Beefeater is an iconic London dry gin that is consistently among the world’s top ten best-selling gins. According to the company’s current owners, the brand’s history began in 1863, when London pharmacist James Burrough (1835–1897) bought the Cale Street distillery from John Taylor, who had founded it in 1820 (the year noted on the current bottle). Burrough had previously at least experimented with making gin, as his recipe books include an 1849 formula for black-currant gin. At Cale Street he made a variety of spirits, including, by 1876, Beefeater and a few other marks of gin, with Beefeater soon becoming the company’s leading brand, winning prizes and cracking the American market in 1917.
The James Burrough company’s advertising, however, suggests that the Beefeater brand, whenever it was created, was not the company’s priority until the mid-1920s, when one first comes across advertisements for it. Before that, the company primarily dealt in bulk alcohol and scotch and Irish whisky, although it did have a damson gin that it promoted. A 1933 American trademark filing claims that the brand was first in commerce in 1909.
The brand entered, or re-entered, the American market in 1933, but its greatest growth came after World War II. By the early 1960s, three of every four bottles of gin imported to the United States were Beefeater. The Burrough family sold the brand to Whitbread in 1987, who in turn sold it to Pernod Ricard in 2005. It is unique among major old-line gin brands in offering tours of its modern distillery in Kennington, London. The Beefeater name evokes a sense of patriotism among the British people with its iconic beefeater red jacket, an item that even in the nineteenth century invoked strong feelings and memories of “Old London.”
Beefeater is an unapologetically traditional London gin. A widely cited 1895 gin recipe from Burrough’s formula book includes the nine botanicals still used to make Beefeater today: juniper, angelica root and seeds, coriander, licorice, almond, orris root, and the rinds of lemons and bitter Seville oranges, which together lace Beefeater’s distinctive and classic juniper with a touch of soft citrus. Now as then, Beefeater begins as a purchased neutral grain spirit in which, famously, all nine botanicals steep in pot stills for twenty-four hours before distillation. Formerly, these were Carterhead stills, but now those are only used for some special bottlings.
See also London Dry Gin and Pernod-Ricard.
Harper’s Directory and Manual. London: Harper, 1920.
“James Burrough Limited.” Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, September 12, 1933, 278.
By: Aaron Knoll