Entries tagged with 'gin'
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[Flickr: cbcastro] For a spirit that seems to inspire such a diverse set of reactions in drinkers, including no shortage of outspoken loathing, gin has certainly been faring well in recent years. As I write in the September/October issue of Imbibe, while gin sales have been modestly progressing since the 1990s, the explosive growth in the number of brands on the market demonstrates a great enthusiasm for the spirit among distillers, especially those just getting into the game. That's not surprising. Unlike spirits such as brandy or whiskey, gin requires no aging, so the time between still and store shelf can be as short as a matter of days—an important factor for start-up distilleries needing a quick source of...
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"Julia Child preferred an Upside-Down Martini, with five times as much dry vermouth as gin in the glass." ©iStockphoto.com/DNY59 You wouldn’t know it by looking at the way it’s used today, but vermouth was the belle of the mixological ball once upon a time. While vermouth can list details such as “revolutionized the late 19th century cocktail” and “enabled creation of the Manhattan and the martini” on its resume, today it's like the elderly greeters at Wal-Mart, picking up whatever gigs it can get in the years that came after the glory ones. While vermouth played a major role in countless cocktails from the Gilded Age and beyond, perhaps no other drink has been as tightly connected to its contemporary...
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"As the category expands, it’s becoming more challenging to navigate the world of gin." Gin gimlet. Photograph from Martin Kimeldorf's Pixel Playground on Flickr In case you haven’t noticed from the gradually expanding selection in the liquor store, gin is on an upswing. Dozens of brands and variations have been introduced in the past decade, and start-up distillers are adding novel gins to their liquor portfolios as the divisions between styles of gin become increasingly blurred. At a time when this gin market growth and a renewed interest in gin-based cocktails have the potential to confuse even the most ardent of enthusiasts, a new book on the spirit has been released by Gaz Regan, one of the most entertaining chroniclers...
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Artisanal spirits are the new micro-brew. It seems as if small-scale liquor dudes are rivaling celebrity deaths in number these days. Unfortunately, I’ve found that most of these booze-artisans are pretty much snake-oil salesman capitalizing on the human penchant for the little guy while passing off bad-to-mediocre vodka. I pretty much expected the same thing when I toured Wisconsin’s Death’s Door Spirits last week. (My apologies to owner Brian Ellison and his team for the assumption.) But I was pleasantly surprised. Ellison is one of those dudes who reminds you of the great chefs, a guy who works according to a personal standard that exceeds most, essentially competing against himself. From his website to his marketing materials to the quality...
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"When you’re trying to buy a bottle for less than what you used to spend on coffee every day, there are some things you need to be prepared to live without." ©iStockphoto.com/monkeyphoto Oh, those heady, innocent days of early 2008. Sure, the economy was losing parts as it wheezed down the road and the real estate market was looking pretty sour, but how bad could it really get, right? Around last year’s tax day I put up a post called Cheap(er) Drinks: Tips for Enjoyable Drinking Without Going Broke. Well, compared to now, April '08 was downright rosy, and in this post-Madoff era, "drink cheap" has become the imbiber’s new mantra. The most recent round of the Mixology Monday drink-blog...
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Photograph from Spencer E Holtaway on Flickr Gangsters did it during prohibition and now, even though liquor is legal, you can too. Gourmet's Ian Knauer shares his quick and easy recipe using juniper berries and spices. If you just want to spruce up a bottle of cheap gin, add sloe berries, a relative of the plum. This makes a ruby red, sweeter drink. The base for making gin is vodka, so if you are like me and your stomach turns with each sip of the juniper berry-infused beverage, there are other things you can do to flavor it. Sauver featured a recipe for pineapple-infused vodka where you take sugar, vodka, and a whole pineapple. You let it sit in...
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plymouthgin.com The world of spirits and cocktails is in a perennial state of flux. New products enter the market at a dizzying pace, typically presented in spangly packaging that can be easily identified by an inebriated patron in a crowded nightclub, and of a color several steps removed from anything found in the natural world. Thankfully, a vast majority of these new products have a life span roughly equivalent to that of a Jägerbomb at a frat party, and within a year, whatever remains of these products will wash up on liquor store bargain tables, making way for the next round of gaudy replacements. Fortunately, mixed in with these fly-by-night products are several that show true staying power. Many of...
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William Hogarth’s engraving "Gin Lane," to represent the 18th century gin craze. Last winter, I blogged wistfully about the scarcity of the august and historic style of gin known as genever. Also known as "jenever" or "Holland gin," genever is the original style of gin. Produced in the Netherlands, genever was such a hot commodity in the mid-18th century, it was condemned as a "social menace" in England. But genever's reputation didn’t stop American bartenders from using it to create an array of ancestral gin cocktails a century later. Richer, maltier, and with a greater depth of flavor than today’s typical London Dry style of gin, genever was considered the style of gin for the better part of two...
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On occasion, I’ve touched on the different types of gin now populating the shelves of your local liquor stores. Many of them are in the growing class of so-called “new generation” gins. That is, less traditional dry gins that, while still flavored with juniper berries, push other botanicals front and center, so the taste is less juniper-forward like old-school gins such as Tanqueray, and more herbal, floral, or citrusy. One of the first, and almost certainly the most popular, in this gin wave is Hendrick’s. Made in Scotland, and with a delicate flavor that features cucumber and rose petals more prominently than juniper, Hendrick’s is marketed in a distinctive black bottle that calls to mind apothecaries of the Victorian era—a...
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Citadelle and G-Vine gin. What with all the talk about gin these past few months—there was American gin, Holland gin (aka genever), and even a foray into sloe gin, if you’ll recall—there’s another diversion from the standard London Dry category that should be mentioned: French gin. "French gin" is an interesting concept. Making it entails taking a spirit that is heavily identified with the UK (while the Dutch invented gin, most of their native spirit is consumed close to home), and putting a unique local spin on it. American distillers have done much the same thing, utilizing ingredients such as lavender and apples to make their gins distinctive; for the French, regionalizing gin seems to come down to flowers. Brands...
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