The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails Definition of Plymouth gin

Plymouth gin is made in the Black Friars distillery in the old English naval port from which the gin takes its name. The business’s early years are murky, but it appears to have been founded when the brothers John Clark and William Langmead, of a prominent local brewing family, teamed up with merchant Robert Fuge to take over an old distillery and gin rectifier on Higher Broad Street in the heart of Plymouth. That was in 1800, or at least that’s when the partnership’s acquisition of the distillery, which had been operating since the 1740s, was announced.

The partnership was an unstable one, however, and went through many changes. In 1814, John Clark and William Langmead got rid of Fuge. Two years later, he bought them out with the help of Thomas Coates (1770–1830), a wealthy London–West India merchant with experience supplying the Royal Navy with rum. From then on, Coates’s name would be attached to an ever-shifting list of others—Fox, Williams, Hawker, Griggs, Freedman, May—that seemed to include everyone but Langmead or Fuge. After Coates’s death the Plymouth merchant William Henry Hawker (1789–1862) became the dominant partner; the Hawker family would own the brand until 1959.

The years immediately following the end of the Napoleonic Wars were good ones for British gin, which, freed of Dutch competition during the war years, had grown in quality, market share, and price. Before long, the distillery’s “rich-flavored Plymouth gin” (as it was described in 1833) had built a dominant position in England’s West Country and a reputation for unusual quality.

In 1821 the distillery was moved to larger quarters in a building on South Side Street, some 200 meters to the south, that had been built as a Dominican priory in 1431. The Black Friars Distillery, as it became known, is now Britain’s oldest continually operating gin distillery. It is unclear if the firm began as “malt distillers”—that is, distilling their own base spirit from scratch. By 1860, anyway, they were purely “rectifiers,” redistilling purchased raw Scottish grain whisky in pot stills with seven botanicals: juniper berry, coriander seed, dried orange peel, dried lemon peel, angelica root, green cardamom, and orris root. The distillery bottled the result, unsweetened, at 44 percent ABV, the lower of the two customary proofs for English gin, and (unusually) mandated that its bulk purchasers do the same. See botanical and rectifier.

Coates & Co., the name the firm finally settled on in 1842, did a good business with the Royal Navy, as one might expect of the leading, and often the only, working distillery in a city with one of the largest and oldest naval bases in Europe. That business was not official, though: the only spirit the navy officially bought was rum. See rum, navy. Rather, officers’ messes—the groups in which officers were assigned to dine—were given money with which to supplement their rations as they saw fit, including with spirits. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Plymouth gin, often bought directly from the distillery, had become an officers’ wardroom fixture, fueling many a Pink Gin and Gimlet. See Gimlet and Pink Gin. In general, the Plymouth being poured was the same bottled, 44 percent stuff that anyone could buy, although during the world wars the distillery may have sometimes made a special bottling available for naval sale at full proof, or 57 percent ABV; this was used for special promotions—the first ships to return from the Falklands in 1983 each got a case—through the 1990s.

The brand was trademarked in 1882 and given a new advertising campaign, claiming it was founded in 1793. That may well be—again, the brand’s origins are murky—but the significance of the year has never been detailed or documented. The gin reached America in the mid-1880s, just in time to catch the Martini as it began its rise to glory, and to get itself in place for the powerful trend toward dry drinks that would sweep the United States in the mid-1890s. See Martini. In America, Plymouth gin was a hit. It would continue to be fashionable until Prohibition, providing the base spirit for cocktails such as the Dry Martini and the Gibson. See Gibson and Martini.

Plymouth retained its popularity in Europe, and indeed the seminal 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book called specifically for Plymouth in many of its gin recipes (the others simply called for “gin” or “dry gin”). See Savoy Cocktail Book. Remarkably, the repeated bombing of Plymouth during World War II—focused on destroying British naval capacity—did not demolish the distillery when much of the city was laid to rubble at the hands of the Nazis, though it did sustain damage. It was the postwar years that were the real challenge. For one thing, the company was sold eight times between 1959 and 2008, when it was acquired by its current owner, the French Pernod-Ricard company. See Pernod-Ricard. Along the way, its marketing collapsed, and cost-cutting dented its quality. When a group of investors led by brand builders Paul Murphy and Charles Rolls bought the brand from the Allied Domecq group in 1998, the gin was molasses-based and bottled at a stingy 37.5 percent ABV. The first things they did were return it to close to its original proof and switch back to the slightly costlier grain spirit. They also brought the special, full-proof bottling to market as “Plymouth Navy Strength,” launching a new gin category in the process.

The brand’s revival reconfirmed Plymouth as one of the world’s most respected gins. This process was aided greatly by its support for the modern cocktail revival. See cocktail renaissance and Ford, Simon. In return, Plymouth gin has been given new life by professionals and gin enthusiasts around the world. Today, the gin, when compared with traditional London dry gin, is both a bit sweeter—the net result of sweet orange and lemony zing—and a bit more earthy, from the rooty angelica and orris. It stands alone in flavor profile both from the recipe and, imperatively, from the unique pot still that has been in use for well over 150 years. A style, a brand, and a place, Plymouth remains steadfast to its long-standing traditions.

Plymouth gin

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