Botanical magic: gin and the fascination of flavour Chris Losh
What gives gin its distinctive flavour, and what makes the seemingly infinite number of gins so different from one another? Chris Losh finds out and picks his top 10 to try
Every year, the Oxford English Dictionary recognises new words. Those from 2019 included cannabusiness (weed-related commerce), spritzy (fizzy) and any number of new dog breed crosses. Surprisingly, though, it hasn’t yet included ‘ginaissance’ – a term that has sprung up to indicate the transformation in the fortunes of the G in G&T.
Gin is everywhere: on A-boards outside pubs and filling up supermarket aisles, dinner parties and drinks lists alike. New distilleries seem to open every week in the UK alone. For a drink that was deader than corduroy 30 years ago, these are heady times indeed.
Key to gin’s revival are two factors: firstly, it’s relatively cheap and easy to make, and since you don’t need to age it (unlike, say, Scotch or Cognac) producers can get their money back on it quickly. And secondly, unlike vodka, it has distinct flavour.
‘Gin is different,’ says Desmond Payne MBE, master distiller at Beefeater Gin. ‘With whisky, it’s grain and that’s it; for brandy it’s just grape. But when you look at gin it’s anything you want, so long as there’s juniper in there.’
The basics
Gin is basically a neutral spirit that is then flavoured with botanicals – herbs, berries, spices, bark, roots, flowers, bits of vegetation; anything, frankly.
To make a classic London Dry gin such as Beefeater, this botanical mix is usually put in the still to macerate with the neutral spirit, then boiled. The steam condenses and is collected to form a turbo-strength spirit, which is then diluted with water.
Distilled gin starts out the same way as London Dry gin, but flavours can be added afterwards, while coldcompounded gins infuse a neutral spirit with botanicals, with no further distilling. Ableforth’s Bathtub Gin, which infuses a base spirit of gin with botanicals, is a good example of when this works well.
Nowadays, botanicals are a stylistic choice. But go back 300 years and there was a more pragmatic reason for their
use. Distillation technology wasn’t up to much in the 18th century and flavours were needed to mask imperfections.
The key botanical is the one that gave the drink its name: juniper. Back in the 16th century British soldiers fighting the Spanish in northern Europe drank a Dutch spirit before battle (hence ‘Dutch courage’), named after the berry that flavoured it. Genever gradually became ‘gen’, then ‘gin’.
Juniper berries are the biggest wild card for gin distillers. They have to be foraged – usually from inaccessible, mountainous places – and the crop sizes (and therefore prices) vary from year to year. But juniper is the sine qua non of gin. Officially, it should be the dominant flavour and it gives gin its fresh, piney ‘walking through a forest’ character and some of its dryness. Juniper takes centre stage in all the ‘classic’ gins – Tanqueray, Gordons, Beefeater, No3, to name but a few – but it’s not the only flavour.
The fab four
‘Pretty much every gin in the world will have four base botanicals:
‘Pretty much every gin in the world will have four base botanicals: juniper, coriander seeds, a root and a citrus peel’
juniper, coriander seeds, a root (usually angelica), and then a citrus peel,’ says Tom Hills of East London Liquor Company. The exact proportions vary, but typically juniper will make up 60% of the mix, coriander seeds 30% and everything else the remaining 10%.
It’s easy to see how these core elements work together. Alongside juniper’s drying pine note, coriander seeds add bright citrus spice, citrus peel brings a sweeter, mid-palate lift, while the orris/angelica root holds the whole thing together with a gentle, drying spice/chocolate rumble.
Some gins have very few botanicals (Tanqueray, for instance, has only four), while others have dozens. Between 10 and 20 is most common, though Monkey 47, from the Black Forest in Germany, has, well, 47.
‘Gin must be about a balance of flavours to create one flavour,’ explains James Hayman of Hayman’s Gin. ‘We compare it to an orchestra – several different instruments creating one piece of music.’
Local twist
When I was writing this article, I was sent a bottle of a new Indian gin, Greater Than. ‘When we started off on this journey, we distilled almost every spice, herb, fruit and flower that we could get our hands on,’ says the gin’s founder Anand Virmani. ‘Each distillate was marked and kept on shelves. We would then put on our
creative hats and bring together flavours we thought might work together. Some worked. Many didn’t.’ The creation process took two years.
Clearly brands are taking the basic gin template and giving it a defiant twist with local ingredients. Four Pillars (Australia) uses lemon myrtle and Tasmanian pepperberry; Kongsgaard uses Danish apples; Gin Mare uses Spanish olives, citrus, basil, rosemary and thyme; Ki No Bi uses yuzu, sansho, red shiso and bamboo leaf; Glendalough is foraged from the Irish mountains around the distillery.
It’s over-egging it to say that terroir has come to gin, but it’s undoubtedly true that a growing number of gins are now an expression of a place. Of course, ‘expression of place’ only works as a concept if the actual gin itself is good, and some ingredients need to be treated with care. A gin that tastes massively of lavender, say, might make a powerful initial impression, but – like a big fruit-bomb of a wine – you could struggle to finish a glass.
While there’s no doubting that ‘exotic’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘better’, it’s also true that the explosion of styles and flavours has created an amazing choice. Whether you like punchy juniper or sweet citrus flavours, perfumed flowers or exotic spice notes, there really is a style out there for everybody.
‘That’s the purpose of gin,’ says Beefeater’s Payne. ‘To be exciting.’
It’s certainly that. My money’s on ‘ginaissance’ making it into the OED for 2020.
DChris Losh has worked as a drinks writer, columnist and author for over 20 years. He was previously editor of Imbibe
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