Booth’s lays claim to the oldest origin story of all major gin brands. F. J. Kelly, testifying on behalf of the Booth’s distillery before the Royal Commission on Whiskey and Other Potable Spirits in 1908 said, “We take our date from 1740.” Even though a Booth family member wouldn’t be listed as a distiller in London until Philip Booth and John Mootham established the Cow Cross Distillery in Clerkenwell in 1772, the Booth family included established brewers, victuallers, and coopers in London in the decades prior, all professions that had close ties to the eighteenth-century gin scene. By 1792, in an early example of vertical integration, the Booths had taken a rare step among gin rectifiers and added a malt distillery to their portfolio and were the ninth-largest producers of raw grain spirit in the country.
By the early nineteenth century Booth & Co. was the largest gin distillery in London. As head of the immensely successful company, Sir Felix Booth, Philip’s youngest son, would finance Captain John Ross’s 1829 arctic expedition, becoming the only gin magnate to have several places named after him, including the Gulf of Boothia and Cape Felix in Nunavut, Canada. Popularized fictions of Ross’s voyage imagined the captain pouring “himself a double portion of Booth’s best cordial gin.”
Once one of the world’s best known gins, the Booth brand fell in esteem in the twentieth century. The Booth family was no longer associated with the gin bearing its name, and in 1937 Booth’s Distilleries was acquired by the Distillers Company Ltd. See Distillers Company Ltd (DCL). The distillery on Cow Cross was badly damaged in World War II, and although it was rebuilt shortly thereafter and christened the Red Lion Distillery in honor of the Booth family crest, operations subsequently moved, and it was demolished in the 1990s.
Currently owned by Diageo, the brand is now distilled only at their Plainfield, Illinois, plant.
See also gin and Old Tom gin.
“Clerkenwell Road.” In Survey of London, vol. 46, South and East Clerkenwell, ed. Philip Temple, 385–406. London: London County Council, 2008.
The House of Commons. Accounts Relating to Distillation in England, Scotland and Ireland: No 1- to No. 11. 1822.
Huish, Robert. The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross, R.N. Knt. to the Arctic Regions. London: John Saunders. 1835.
“Revenue Statement.” London Evening Mail, September 12, 1792, 1.
By: Aaron Knoll