Photo of
May 30, 2019

First up, True OriGins gin festival is at Glasgow's Briggait for two days from Friday.

We blogged about it extensively back in March so we won't repeat ourselves much here.

What we will say is that more than 70 different gins will be on show along with live music and street food.

Obviously, there are gin festivals taking place in Scotland pretty much every weekend over the summer months. Juniper Festival is also taking place this weekend but in Edinburgh.

Where True OriGins hope to stand out is that they have hand selected all of the gins for their back story and Scottish provenance.

Exactly what makes a gin Scottish is a hot topic at the moment and there is no official definition in the same way that there is for whisky.

For the organisers of True OriGins, a gin qualifies as Scottish if it is 'distilled/rectified and bottle in Scotland'.

The festival runs Friday 31st May and Saturday 1st June at the Briggait with sessions on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon and evening. Tickets. Main pic is from festival Facebook.

West End Festival

At the other end of town, the West End Festival gets underway tomorrow for the 24th time. Running from Friday 31st May to the end of June, it's billed as Glasgow's largest cultural event and last year over 400 events took place in 80 venues.

The programme looks just as packed this summer and there are lots of food related events.

A swatch at page 47 of the brochure will fill you in on many of the details.

This Sunday, you may want to saunter along to the Vinicombe Street Party and/or the Sunday Lane Party on Ashton Lane.

Between the two, they offer al fresco bars, street food, magicians, brass bands, frozen cocktails, stilt walkers and, this is the clincher, ping pong wars!

Be careful out there, all you hardcore whiff whaffers.