Welcome to Gin Week!
To Begin This Juniper Jamboree, A Walk Down the Gin Revival Memory Lane.
Some summer day in 2006, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I walked into a small liquor store called LeNell’s that everyone was talking about. It was an early example of what would become known as a “boutique spirits store,” though nobody was using that gentile term then. As I walked in, I noticed an old white bathtub on the floor to the left of the door. How could you not? It was filled with dozens of black cylindrical containers that I first assumed were cans of fancy olive oil. Hendrick’s olive oil. Picking one up, however, I saw the word “gin” under Hendrick’s.
Get it? Bathtub gin.
This was my first inkling that something might be afoot in the staid world of gin. A new gin sold not in a bottle, but a goth-like, black tube? A new gin made not in England, but Scotland? A new gin period?
Who made new gins anymore?
Hendrick’s played its hand well. With its whimsical packaging and odd botanical mix (rose petals! cucumber!), it got its hooks into the vodka-drinking public early on and never let go. To this day, I know plenty of people who stand by their Hendrick’s Martini order and won’t be persuaded to try another brand.
We didn’t know it then, but Hendrick’s wasn’t a one-off. It was a harbinger. There would be more new gins to come. So many more. And, as I had only then just begun my career as a spirits and drink journalist, I had a ringside seat to the gin revival, watching it develop in real time.
Welcome to Gin Week at The Mix, a week dedicated to the most versatile of cocktail spirits and my favorite spirit to boot!
Get ready for all sorts of gin coverage, from gin round-ups with tasting notes; interviews with gin experts; visits to vaunted gin bars; historical deep dives into gin’s past; gin cocktail recipes; and much, much more. There will be a post every day between now and Sunday, so be prepared for some emails.
We’ll start with a very personal chronicle of the roots of the gin revival, as told by yours truly. Here are some of my memories. But, first, an offer:
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The next gin after Hendrick’s that I remember being everywhere all of a sudden was Plymouth. It was not a new gin, but it might as well have been. A 200-plus-year-old brand, it had been completely forgotten by the world and almost disappeared. Around 2008, I started running into bartenders who had just come back from a tour of the distillery in Plymouth, England, and were sold lock, stock and barrel on the stuff. They had been invited there by a guy named Simon Ford, a former bartender who was now something called a brand ambassador. As bartenders were not typically invited to go on all-expenses-paid trips to anywhere, most of those invited by Ford said yes.
Soon, Plymouth was being poured at all the best new cocktail bars. This was not a bad thing, because Plymouth made good juice. It was a different sort of gin, like London Dry Gin, but softer. It didn’t have the pine-tree, juniper-smack-in-the-face character of most London Dry Gins. And it had a sleek new art deco bottle. People liked it. It made them feel urbane. Especially journalists. I still know some writers who were converted early on and swear by their Plymouth Martini.
Next up for resurrection was Beefeater. It was then the Wild Turkey of gins, so associated with old-man drinking habits that, despite its heritage and excellence, it seemed beyond rescue. But it was rescued. That Ford guy was back and now he was inviting people to the Beefeater distillery, which was smack dab in London. It was, in fact, the only gin distillery left in London.
I was one of those people. The trip was in October 2008. It was for the launch of Beefeater 24, a new expression that added Japanese Sencha tea, Spanish grapefruit peel and Chinese green tea to the botanical mix. There was a bacchanalian launch party at some stately home just outside London to signify Beefeater 24’s arrival. I remember trapeze artists and fire-breathing metal horses. The whole idea of someone throwing a party in honor of a new gin was bizarre. I didn’t know what to think of it, except, “Wow, these gin people have a lot of money.”
This began a period where liquor conglomerates decided to turn their master distillers into celebrities. Beefeater had Desmond Payne; Plymouth (where Payne used to work) had Sean Harrison. Previously introverts who toiled anonymously in their gin caves, they were now the belles of various balls, hosting parties and heading up lavish gin dinners, and being interviewed by reporters. Both very nice men, they nonetheless had a deer-in-the-headlights look about them, like someone who was unexpectedly yanked on stage as the subject of a “This Is Your Life” episode.
By 2008, gin was big news enough that the New York Sun let me write about which gins made the best Gin & Tonic. The blind taste test was held in the back room of the newly opened Brooklyn bar Clover Club. The judges were Clover Club owner Julie Reiner, cocktail historian David Wondrich and St. John Frizell, who had yet to open his bar, Fort Defiance. Tanqueray and Plymouth tied for first place. Beefeater and Junipero tied for second. It was a purist panel.
On Nov. 9, 2008, Martin Miller’s Gin held a cocktail competition at Death & Co. in New York. Death & Co. was the hottest cocktail bar in the world at the time. You never hear much about Martin Miller’s anymore, but back then the stuff was a contender in the Cool Gin Sweepstakes. It was founded by in 1999 by Miller, an eccentric antiquer and hotelier, who extolled his use of Icelandic water. There was barely room to stand. The judges included cocktail blogger Paul Clarke, historian David Wondrich, Milk & Honey founder Sasha Petraske, liquor store owner LeNell Smothers and booze guru Gary Regan. Filling the room were bartenders from all over the nation who had seemingly flown in just for this. There was Jeffery Morgenthaler from Portland, Jamie Boudreau from Seattle, Thad Vogler from San Francisco, and from the UK Jake Burger, Ben Reed, and Sean Muldoon, all craning their necks and standing on chairs so they could see the action behind the bar.
All there—for a gin contest!
Quite a few of these people were contestants. Sam Ross won the bout with something called Palin’s Christmas Punch, a poke at the losing VP nominee Sarah Palin.
Suddenly, there were gin bars.
Pegu Club was basically a gin bar, because its owner Audrey Saunders loved gin so much and served so many gin cocktails. But it wasn’t really. It was an all-around cocktail bar. Bar Celona opened in Williamsburg in 2009. It was the first New York bar I can remember that started to adopt the Spanish way of drinking gin, which was mainly in the form of large, ornate Gin & Tonics. Gin Palace in the East Village was a gin bar and proudly so. It got in trouble with the health department for serving gin cocktails on draft, something City Hall couldn’t wrap its head around. (Gin Palace had the same name as a bar in Melbourne, opened by Vernon Chalker in 1997, which was probably the first gin bar of the modern era.) The Winslow opened on 14th Street in 2013. Vandaag, an honest-to-goodness genever cocktail bar, opened in the East Village in 2010. In Chicago, there was Scofflaw. In San Francisco, there was Whitechapel.
Did people want to drink this much gin? Probably not, as most of these bars eventually closed. But gin, undiscouraged, wasn’t going anywhere.
It is worth noting that this gin-cocktail-bar boom was accomplished without any help from the mighty Martini, the most famous gin cocktail of all time.
Mixologists of the period were not interested in the Silver Bullet. Their attention was honed in on all the wallflower gin cocktails that had spent a century at the mixed-drinks dance without being asked to take part in so much as a foxtrot. The Aviation, Bee’s Knees, Bronx, Clover Club, Corpse Reviver, French 75, Hanky Panky, Last Word, Monkey Gland, Negroni, Pink Lady, Ramos Gin Fizz, Tuxedo, Vesper, and White Lady.
As far as aborning modern classic cocktails went, the creations of these years were all about gin: Basil Gimlet, Bramble, Breakfast Martini, Eastside, Earl Grey Mar-TEA-ni, Enzoni, Fitzgerald, French Pearl, Gin Basil Smash, Gin Blossom, Gin-Gin Mule, Gordon’s Cup, Ginger Rogers, Jasmine, Juliet & Romeo, White Negroni and Wibble.
Aviation was the first new American gin I ever heard of. It was created by Christian Krogstad and Ryan Magarian in Portland, Oregon, in 2006. “New Western Gin” was the term that was thrown around and never quite stuck. The gin was named after a pre-Prohibition cocktail that was all the rage in bartending circles at the time. I didn’t care for Aviation Gin; it tasted too much of lavender. This was a sign of things to come: new gins toyed around with unusual botanicals in order to stand apart from the competition, as well as shake off gin’s juniper-y reputation, which was still a turn-off for many drinkers.
It didn’t matter what I thought. A lot of people were excited by Aviation. Including, eventually, movie star Ryan Reynolds. For a short while, Aviation was one of the very few celebrity gins. But Reynolds sold it in 2020.
At the 2008 Tales of the Cocktail, a guy named Brian Ellison handed me a mini-bottle of a new gin called Death’s Door. Funny, I thought—there’s a water passage called Death’s Door just off the Door County Peninsula in Wisconsin. Actually, not funny and no coincidence. The gin was named after that passage and supposedly made from local winter wheat grown on Washington Island in Lake Michigan. And Brian was from Wisconsin.
Brandy-swilling Wisconsin had a new craft gin? What was going on?
Gin was so big by 2010 that people went to court over it. A former Wall Street guy named Brad Estabrooke started making Breuckelen Gin, the first new gin to be distilled in Kings County since Prohibition. Meanwhile, a guy named Angel “Joe” Santos, a former Bacardi exec who lived in Florida, started making Brooklyn Gin in upstate New York. It seemed this country was not big enough for two gins named Brooklyn. The Florida guy sued the Brooklyn guy to cease and desist naming his gin after the borough, if you can believe it.
They settled out of court. Breuckelen Gin changed its name to Glorious Gin (still made by Breuckelen Distilling). These days, Breuckelen Distilling primarily makes whiskey. And Brooklyn Gin still isn’t made in Brooklyn.
In the late aughts and early 2010s, all the other styles of gins started to come back, one by one.
There was Sloe Gin, a liqueur most people knew from the dusty bottle in their parents’ liquor cabinet, the one once used to make trendy Sloe Gin Fizzes all those years ago. But Plymouth assured us that wasn’t a good representation of Sloe Gin. Theirs was. They started making it again in 2008 to prove it. And, damn, if it didn’t taste better. (Plymouth was always first out of the gate with these new/old gin styles.)
Over in the States, we didn’t have so many sloe berries. So folks made Damson Gin, made from Damson plums, and Beach Plum Gin, made from the beach plums that grow in sandy climes along the eastern seaboard.
Bartenders also declared that they needed Old Tom Gin back, though no one was exactly sure what that was. But, whatever it was, they needed it to make a historically accurate Tom Collins and Martinez. So distillers like Tanqueray, Hayman’s and Ransom obliged. Turned out, Old Tom was basically sweetened gin, though how you made it sweet was something people debated.
Genever, the malty Dutch father spirit of English gin, came back into American circulation. There were even new genevers, most notably Old Duff Genever, a spirit made by an Irishman named Philip Duff who bartended in London, owned a bar in Amsterdam and now lives in New York. Wrap your head around that.
While they were at it, gin distillers started reviving gin categories that had never actually existed. Like overproof Navy Strength. Plymouth came out with one that clocked in at 57 percent alcohol. Hayman’s and New York Distilling Company followed suit. The story was that, beginning in the early 19th century, it was supplied to the British Royal Navy. That was a yarn. But by the time that was found out, nobody cared, because overproof gin was tasty. Navy Strength, the category that never was, now is.
New American and English gins continued to arrive. There was Dorothy Parker Gin at New York Distilling Company in Brooklyn, created by Allen Katz, a great fan of the poet. Jared Brown, a British booze historian who had written extensively about gin, and had some distilling experience, collaborated on Sipsmith. Simon Ford stopped banging the drum for other gins and made his own, Ford’s. There were gins from the Scottish isles of Islay (Botanist) and Harris (Isle of Harris). Berry Bros. and Rudd, the ancient London liquor traders, came out with No. 3 Gin in 2010. Jake Burger, a London bartender who ran a museum called the Ginstitute, produced Portobello Road Gin in 2011.
I was convinced the gin revival was largely an English-speaking-world thing until I visited Bar Convent Berlin, the massive German bar show, in 2016. Every other booth was hawking a new German gin. The Duke Gin. Gin Sul. Windspiel Gin. And a few hundred more, including the one that would eventually rule them all, Monkey 47, made from, in all seriousness, 47 botanicals.
Other countries soon followed the same pattern, including Spain, Australia and Japan. Everyone makes gin now. And not just gin gin; also barrel-aged gin, seasonal gin, citrus gin, pink gin and purple gin. It’s a complicated liquor category. It is impossible to keep up with all the new gins on the market, even for a professional like me. Indeed, my home bar is currently crowded with dozens of new gins I had never heard of until recently—bottles sent to me in answer to a calling-all-gins request on this newsletter.
I will introduce you to a few of these at the end of every post this week. Let’s get started:
Gin Round Up #1
Highclere Castle, UK, 43.5% abv
This British gin comes with a high pedigree, aristocracy-wise and pop culture-wise. It’s named after the stately manor where “Downton Abbey” was filmed and is brought to you by 8th Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, the owners of that pile of bricks. It is produced at Langley Distillery, which makes gin for various labels, in copper pot gin stills. Botanicals include juniper, orange zest, lime flower, cassia, angelica and lavender that is purportedly picked on the property. This is an approachable gin, with a muted nose and a soft, simple palate that tastes primarily of the expected juniper (but not too much), with maybe a whiff of that lavender. Like conversation over dinner at Downton Abbey, it is polite, civilized and not likely to offend anyone.
Killowen Gin, Ireland, 45% abv
This gin is made by Killowen, the quixotic, boundary-pushing maker of unusual Irish whiskeys, run in Northern Ireland by Brendan Carty. This gin is currently only available only at the distillery and online, but that may change in the future. Botanicals include angelica root, mint, meadowsweet, fuchsia, elderflower and elderberry, as well as lemon, orange and grapefruit zest. That trio of fruits comes through with the layered citrus notes on the complex nose, joining the flowers and mint. The mouth-coating texture is pleasingly milky and the juniper comes in softly. I have found over the years that whiskey makers are often good at making gins and Killowen’s delightful potion is no exception.
Roots of Ruin Dry Gin, Kentucky, 53% abv
It doesn’t say “Navy strength” anywhere on the bottle, but it may as well. This burly gin is a bit of a beast and packs a wallop. It is made by the Kentucky bourbon distiller Castle & Key and uses the same mash bill of 17% corn, 20% malted barley, and 63% rye that goes into their rye whiskey. That, along with the higher alcohol level and the inclusion of ginger as a botanical, contributes to the spicy, slightly hot personality of this gin. There’s also a certain woodiness, but hiding behind that are some fruitier notes. I could see getting used to this tough customer in a 50/50 Martini. But start with baby steps.
Odds and Ends…
The “Martini Residencies” at Koloman restaurant in Manhattan continue on Aug. 15 with Zachary Weiss… Hawksmoor, the British steakhouse in Manhattan, is offering a $12 Martini Hour Monday-Friday, 4:30-6:30 p.m., through Aug. 30… La Marchande is brining back the Three Martini Lunch. Beverage Director Amy Racine has hand-picked a selection of 2- to 3-ounce pours made for back-to-back sipping. Choices include Dry, Dirty, Espresso, N/A, and something called the Day Trader, made of The Botanist Gin, Sauternes, Dolin Blanc vermouth and a blue-cheese-stuffed olive… Quick & Dirty Theatre Company, founded in 2023 by Booth McGowan, Maya Hendricks, and Jason Ewers, will present the world premiere of Picture Day, a new play by Levon Hawke (son of actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman). It will open September 20 and run until October 6 at Coffey Street Studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The play, “set in a mundane afternoon in a shared living room, follows five roommates as they navigate pseudo-family dramas, sexuality, identity, and the complexities of modern male friendships.” Tickets are $50… The great Wein-O-Rama, purveyor of excellent Rhode Island style hot wieners, has closed its doors after 62 years in business. The Mix wrote about the restaurant just last June during “Hot Dog Week.”
Tomorrow on Gin Week at The Mix, a conversation with legendary cocktail pioneer and gin expert Audrey Saunders!
Love Gin. Wish I had a Time Machine!
Good grief, what a saga. I was there for nearly all of that. I feel old. And maybe a little triggered.