Mountain flavors add unique twist to S. African gin craze
CAPE TOWN — Piling in for after-work drinks, around two dozen people pore over the menu at Mother’s Ruin, a speciality gin bar in Cape Town, where homegrown varieties are making a mark on the global scene.
The menu is a daunting tome of 144 gins from around the globe, over 20 of them South African and steeped in the flavors of the country’s unique coastal mountains.
“Those are very popular — all the foreigners that come in here want to see what gins South Africa has to offer,” says part owner Will Pretorius, whose current favorite is A Mari, a variety from Cape Town distilled with seawater.
“Gin around the world is starting to have a moment and South Africa has jumped on the bandwagon,” says gin maker Lucy Beard.
In 2015, her gin distillery Hope On Hopkins was the first to be licensed in Cape Town, just as the drink began to make a stir.
“Very soon after, small gin distilleries began popping up in Cape Town and its surrounds, with quite a few on the wine farms, too,” she adds.
Formerly lawyers based in London, Beard and her partner Leigh Lisk, who are both South African, turned their hand to gin after taking a year off to travel around Europe.
“There were little craft distilleries everywhere,” says Beard.
“It was basically a passing comment: ‘Do you think we could make gin?’ We downloaded a book on distilling to our Kindles and sat in a campsite in Spain reading it.”
It’s a simple enough process: spirits are distilled with what gin makers call botanicals to add flavor. The only rule — one of those flavors must be juniper.
What then distinguishes one gin from the next is everything else the distiller chooses to add to the mix.
In South Africa, that has predominantly been the flowers and herbs of the mountains surrounding Cape Town, collectively called