Ask the Expert

I have a load of bottles that have about an inch or two of gin left in the bottom. Can I mix them together, or will it just taste dreadful?

NITA, WATTON

You can definitely combine gins to create an “infinity bottle” or “house blend”.

This has been popular within the whisky community for many years (Mrs Smith even keeps her Scotch blend in a small cask) and it has gradually been adopted by those gin folk “in the know”.

I’d start with dry gins only as they are easier to blend than sweetened, infused, or fruit gins. By sticking to dry gins, you can follow a pretty simple rule: if you wouldn’t drink it neat, don’t put it in the blend. You might also want to watch out for certain overpowering flavours such as lavender, cardamom, chilli, or smoke.

You can combine gins of different alcoholic strengths or ABVs, but ideally you would include a couple of higher ones (46% or higher), maybe even a bit of navy gin. This helps to compensate for the fact that the remainder at the bottom of a gin bottle will often have lost some of its alcohol through evaporation.

At home, I have a couple of gin blends: a general, “classic gin” for everyday use or for trying out recipes, plus a spiceforward one for Christmas. Eventually, I’d quite like to have a more herbal one and a citrus-focused one, too.

Sugar syrup is needed for lots of cocktails, but do I need to buy it or can I just use normal white sugar?

ELLA, SOMERSET

This is a very well-timed question as I’ve changed my thoughts on it recently. When I first got into cocktails, I purchased a big bottle of premixed sugar syrup, but it was a nuisance to keep it in the fridge and I didn’t use it up before it was past its best.

For a long time afterwards, I honestly couldn’t be bothered to use sugar syrup and just used sugar instead and the resulting drinks were still pretty tasty.

That said, I recently made some premixed drinks in batches and, as a part of that, I made my own simple syrup (another name for sugar syrup), which I kept in a small screw-top bottle. I simply combined the two ingredients in equal parts to make 100ml and shook it until the sugar had dissolved. It should be good for at least six weeks when kept in the fridge, if not more.

The reason why I now think that it’s worth the extra (minimal) effort to make the syrup is that, whilst the drinks made using just sugar were good, the ones with the syrup are better. The flavours are more integrated and I spend less time trying to dissolve the sugar. It is also very easy to fine-tune the level of sweetness in the drink.

I find glass bottles of tonic water frustrating; they are difficult to store, heavy to transport and recycle, and too big! What tonic brands are available in cans? Is tonic from a can worse than from a bottle?

GABRIEL, BRISTOL

As someone who has a lot of bottles to recycle, I can sympathise with having to haul them to the bottle bank - it’s something of a work-out!

Like you, I am a fan of the smaller cans of tonic, usually 150ml. They are just the right size for my ideal double Gin & Tonic and they fit very nicely in my fridge door (where people sometimes keep their eggs and butter); I can probably fit about two dozen in there.

From an environmental perspective, greater carbon emissions are generated from shipping glass than cans, because it’s heavier. However, when looking at the wider lifecycle of emissions, it gets tricky: if the aluminium can is made of new materials, it is worse, but if it’s 100 per cent recycled aluminium, it’s one of the greenest containers for tonic water.

For a long time, it was really only Schweppes that was available in smaller cans, but now a much larger range is available. Varieties from Merchant House, London Essence, Fever-Tree, and Double Dutch are all available in 150ml cans in both supermarkets and online.