Welcome to Drinks Tube, I'm Sam Carter, gin professor here at laverstoke mill.
A gin distillery sixty miles west of London.
I've been making cocktails right around the world for the last twenty years so I think
I'm the best person to give you the ultimate guide to gin.
There's been a huge resurgence in gin and gin cocktails in the last few years but what
is gin?
The definition of gin states that it has to be juniper dominant flavoured spirit.
An agricultural origin, and then bottled above thirty seven point five percent alcohol by
volume.
Gin has a thousand years of history to it, dates all the way back to ten fifty A.D to
an Italian monastery, so gin is Italian.
Gin wasn't popularised until the sixteenth century in Belgium and Holland and it's here
during the thirty year war the term Dutch courage was coined and the British soldiers
would take a wee nip of the local Genever, give them a bit of courage to get out onto
the battle fields, brought it back to England and shortened the name to just Gin and claimed
it as there own.
When I say botanical it stems from the word botany that basically means anything thats
grown like a herb, root, spice, plant or even a nut.
You've gotta' have juniper in your Gin to be a Gin.
Some of the other most common botanicals in gin are like the lemon peel it gives a wonderful
bright fresh citrusy element to the Gin.
Cassia bark, licorice root, angelica root even grains of paradise and cubeb berries
give a wonderful floral peppery spice.
But when you bring all of these botanicals together this is what makes Gin so versatile
and mixable in a vast array of cocktails.
So once you've harvested your botanicals that are gonna' go into the gin you need them in
a natural raw berry form.
You're gonna' dry them.
This is the juniper berry and we extract the oils out of it so you have a wonderful bright
fresh green piney note.
So there's two main types of Gin you've got that cold compounded gin and you got that
distilled London dry gins.
Cold compound is basically that nutri grain spirit, mixed with some botanicals for a few
days to infuse, add water and then you bottle it.
When you make a distilled gin well we all know that water boils off at a hundred degrees
C right but alcohol boils at about twenty degrees lower at seventy eight point three
seven degrees C. So if you've got alcohol and water together with the botanicals.
You're gonna' heat that up and then you're gonna' hit the condenser and condense it back
to a liquid.
With a distilled gin you are allowed to add artificial flavouring after distillation but
with the London dry gin you're not allowed to add anything like that at all.
But with the gin they make here they use a process known as vapour infusion and by that
I mean they don't put the botanicals in the distill they put them in a perforated copper
basket about thirty five foot up in the air, twenty five foot accross the still house and
they allow that spirit to pass through the botanicals and extract the natural raw flavour
of the botanical rather than the cooked flavour.
So in here we've got a wheat base nutrigrain spirit and water that's heated up to eighty
degress C so that mean that all of the alcohol goes up the column.
So when that spirit comes up the column it then turns a corner and comes down the line
arm into this perforated copper basket where those botanicals are held, and this is what
is known as the vapour infusion process.
It extracts all the natural oils within the botanicals and then comes out the other size
as a flavoured vapour then it hits the condenser and condenses back to a liquid.
So it passes through the pipe work into the spirit safe.
This liquids coming off pretty much double bottling strength so that's like eighty five
to ninety percent alcohol.
This is the access point for the stillment to be able to nose and taste the gin.
We don't want the first twenty liters or so, we're gonna' wait for a lovely bright fresh
citrus note to come through . That then leads into piney notes floral notes, rooty notes
and then spicy notes and all of this is the heart of the gin.
And then after about six hours or so they'll be nosing it every minute and once they finish
getting those spicy notes they'll switch it over and that's the tails.
So it's that heart that we want right in the middle.
They take that high strength botanical spirit add water to it to dilute it down to bottling
strength, put it in the bottle and it's ready for you to make your favourite gin cocktail.
To see me teach you how to make my favourite gin cocktail click right here in the sublime
moment button or follow the link below and you will learn all about how flavour trans
modification is amazing.
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Cheers