gin , one of the most historically and commercially important spirit categories, is made by flavoring neutral spirits with juniper berries and other botanicals, chiefly through distillation, but sometimes by infusion or compounding. See infusion and compounding. Originating at the end of the seventeenth century as a British imitation of Dutch genever, gin has become a global spirit, manufactured and sold in just about every region. See genever. Its history, a matchlessly complex one, can be divided into four distinct phases.
Silver-plated Gordon’s gin promotional barspoon, bearing the brand’s famous boar’s head logo, ca. 1950.
Wondrich Collection.
The Gin Craze (1690–1760)
The history of gin has been shaped more by government regulation and taxation than that of any other spirit. See excise, taxes, and distillation. Indeed, gin was born from an act of British Parliament, the 1690 “Act for Encouraging the Distilling of Brandy and Spirits from Corn,” passed at the instigation of King William. In the 1670s and 1680s the habit of drinking spirits recreationally had finally reached England. See punch. England, however, did not have a developed distilling industry, so the market was supplied mostly from her on-again, off-again enemy France. William officially banned this trade. The 1690 act was intended to develop a grain-distilling industry like the one in his native Netherlands and assist British agriculture.
Unfortunately, the act, which abolished the Worshipful Company of Distillers’ monopoly on distilling and lowered the tax on low wines made from British grain from 12 pence a gallon to 1 penny, worked both too well and not well enough: by the first decade of the new century, domestic “geneva” (as the English pronounced jenever), or “gin” for short, was everywhere, with literally thousands of new entrants in the distilling trade. See low wines. From half a million gallons in 1690, English distillery output rose to two million gallons in 1713 and, by a low estimate, 4.3 million in 1729. The new tax meant that barriers to entering the market were low. It also, however, meant that competition was plentiful. The result was a race to the bottom, as grocers, publicans, and other new distillers fought to supply the increasingly crowded slums of London with cheap spirit. Far from the wholesome, artisanal barley- and rye-malt Dutch original, much of the new English corn spirit was hastily distilled from such things as beer lees and raw, salt-water-damaged grain with just enough malt to allow it to ferment. The juniper flavoring often came not from real juniper berries, as used in Holland, but from turpentine and worse. While genuine Dutch “Hollands” sold for high prices—thus monopolizing the high end of the market—London gin was sold at prices even the poorest could afford.
Nor was the social dysfunction confined to the poor: all classes of English society binged on spirits in the eighteenth century, whether it was in a bowl of punch, used to fortify a bottle of wine (English vintners customarily added spirit to almost every category of imported wine before bottling it), or drunk by the quartern-measure (120 ml) in the back alleys of London.
It should also be noted that the problem was not unique to England: as Didier Nouraisson has observed, massive and disruptive rises in spirit consumption are closely tied to industrialization, as occurred in France and the United States in the early nineteenth century. In England, it just happened earlier.
The Rise of the Rectifiers (1760–1880)
Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, Parliament made spasmodic attempts to put the cat at least partway back in the bag, including raising taxes, tightening licensing requirements, and various kinds of de jure and de facto prohibition. Eventually, it hit on the right combination with a dizzyingly complex and ever-shifting set of excise laws that tightly governed the spirits trade. Its main pillars were a strict separation between distilling spirits and selling them to the general public, a tax and regulatory structure that favored large firms over small ones, particularly when it came to distilling, and a tight control of distillation and rectification proofs based on hydrometer testing, first mandated in 1765. See hydrometer.
Under this system, gin began as “raw spirit,” a double-distilled grain spirit that was essentially unaged whisky, made from malt by a small cartel of very large-scale “malt distillers” in England and, after 1826, Scotland and Ireland (these did not always use pure malt, particularly in England, although they were enjoined from fermenting non-grain sugars). These firms were only allowed to sell their product wholesale and only at a single, legally mandated strength, the equivalent of 61 percent ABV.
To become gin, the raw spirit required flavoring with juniper (often supplemented or replaced entirely by a cheaper substitute, turpentine) and other botanicals, and it required reducing in proof and sweetening—unsweetened gin was sold, but only so that the customers could sweeten it themselves. See botanical. By law, “compound spirits” such as gin could not be sold to the public at above a certain proof: until 1818, 44.6 percent ABV; after that, 47.4 percent. Usually, the proof was considerably lower: an 1855 analysis for the Lancet of thirty-eight samples of gin purchased in London found the strengths ranging between a high of 48.8 percent ABV (and hence illegal) and a low of 22.4 percent, with an average of 36.5 percent. The sugar content in the thirty-six sweetened gins ranged from 20.6 to 83 grams per liter. (To put that in context, today the EU requires a minimum of 100 grams per liter for most liqueurs, while a Swedish government test of twenty-eight rums found an average of 16 grams per liter of added sugar.)
Some retailers—public houses and wine and spirits merchants—did the flavoring, reducing, and sweetening themselves, pocketing the profit made on the difference in purchase proof and sale proof. But malt distillers only dealt in large quantities, and without distillation the resulting product was palpably inferior. Most retailers therefore bought their gin from rectifiers, who redistilled the raw spirit once or twice with their proprietary botanical blends and reduced it to compound-spirit proof. See
These excise regulations and the practices they fostered decisively pulled British gin away from its original Dutch model, particularly after the malt distillers adopted continuous stills in the 1830s (the rectifiers generally stuck with pot stills). See still, continuous. While genever remained primarily a distiller’s spirit, reliant on its grain base for most of its flavor, gin had become a rectifier’s one, where the base spirit was as neutral as possible and the flavor came from added botanicals. Indeed, in 1789 when George Bishop, who had studied distilling in the Netherlands, wanted to make Dutch-style gin in Maidstone, Kent, he had to get a special act of Parliament to allow it (Original Maidstone Hollands Gin, as it was called, enjoyed a high reputation for quality and was made, on and off, under various owners for another century or so; it has recently been revived).
Another dissenter from the predominant style was Coates & Co’s Plymouth gin, made in that town since at least 1800. Unsweetened (although reduced in proof) and lightly inflected with botanicals, it still retained some of the malty character of its base spirit and was considered an intermediary between London and Dutch styles of gin. See Plymouth gin.
England’s former colony the United States also took its own path. As one American distiller wrote in 1907, “There are really only two kinds of gin”: Holland gin and English gin, with the former being “known by the simple name of gin.” This reversal of British practice had deep roots, genever having been made in the Dutch colony that became New York as early as 1640. Without the strictures of the British excise system and with plenty of cheap grain available, beginning in the years after independence some American distillers, “actuated by a laudable desire to equal the Holland gin, justly deemed superior to that of any other part of the world” (as Pennsylvania distiller Harrison Hall wrote in 1813), focused their energies on making a heavier, grain-forward product, often by redistilling raw whisky, of which there was an abundance, with gin botanicals. As far as can be determined, the resulting spirit wasn’t pre-sweetened, in the British style. Since British excise made it almost impossible to export gin until the law changed in 1850, the only models American distillers had to measure themselves against were Dutch. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did they begin working in the British style.
In the London of 1760, gin was still the liquid crack of the urban poor. But over the next century, as a number of distillers established reputations for making a superior product and found retailers who would keep their adulteration within reasonable bounds, gin found a place for itself. Never elegant, gin became at least traditional, something a working person could drink by the dram and a gentleman could have as the motivating force in a bowl of punch.
The Great Brands (1880–2000)
In 1879, the British government set 37 percent ABV as a minimum proof at which the retailers could sell their gin to the public. At a stroke, this removed much of the incentive for retailers to do their own reduction. At the same time, largely because of widespread concerns about adulteration (fanned in no small part by temperance advocates), distillers and rectifiers in Britain and elsewhere were moving toward bottling their own spirits so that retailers would have to sell or dispense from factory-sealed, labeled containers. One of the effects of this change was that those distillers and rectifiers became not just suppliers but brands. Some London rectifiers, to be sure, had already gone a long way toward that, but after 1879 the trend accelerated. Firms such as Gordon’s, Booth’s, Seager and Evans, Tanqueray, Nicholson, Coates, and Burnett managed to establish their brands as commercial icons, not just locally but throughout the vast British Empire, and in the United States as well.
This style of gin remained remarkably stable throughout the twentieth century, not just in Britain but globally. Because it was based on neutral spirits, London dry gin was much easier to imitate than earlier versions of gin, even if grain was a scarcity. With the reach of the British Empire, imitations sprang up on every continent save Antarctica, some of them quite popular (in 2012, the sugar-cane-based San Miguel gin, made in the Philippines since the nineteenth century, became the largest-selling gin in the world).
American distillers had adopted the new style by the end of the nineteenth century, largely abandoning the older, Dutch-style gins they had been making. In 1904, the Wilson Distilling Co. even went so far as to buy the equipment and formulae of the Camberwell Distilling Co. of London (established 1797) and transport them to Baltimore, where they used them to make the popular El Bart dry gin. Such domestic brands received a boost during World War I, only to be cut off at the knees by Prohibition in 1919. (About the thirteen years that followed, during which—in a throwback to eighteenth-century London—gin was compounded from raw spirit and juniper syrup—there is little to say.) The major British brands, in the meanwhile, weathered that war, American Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the next war, only to run into a much bigger problem in the postwar years: vodka. See vodka.
The niche London dry gin occupied in the spirits market from the 1880s through World War II was the one for the lightest, cleanest spirit commercially available. Many drinkers liked it in mixed drinks for just that reason: compared to whisky, brandy, or the heavier rums of the day, it blended right in. Vodka, however, was even lighter, being entirely purged of aromatic elements. Many drinkers found they preferred that. By 1954, vodka, a commercially insignificant spirit before the war, was outselling gin in some parts of the American market. In 1969 it outsold gin nationwide. The picture was little better in the United Kingdom.
The last two decades of the twentieth century saw the old gin brands struggle with consolidation, drops in price and proof, and declining market share. Like rye whisky, it was a spirit of the past.
The Gin Insurgency (2000–Present)
The new millennium brought a dramatic change in gin’s fortunes. The cocktail renaissance, focused on reviving forgotten knowledge, was at first largely fueled by gin. See cocktail renaissance. Old-line brands such as Plymouth, Beefeater, and Tanqueray suddenly found themselves in vogue, if not widely then deeply. Some of the larger producers cautiously essayed new bottlings, such as Bombay Sapphire (launched in 1987 to capitalize on an uptick in interest in the classic Martini), Hendrick’s, and Tanqueray no. 10 (both launched in 2000). See Hendrick’s Gin. But now there was a new factor: in 1996, the Anchor Distilling Co. of San Francisco, a then-tiny offshoot of the brewing company of the same name, launched Junipero gin. This was the pebble that starts the avalanche. Over the next twenty years, Junipero would be joined by literally hundreds of other small-producer gins. At first, this movement was confined to the United States, but by 2010 it was spreading worldwide.
It is difficult to generalize about the gin these small distilleries are making or to assign a style to it—indeed, among their many products one finds are true, rectified Old Tom, revisionist Old Tom, American genever (aged and unaged), eighteenth-century-style Dutch pot-still genever, and classic London Dry gin, along with a myriad of gins using nontraditional base spirits; unusual, often local, botanicals; or both. While it’s true that the vast majority of these fall more or less in the English style, with a neutral base spirit that is rectified with botanicals, there are numerous examples where the base spirit is anything but neutral, and many of the English-style ones don’t taste remotely like traditional London dry gin. Any category that can contain them all must be so loosely defined as to be meaningless.
Mixology
Gin is alone among the major spirits categories in being mostly consumed in mixed drinks. That was not always the case: during the gin craze, it was almost invariably drunk by the dram, neat. By the 1730s, however, references to “Gin Punch” begin to appear in England. By the early nineteenth century, this high-low combination had evolved into Gin Twist (a short, impromptu punch) and would become known as the Collins. See Collins. The combination of gin and bitters, which in America would evolve into Cock-Tail, is of a similar antiquity. See Cock-Tail. The introduction of English gin to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century helped to revolutionize the American art of the bar: drinks such as the Gin Fizz, the Martini, the Gin Rickey, all based on Old Tom, Plymouth, or London dry gin, were among the most popular of their day. See Gin Fizz; Martini; and Gin Rickey. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ascendancy of the Dry Martini ensured that London dry gin would dominate the whole category, thrusting the other English gins and Dutch genever into the background. The cocktail renaissance has seen that process reversed, with new gin drinks being created as new styles appear or old ones are resurrected.
See also buchu brandy and buchu gin; Carter-head still; and sloe gin.
Ashworth, William J. Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Dillon, Patrick. The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva. London: Review, 2002.
Harper, William T. Origins and Rise of the British Distillery. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999.
Hassall, Arthur Hill. Food and Its Adulterations; Comprising the Reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of “The Lancet” for the Years 1851 to 1854. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855.
Montefiore, Joshua. A Commercial Dictionary. London: 1803.
Mr. Seager and Mr. Evans: The Story of a Great Partnership. London: Seager & Evans, 1964.
Smyth, William A. The Publican’s Guide, or, Key to the Distill-House. London: 1781.
By: David Wondrich
Silver-plated Gordon’s gin promotional barspoon, bearing the brand’s famous boar’s head logo, ca. 1950. Source: Wondrich Collection.