Find the right chemistry
Mother’s milk or mothers’ ruin, whatever you call it, gin tastes as sweet, writes Josh Martin.
It was just like going back into a high school chemistry lab. There were wood-topped stools arranged horse-shoe in front of a bench adorned with beakers, boilers and measuring ,materials and small jugs of water.
Jars, big and small, filled with strange ingredients from far afield lined a cabinet at each end of our attic space. All that was missing were the lab coats. And unlike my 15-year-old self, today I was determined to make the grade.
Thankfully, we had just completed the theory next door, at Salcombe Gin Distillery’s recently house-warmed premises. Master distiller Jason, adorned in a bowler hat and grasping a bamboo stick, showed off the company’s hard-working 450-litre copper still, named Provident after one of the co-founder’s favourite sailing ships.
Our group of about a dozen were taken through the steps and ingredients – but never the quantities of Salcombe’s award-winning recipe – turning mere water into ‘‘mother’s ruin’’.
And it turns out that all of those ‘‘notes of honey, rose petals and cardamom’’ or ‘‘fresh basil, pear and rhubarb root’’ are not just marketing fluff thought of at the time of the label printing.
In gin-making school we plucked, sliced, and crushed our botanical collections for our very own individualised recipe. We were told from the outset that we only get one shot at the recipe, this being the London dry method.
‘‘But we’ve never had a guest come to us and leave with a bad bottle of gin made,’’ consoled Jason. ‘‘Well, we had one horrible bottle – but that was made by a staff member so it hardly counts.’’
Hoping not to be the first dreadful distillers, we sheepishly tipped the ramekin of additives into our mini bench-top copper stills and hoped for the best. Tension turned to giddy laughter and childlike wonder around the classroom (‘‘It’s working!’’) as drops became trickles and then slight streams as our very own gin flowed into our beakers. Now to the hardest task of all: what to name our creations?
It may have been the ‘‘London drymethod’’, but we wouldn’t have seemed further from the sprawl of concrete and rust that is the British capital.
Salcombe Gin was the pet project of locals Angus Lugsdin and Howard Davies, who met at the local sailing club just down the road from where we are creating, and has only been distilling commercially since July 2016. The setting is not one iota of the Victorian London that springs to mind and is marketed to within an inch of its life when it comes to gin.
Instead, Salcombe is a throwback to a time even before then, with narrow paths and stone houses and shops wrapping part way around a harbour and climbing up the farmland surrounds.
Perched as a crown jewel in the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Salcombe maintains a link to the sailing and boatbuilding industry, and its Island Street still has maritime workshops interjected with boutique food stores selling local produce – Devon being the pantry of England, after all.
Tourists meander down cute lanes and weekend wanderers in too-flash Range Rovers foolishly attempt to pass them.
Despite the newer artisanal food companies popping up, this is still meat pasty and crab sandwich territory, and earlier we let our legs
dangle over the wharf as we devoured both and watched kids go crabbing in the estuary below.
It’s a locally-approved way to line the stomach before class and is so good you’ll call in again on your way back.
After school, the incoming tide lapped in the estuary below the deck of the company’s Boathouse Bar, and we nodded in agreement at our afternoon’s work: A 700ml bottle named Nu Zillund Jun: Dis’till The Best. Jason from behind the bar matched our unique creation with a couple of different mixer options to extenuate our concoction.
With a G&T in hand – the delicious result of our hard labour – it was much better than I remember my last chemistry class.
❚ The writer travelled with assistance from Food and Drink Devon and South Sands Hotel.