By Guy Venables
We’ve all been there, late night, sitting on the internet trying to gauge how much to bid on a brand new foreign spouse. The trouble is you simply can’t tell how much you want to pay until you’ve been properly acquainted. The same is true nowadays when trying to choose between the hundreds of gins available. I’m going to tell you about two of them.
The first is a refined affair from Beefeaters. Because gin, in them olden days was often stored in barrels, it would have taken on a very different flavours from the ones we are used to. This has been recreated by distilling and resting their gin in Jean de Lillet Bordeaux barrels. Beefeaters Burrough’s Reserve edition 2 is designed to be drunk neat with ice and in that it’s a lovely and surprising straw coloured appetizer.
The wood notes may utterly delight some but confuse others as it denies the gin it’s usual crisp clarity and I was advised it shouldn’t be mixed. That I took as a glove-swiped challenge and “took it straight home” by mixing it with some Lillet blanc which made perfect sense out of it as a woody martini. I can’t claim any great success however in mixing it with anything else (tonic drowns it, sugar and lemon fight with it, after that my notes got a little hazy.) At around £65 a bottle, sipping a chilled neat one with an appetizer is much more sensible and reminded me of the way the Greeks drink freezing Tsipouro with octopus and sour bread.
My second gin is, well, my first gin. Renowned cocktail barman Joseph John and I have concocted a gin using only herbs from the long long ago with the help of my wife, Clea, a historical gardener in the Weald and Downland Museum in Singleton. Steeping Orris root, chervil, cardomon, red peppercorn, wormwood and, of course, juniper in base spirit (vodka) we spent a fun afternoon blending it and now it’s for sale in the Dean pub, unfiltered, so a deep amber colour and it’s going fast. (Possibly because it’s quite a bit cheaper than all the other gins but I’m going with the discerning palette of our locals rather than diminishing local wages.) It’s called Trundle, It took a week or so to make (see last issue on “how to”) and, inspired by Beefeaters, we might just barrel age some just to slow down its rapidly spiraling consumption.