No Mean City launches, a Glasgow made blended whisky brand

We visit the Finsbury Flatiron to find out more about No Mean City the newest whisky brand to launch in Glasgow.

Transcript

00:00But look at you. So what we've got here is No Mean City whisky. It's a blended Scotch

00:07whisky that's just recently been launched. The inspiration comes from a

00:12book, it was an old Glaswegian book written in the 1930s called No Mean City

00:17and it was basically just about Glasgow lifestyle in the 20s based around the

00:23Gorbals. It was a parallel between the underbelly of the city at the time, tenement living, the

00:28struggles at the time, the interim war time where there was a bit of

00:35depression. We had a really big shipyard industry, World Famous is what people

00:40know about. It was in a bit of a decline so, you know, finding work was hard and

00:47how that kind of affected the city at the time but it had great parallels. We

00:52also had very champion ballroom dancers at the time and there was a big

00:56dancing scene with the Barrowlands and all these famous dance halls across the

01:00city and it was just a really interesting, very gritty book but it was

01:05really very interesting and off the back of that book Glasgow kind of got

01:09nicknamed No Mean City which held for years and years and years and then it

01:14kind of dissipated as we probably tried to kind of lose that stigma. So that's

01:19really what the whisky represents. Yes we come from these times, we're resilient

01:23people, hard-working and there was a gritty underbelly at one point but we've

01:29really evolved over the last hundred years. So that was in the 1920s, now we're in

01:34the 2020s so the whisky was really inspired to sort of capture that essence

01:41and tell that story and tell the story of the city, where it's from, where we

01:45came from and where we're going to or where we are today sort of thing and the

01:50positives that the city's got going forward.