Rising Gin
After vodka and whisky, is gin the new ontrend tipple? chek wong talks to the founders of a Japanese distillery that heralds a new dawn in appreciation of the liquor
GIN, IMMORTALISED IN William Hogarth’s bleak depiction of misery and despair Gin Lane as a vile and reprehensible spirit, has undergone an image about-turn of late. Its resurgence has been helped by the popularity of glamorous cocktail bars as well as a raft of high-quality, premium gins entering the market.
An interesting contender is the Japan-distilled Ki No Bi, a no-holds-barred craftsman gin established two years ago by Britons David Croll and Marcin Miller. While the Brits have been at the forefront of the craft gin movement (think Sipsmith, the London distillery now owned by Beam Suntory), finding a gin made in Japan is not so common.
Having distributed Japanese whiskies for more than a decade, however, Croll and Miller are highly attuned to the subtle undercurrents of changing consumer palates. As Miller explains, “In 2005 we started working with Japanese whiskies from smaller, independent producers. The Japanese whisky landscape has changed significantly in that period, and we’re always looking for new and interesting things to do.
And so the idea came to me that we could bring together the prestige of luxury Japanese spirits with this dynamic wave of gin and create Japan’s first craft gin.” Thus Ki No Bi was born.
The secret to Ki No Bi lies in the careful distillation of 11 botanicals that make up the final product. Grouped into six flavour categories (base, citrus, tea, spice, fruity/floral and herbal), each set of botanicals is distilled separately in
copper stills and then blended.
“If you distil everything together, which is the most common,” says Croll, “inevitably there’s a certain amount of averaging going on.
You can only take one cut, and that means you’re missing some of the desirable flavours and elements, and getting some things you don’t want. Whereas if we do each thing separately, it’s a bit like buying a bespoke suit – every little bit has been individually measured and checked.”
Formulating the recipe was laborious, requiring intensive research into Japanese ingredients and experimenting with more than 60 different botanicals. Croll adds, “Our distiller, Alex Davies, came to Japan way before we even had a distillery, so that he could use the first six months of his time in Japan to learn about all these tastes and flavours and aromas to create a palette from which we could paint Ki No Bi.”
The core flavour of the gin is juniper, currently sourced from Macedonia, but the Ki No Bi recipe also calls for authentically Japanese ingredients such as yuzu peels and hinoki cypress wood chips. “The objective,” says Miller, “was to create something that anyone in the world who knew about gin would recognise as being a gin, but we wanted to add a distinctive Japanese accent so we’ve created that accent through the use of local botanicals.” Some of the ingredients are quite unique, such as the inclusion of gyokuro green tea from Uji. “Tea is very difficult to work with,” explains Miller. “It’s quite possible to overextract, to get tannic and astringent, which we really don’t want. There’s a delicacy that we strive to achieve, so when you taste just the tea distillate that we produce, it has a sweetness and freshness that's very alluring and that comes through on the finish as well as on the palate of the final gin.” These local botanicals are sourced from dedicated farmers who harvest the produce when they're in season at the peak of flavour, a testament to the ethos of Ki No Bi, which means “the beauty of the seasons”.