch Gins. At 40% abv, it has the characteristic smoothness of all our Shetland Reel gins and enticing citrus notes on the nose. Each bottle is hand labelled and numbered, creating a truly unique Shetland Reel experience.
Only 121 bottles of Not Up Helly Aa 2021 were created, but much like Up Helly Aa itself, the launch has been cancelled – not because of Covid-19 thankfully, but because the gin is sold out already!
Pre-orders opened online on Wednesday evening to a select group of online customers and within a few short hours all 121 bottles had sold.
We couldn’t have predicted just how popular this gin would be. We often take preorders for our latest gins, but none have ever sold out immediately. As a limited edition Single Batch Gin, we sadly don’t have any more bottles for today’s launch. It’s the gin launch that never was for the Up Helly Aa that had to be cancelled
We have no doubt that the festival will return next year, bigger and better than ever before. In the meantime, for those who have managed to buy a bottle, we hope that our Not Up Helly Aa 2021 Gin will go some way to make up for this disappointment of the event being cancelled.
For those who haven’t managed to get their hands on a bottle of Not Up Helly Aa 2021, there’s still the opportunity to buy limited editions from previous years’ Up Helly Aa festivals.
Please also look out for new limited edition Special Batch Gin releases from Shetland Reel in the coming months.
