Gin-ovation

Unleash the spirit, enjoying juniper and more.

Gin has come a long way since the 17th century, moving from being essentially British moonshine, synonymous with social failing and moral depravity, to acquiring National Treasure status – the booze equivalent of Judi Dench – beloved by everyone from hipster millennials to maiden aunts. There’s now pretty much a distillery for every day of the year in the UK, with gin sales worth more than £2.7bn. Fiftyfour distilleries opened in 2018 alone – more than one a week – and we guzzled down 73 million bottles during the year.

In medieval times, the Dutch found distilled malt wine proved unpalatable so junipers were added for their health-giving properties (they were thought to aid headaches and soothe stomachs) – and so jenever became a medicinal staple. The British observed the beneficial effects on Dutch soldiers of a ‘swift one’ during the central European bloodbath that was the Thirty Years War (1618-48), and this is where the idea of Dutch courage comes from.

When William and Mary ascended the throne in 1689, there were incentives, for political and religious reasons, to encourage production and consumption of gin. These included a tax on foreign spirits (to hit the French brandy market) and the breaking of the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers, which allowed people to distil their own product.

The British public, male and female, responded enthusiastically. Gin shops could be smaller and cheaper than alehouses as there was no obligation to provide food and shelter. Writer Mark Forsyth noted: “Beer and the alehouses had always been seen as basically male domains. Gin, which was new and exotic and metropolitan, didn’t have any of these old associations. There were no rules around gin. There were no social norms about who could drink it, or when you could drink it, or how much of it you could drink. A lot of places served it in pints because, well… that’s what you drank.”

But with unfettered access came abuses. The poor, and poor women in particular, came to represent the worst excesses of the Gin

Craze. Stronger than it is today and cheaper than beer, some workers were even paid in gin. By 1710, 19 million gallons were consumed annually. During the second quarter of the 18th century, adults drank an average of half a pint a day. Much of it was homebrew, cut with ingredients such as turpentine when junipers were scarce, and sulphuric acid for authentic burn.

APOCRYPHAL TALES

There are many apocryphal tales surrounding the Gin Craze: of women spontaneously combusting; of the farm labourer newly arrived in London who dropped dead after necking three pints. Perhaps the most depressing is the tale of Judith Defour, who placed her two-year-old daughter in a workhouse. She came to take her out for a few hours, during which time she and her friend strangled the child, in order to sell the clothes she had been given at the workhouse to buy gin. Similarly, Mary Estwick, a childminder, came home drunk on gin, and sat down by the fire with her charge on her lap. She promptly passed out and the child rolled into the hearth and was burnt to death.

This led to moral outrage. Decried by writers and politicians, one of the most damaging and lasting invectives took pictorial form. Hogarth’s twin engravings Beer Street and Gin Lane contrast the health-giving benefits of beer with the depravityinducing effects of gin. The political response was ineffectual. Between 1729 and 1751, eight Gin Acts were passed. Taxation, licensing and vending restrictions merely drove production underground. Consumption peaked in 1743, as Londoners found ways round the strictures, including the Puss and Mew machine: wooden panels through which money and gin could be exchanged.

More successful was the 1751 Gin Act, which raised merchants’ fees, prohibited distillers from selling to unlicensed ones and introduced minimum production quantities. This put the small operators out of operation and, within a few years, the hold that gin had on the working classes had been broken.

As noted by Sipsmiths, “it was transformed from being seen as an escapism tactic for the working classes to a relatively middle-class spirit”. These