From old to new
and innovation, so we were thinking about how we could innovate within the confines of the London dry gin regulations.”
And innovate they did. First, Burger swapped out the British wheat spirit used for Portobello Road’s other gins for the potato spirit used in its vodkas. Then he developed a new technique, which he dubbed “reverse ageing”, to get some wood influence into the spirit. A London dry gin can’t be aged, as the regulations state that it can’t be “flavoured” post-distillation, so instead, he rested the potato base spirit in barrels before redistilling it with the botanicals. (Questionable, in terms of the regulations? Possibly. Worth the gamble? Certainly.) Burger found that juniperforward gins were scoring higher with drinkers and bartenders, so the Special Reserve 101 recipe includes 50 per cent more juniper than Portobello Road’s London Dry Gin. It is bottled at a punchy 50.5%
ABV, or 101 proof; in the American whiskey world, this is known as “Kentucky strength”. Finally, instead of purified still water, the gin is diluted with carbonated Vichy Catalan – statistically, the most mineral-rich bottled water in the world. It is exclusively available through the distillery.
If Portobello Road’s core range is an example of traditional experimentation, its Director’s Cut series is its playground for modern experimentation. Launched in 2015, the editions are released to coincide with co-founder Ged Feltham’s birthday in October. The series sees one of the distillery’s directors choose and then collect a key botanical. In
2015, co-founder and former director Paul Lane chose asparagus, and went to pick some at the end of the harvest season in southern England. In 2016, Feltham picked peat and went back to his ancestral home, Ireland, to dig some up. Burger and a colleague then used the peat to smoke juniper berries (a laborious process that Burger is keen not to repeat). In 2017, Burger went to Grenada to collect nutmeg for his Pechuga Gin. The name comes from a particular mezcal production technique which sees a poultry breast (‘pechuga’ in Spanish) hung over the still – and Burger honoured this tradition, precariously suspending a 2.4kg turkey breast over the still for the gin’s 24-hour distillation. The final Director’s Cut to date, Parsnip in a Pear Tree, was released in 2018 and used parsnips (collected from Portobello Road market by brand director Tom Coates) and pear liqueur.
... while rules are great for preserving the integrity of a historic category, they can stifle creativity