Sacred Rosehip Cup—a thoroughly English aperitivo

To Primrose Hill last week for the launch of Sacred Rosehip Cup. The Sacred Spirits Company is basically Ian Hart, a thoughtful boffin with a twinkling curiosity, who has built a vacuum still in a room in his house. Dotted about the place are tubs of neutral spirit with various single botanicals macerating in them; when he deems each one ready he puts it into a glass vessel, then uses a big vacuum pump located in a garden shed to lower the pressure in the vessel till the spirit starts to evaporate. No heat is used to cause this evaporation;* the theory behind cold vacuum distilling is that the botanicals don’t get “cooked” and so retain their natural flavour.

Ian’s gin is doing very well for itself and keeps winning all kinds of awards. But he is always looking at ways of applying his concepts to other drinks. He makes a Spiced English Vermouth, intended to partner with his gin for a perfect Martini, and his latest wheeze is the Rosehip Cup, which is actually intended to be a sort of English answer to Campari. Like other aperitivos and vermouths, it is an infusion that is not redistilled, and is bottled at 18% ABV.

The starting point, Ian explains, was to use rosehip for fruitiness, rhubarb for acidity and gentian for bitterness.** They were going to call it a Rhubarb Cup, but the end result does not really taste that rhubarby—so he felt that those who don’t really like rhubarb (and it can be divisive) would be put off, while those who do would be disappointed. Hence the name Rosehip Cup.

The colour of Campari originally came from crushed cochineal beetles but nowadays is artificial. Ian didn’t want to go down the artificial route, however (the ingredients of the Cup are all natural and mostly organic). The rosehip actually made the tincture a pale, pinky-brown rather than the bright red he wanted. He considered cochineal, but then had a stroke of luck: he discovered that red grape skins, which are actually a purple colour and are the source of the colour of red wine, turn bright red in the presence of the acid from the rhubarb. This is where the colour of Sacred Rosehip Cup comes from. Ian has observed that, if you dilute the Cup with soda water, for example, as the acid concentration drops the drink turns purple again.

Ian with his Negroni kit gift pack

The signature serve is the Negroni, undoubtedly the classic Campari drink (equal parts gin, Campari and red vermouth). Ian prescribes the use of his own Spiced English Vermouth—you might say, “well he would,” but he explains that the Rosehip Cup is actually not as bitter as Campari, whereas the Spiced English Vermouth is more bitter than, say, Martini Rosso; and the Rosehip Cup needs this extra bitterness. At the launch I am given one of these Negonis to try (using Sacred gin, of course): it is a light, fruity example of its kind, with a slightly downplayed juniper, as one might expect from a complex gin like Sacred. Perhaps a good, light summer Negroni.

Ian is actually planning to sell a “Negroni kit”, of three 20cl bottles of Sacred Gin, Sacred Rosehip Cup and Sacred Spiced English Vermouth (see photo left). That’s everyone’s Christmas presents sorted, then.

Alternative ways to drink the Rosehip Cup are with Fentiman’s Rose Lemonade or with Prosecco; the latter produces a dry, fruity number, a bit like adding Pimm’s to sparkling wine, if you’ve ever tried that.

Rosehip Cup on the left, Campari on the right

Back home I line up a direct comparison between Campari and the Rosehip Cup. As you can see from the photo, they look pretty much identical. Tasted neat they are similar but Campari has a more citric, floral nose with a steely savouriness, and a hint of cooked peppers, celery, even onion, and maybe some cinnamon. All this is carried through on to the tongue, plus bitterness, obviously, and something woody (perhaps that’s the cascarilla bark).

By comparison the Rosehip Cup, while broadly similar, has a softer and more fruity nose, comforting like rosehip syrup. It is sweeter on the palate, though with bitterness too, and there is something like parma violets in there as well.

A Negroni made with the Rosehip Cup (apologies
for the garnish—I didn't have any oranges)

I don’t have any of the Spiced English Vermouth at home, so I knock up a Negroni using Martini Rosso, and then source some extra bitterness from Peychaud’s Bitters (which I find is more simple heads-down bitter, whereas Angostura has has other aromatic things going on too). The end result is very agreeable, a good showcase for what a fine cocktail the Negroni is, and I find one can dial in all the bitterness one wants using this method.

Sacred Rosehip Cup is £28.50 from www.sacredspiritscompany.com


* Actually the vessel rotates in a warm-water bath, which is simply to keep it at room temperature, otherwise the drop in pressure would cause the temperature to drop dramatically too. Oxley gin is also made using vacuum distillation but they, I believe, allow the temperature to drop to –5 degrees C.

** Campari won’t say what their ingredients are; Ian said he thought the bitterness came from gentian, though I see that whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry believes it contains the bitter-sour fruit chinotto and cascarilla bark, while this person is adamant it contains “quinine, rhubarb, ginseng, orange peels and aromatic herbs”.

Two Birds, Dodd's, Sacred—gins that show their craft

All looks orderly as DBS hands out pens and scoring sheets at the beginning of the session…

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to join a panel for a blind tasting of British “craft” gins, organized by DBS in association with the Craft Distillers Alliance. OK, so the obvious first question is: what is a “craft” gin? The name suggests something homespun and artisanal, and that is essentially what it is—and it’s apparently on the rise. It’s been going on for some time in the US, where there are more than 500 craft distillers, and now it’s happening here too. We tasted 18 gins, which were reckoned to be fully 90% of all the UK craft gins in existence (i.e. two declined to take apart), so we’re a little way behind the Yanks; but DBS points out that a year ago we couldn’t even have organised a tasting like this at all. Anyway, for the purposes of the tasting a “craft distiller” was someone who used their own still (as opposed to getting their gin made for them by a big distiller like Thames or Greenalls), but was not one of the major players.

The tasting took place at the “Ginstitute” upstairs room at the Portobello Star on Portobello Road in London, with the support of Fever-Tree mixers. Each gin was blind-tasted neat and we were asked to rate its nose, palate and balance, as well as giving it an overall score out of 100. Then we rated them all over again with tonic water. The resulting scores of all nine judges were aggregated to produce an overall winner.

Straight away it became clear that the concept of the craft gin was more useful than you might imagine: perhaps freed from the “regression towards the mean” understandable in a vast commercial enterprise, these gins went in some strange directions. In fact it was only the seventh sample we tried that we agreed seemed to be especially juniper-led.

Ultimately the laurels went to Two Birds, a gin produced in Market Harborough and only launched earlier this year. It is made in a still designed and hand-built by the gin’s creator Mark Gamble, in batches of just 100 bottles at a time. It contains five botanicals, of which only juniper is admitted to. (I notice that on their About page there is a photo showing juniper and elderflower, so I wonder if the latter is in the mix—they do emphasise that their gin is all about celebrating the English countryside—although I don’t think I can taste it.) The style of this one is actually quite classic (suggesting that, for all the experimentation going on with gin profiles these days, the judges essentially liked a gin that tastes of gin); this was the one that prompted me to write “Juniper at last!” in my notes. It also struck me as sappy and spicy with an orange note. On the palate neat it was smooth and approachable but well balanced in a classic way. Tasting it now against Tanqueray as a control, it has a bit more of an emphasis on cardamom and sweet/roundness, where Tanqueray is drier, more upright and with more coriander.

Tasted neat, the joint highest scorers were actually Sacred Coriander (see below) and Dodd’s gin, made in Battersea by the London Distillery Company (and named after Ralph Dodd, the idealist who founded a company of the same name in 1807, but never actually got to make any gin). The bulk of the botanicals (which include juniper, angelica, fresh lime peel, bay laurel, cardamom, red raspberry leaf and London honey) are distilled in a 140-litre copper alembic, but “the more delicate botanicals” are separately processed in a cold vacuum still, in the same way that Sacred gin is. The two distillates are then blended.

I myself actually seem to have ranked Dodd’s 10th in the neat round (I put Two Birds top, with Chase Williams, Sacred Coriander and Dà Mhìle all in joint second place), describing its nose as “wood resin and varnish [from juniper, I assume], with a hint of grapefruit and a smidgeon of curry” and adding that the palate has an “interesting balance between powerful high notes and earthy warmth”. Tasting it again now I would say its balance is heavily towards sweet, floral flavours of angelica and cardamom.

Sacred should come in for a special mention. Ian Hart makes the stuff in a vacuum still in his house, distilling each botanical separately then blending them at the end. This gives him the freedom to make different blends, and he sells packs containing the basic gin plus a selection of single-botanical distillates so you can experiment with tweaking the flavour this way or that. He now also makes gins that are heavily weighted towards one botanical—5% normal Sacred Gin mixed with 95% distillate of just one botanical. He had entered no fewer than seven samples into our tasting: his normal Sacred Gin, plus his Juniper Gin, Coriander Gin, Cardamom Gin, Orris Gin, Pink Grapefruit Gin and Liquorice Gin.

And it was certainly worth his while. Although he didn’t take the overall victor ludorum, in the aggregated scoring his standard Sacred Gin came second, his Coriander Gin (i.e. 95% coriander distillate with just 5% Sacred Gin mixed in) came third and this Cardamom Gin came fourth. As mentioned, tasted neat his Coriander Gin was joint first. And in the scoring for tasted-with-tonic-water, Sacred Gin came first, followed by Sacred Coriander.

In my own notes, with tonic I put Sacred Cardamom top, followed by Sipsmith VJOP (a special juniper-heavy blend made for the Japanese market), then Sacred Gin and Sacred Coriander in joint third place.

Not only does this suggest that Sacred is a Good Thing, but it also shows that we don’t necessarily need a huge number of botanicals to make a satisfying gin,* particularly when it is to be consumed with tonic water. Certainly this tasting reveals that one gin can be excellent on its own but not rated at all with tonic, and vice versa.

For me, a logical conclusion would be to look more closely at Sacred Coriander. It seems to be something of a jack-of-all-trades, coming joint first neat, second with tonic and third overall. And when I aggregate my own scores I find that Sacred Coriander comes first. On his website Ian sells the Pink Grapefruit, Cardamom and Juniper gins, as well as the standard Sacred Gin, but not the Coriander. “We will indeed be selling Coriander Gin shortly on our website,” he explains. “It’s just that the USA has bought nearly all our stock! I have been distilling coriander for the last few days, and we will be bottling 3,000 more bottles shortly.” I suggest that he must be a bit sick of coriander right now, but he replies, “Coriander is fascinating—so many different flavours come out at different points of the distillation!” Clearly a man who loves his work.

By the end of the session, things are a bit more
chaotic and voluble…

Tasting some of these samples now, side by side and knowing what they are, I’m struck by just how powerful the Sacred Coriander and Cardamom gins are—which perhaps gives them the ability to stand out in a mass tasting, particularly diluted with tonic water when tongues are getting tired. As soon as you, for example, blend these two together the overall punch seems to reduce exponentially. Sacred Gin itself contains 12 botanicals and is indeed quite subtle, particularly with tonic. I would describe it as elegant, refined and with an emphasis on rich, smooth, exotic elements. (Its name comes from the fact that one of the botanicals is frankincense; I’m not sure I can exactly pick it out, but you can believe there is a heady resinous note, like hot solder.)

The single-botanical gins are actually a great way to appreciate the flavours of particular spices: the coriander is pungent with a combination of lemony high notes and a liquorice-like sweet rooty layer; the cardamom has an immediate confectionary appeal, a powdery sweetness with elements of lemon, lime and mango, but with a bitterness on the finish. But would either by my desert island gin? No, I don’t think so. All of which actually shines quite a light on the tricky business of gin blending, and on the achievement of Two Birds, and also Dodd’s and Sacred, in producing recipes that pleased all nine judges on the day!

* Mind you, it didn’t always work. The Sacred Liquorice Gin rated as not really smelling or tasting of much at all, and ranked second from bottom in my overall scores; clearly this is one botanical that plays its part in a blend but does not work on its own.

Gin Mare: a gin you can't refuse

As the fad continues for producing “gins” that include all manner of bizarre flavours, Gin Mare, behind which a fair amount of marketing clout seems to have been put, looks like a bold move. In addition to juniper, coriander, cardamom and citrus peel (lemon plus both bitter and sweet oranges), we have thyme, basil, rosemary and olives. The idea is to create a self-consciously Mediterranean gin, something that denizens of that region will embrace as their own. (The name comes from the concept of Mare Nostra, “Our Sea”. Spain is a huge gin market so you can see the logic.)

Fortunately they allow us Brits to drink the stuff too. The bottle is striking, with an olive-leaf pattern prominent on the front along with the phrase “Colección de autor”. Some marketing bumf I’ve seen attempts to translate this, rather bafflingly, as “author’s collection”. I speak no Spanish, so I don’t know if they are getting at something artisanal here, a product created by craftsmen, or if it means the creation of an visionary auteur: it is, apparently, “the vision of a new generation of a family with a long tradition of distilling high quality spirits”. So, both traditional and innovative at the same time, conveniently.

The blue and white shades of the bottle represent the sky and the clouds, the sea and the surf.  The bold cap covers the whole neck and forms a handy 50ml measure. Its top is struck like a classical medallion and there are four vanes on the side that apparently represent the four Mediterranean botanicals (the basil is from Italy, the thyme from Turkey, the Rosemary from Greece and the Arbequina olives—the only olives to have their own DOC category—from Spain, though in fact the citrus also comes from Spain and the juniper is, they say, harvested on their own farms, so I assume that is Spanish too). But to me the bottle cap has a Futurist architectural quality and reminds me of Mussolini’s Fascist EuR development in Rome.*

The product was launched in February 2010 and the promotional literature shows that it was born as a titanic marketing exercise, attempting to encapsulate a relaxed Mediterranean lifestyle, a warm climate, a native love of gastronomy and a sense of escape. (This last one seems at odds—if you’re a native of the Med, surely you’re not escaping there? It’s only us pasty Brits who try that.) There are photos of beautiful people dressed in minimalist white and scenes of what Mount Olympus would look like if it were a club on Ibiza.

Typical Gin Mare consumers: these people are so relaxed they have forgotten
to build the rest of their house

But a lot of thought and effort have gone into the product too. All the botanicals are distilled separately (something I used to think only Ian Hart of Sacred did, but one hears of it more and more). Whereas most gins macerate their botanicals all together for about 24 hours, Gin Mare botanicals are steeped for varying times—from 36 hours for the olives up to a year for the citrus peel. At a tasting at Graphic in March we were told that the reason for the separate distillations is that the olive distillate varies a lot in heaviness and flavour, so this way they can keep the balance consistent. The distillates are hand blended and the finished product is bottled at 42.7% ABV.

That Futurist bottle cap

As if terroir, tradition and technique weren’t enough, the manufacturers have hedged their bets even further by erecting the still in an 18th-century chapel that was dismantled brick by brick and reassembled in its current location in an old fishing village between the Costa Brava and the Costa Dorada, presumably to make sure that God is also on their side.

So many New Gins seem to play down the juniper aspect and add sweet, floral notes, apparently to woo punters who perhaps are ripe to like the idea of gin, but fundamentally don’t like the taste (especially women, at whom some brands are specifically aimed). Gin Mare is, when you unscrew the cap, clearly gin—the juniper hits you first. But then there is obviously something floral, smooth and sweet going on too. On the palate I get something like cinnamon, warm and rich, and then there is the olive, quite noticeably, plus the woody, aromatic thyme and rosemary elements. This is the fascinating thing about Gin Mare, the way it manages to present sweet, smooth, floral qualities yet avoids ending up cloying like many modern gins, and somehow successfully marrying this with a distinct saltiness from the olives and the dry, savoury, resinous elements of the herbs too.

In a G&T this character remains pronounced, with both a distinctive herbaceous quality and a silky smooth mouthfeel. At the Graphic tasting we had our wrists slapped over the idea of garnishing the drink with lemon or lime (despite the fact that citrus is an ingredient) on the ground that they would overpower the flavours: instead we should use rosemary, thyme, basil or mint. In a Martini one should use an olive.**

I tried the gin in a few other classic cocktails:

Martinez (2 parts Gin Mare, 1 part Carpano Antica Formula red vermouth, 1–2 tsp maraschino, dash of Angostura bitters) Cracking. The herbaceous flavours of the gin marry well with the vermouth and balance nicely with the fruity sweetness of the maraschino.

Negroni (equal parts Gin Mare, Carpano Antica Formula red vermouth, Campari)

With Antica Formula this makes a warm, chocolately Negroni, with the sweet fragrance of the gin and the prominent vanilla of the vermouth creating a smooth feather-pillow for your tongue; but then there is that bitterness at the end, from both the vermouth and the Campari. Not sure it’s the very best Negroni I’ve had—perhaps it wants the steely juniper note in more conventional gins.

Dirty Martini (4 parts Gin Mare to 1 part dry vermouth, plus about ½ tsp of olive brine) It seemed an obvious thing to try and, as you might imagine, it works very well—although you are really just adding more of the salty olive character that is already there. Nevertheless it does emphasise the effectiveness of the botanical combination in the gin.

Graphic bar manager Sarah Mitchell with Duncan Hayter
from Gin Mare at the event in March

Gimlet (2½ parts Gin Mare and ¾ part lime cordial) Balances in a surprising manner—it brings out the floral character in the gin, though the savoury, salty qualities are still in there too. The warm, spicy elements poke through clearly. In fact in an interesting way this cocktail spotlights the complex balancing act that Gin Mare attempts—and for my money by and large achieves—though I sense it might be a love-it-or-hate-it thing for most people.

Gibson (A dry Martini with one or two cocktail onions as garnish) Having quite a savoury tooth I do like this cocktail and I figured that a gin with so many savoury elements as Gin Mare would work well. But I’m not sure I was right: in context Gin Mare came up with some surprising sweet elements that seemed to jar with the sulphurous allium flavour of the onion (reminding me a bit of sweet-pickled herring). It makes you realise that the dominant herbaceous notes aren’t as savoury as they seem.

Red Snapper (2 parts Gin Mare, 4 parts tomato juice, ½ part lemon or lime juice, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, black pepper, celery salt) Likewise an obviously savoury cocktail (and one of the few classic cocktails that sits easily with the extraordinarily savoury Aviation gin). And it was pretty good, yet again it didn’t work as neatly as I would have assumed. In this savoury, almost meaty context, Gin Mare showed itself to be more floral and sweet than I had thought. And I am reminded just how powerfully flavoured it is: this is a muscular cocktail context, with the acids of the tomato and lemon and the chilli and pepper heat, yet the Gin Mare immediately pushed its flavour profile through.

Aviation (2 parts Gin Mare, ½ part maraschino, ½ part lemon juice, ¼ part crème de violette) As gin shorts go this is relatively fruity/floral, so I didn’t expect it to work but I was wrong. This sort of cocktail, perhaps like the Gimlet, showed that Gin Mare actually has a strong floral perfume, that in this case sits quite happily with the violet and cherry flavours.

I’ve now nearly finished my bottle of Gin Mare in my experimentations, which is in itself a sign. The strong thyme, rosemary, basil and olive elements are impossible to ignore, yet this would make the gin sound like food, and as it turns out it is not that savoury as a mixer. It works well in combinations with a floral/fruity character. Forcefully characterful, it may well divide and perplex drinkers, but I still find myself fascinated by it.

Gin Mare can be had for about £34 a bottle (or £42 if you buy it from Harvey Nicks).

* See m’colleague’s recent review of Adler gin from Munich: adler means “eagle”, but it is reminiscent of the Adlerhorst, Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” mountain hideaway. So if Adler is “Hitler’s gin” then perhaps Gin Mare can be “Mussolini’s gin”. I believe that Churchill was partial to Plymouth in his Martinis. So, what would be Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s gins, I wonder..?

** This whole business of garnishes sometimes seems a bit pointless to me. Granted that nothing you can do to the constituent liquids will create the same effect as squeezing the oil from a strip of lemon rind on to the surface of your Martini, but many prescribed garnishes leave me thinking, If you believe your gin needs that extra element of grapefruit/basil/raw beef or whatever, why not just add that flavour when you distil it and serve it without a garnish? Much of it is just gimmickry, methinks.

A most unusual way to make gin

The exterior of the Horseless Carriage

The Hendrick's marketing machine is such a thing of Shock and Awe that few people (at least few in Our World) can be unaware of their calculated image of playful eccentricity and oddness. So I was almost surprised when, as part of London Cocktail Week, there was an opportunity to learn about how the actual product is made.

The Hendrick's roadshow had set up on the forecourt of a disused petrol station and there was eccentricity aplenty with a croquet lawn, threnody from a musical saw and one of the famous Hendrick's roll top baths, filled with rose petals. The actual seminar was inside the Hendrick's Horseless Carriage, what looks like a railway carriage adapted for road transport. The snug, dark wood interior is filled with bric-a-brac and strange specimens—but also, mercifully, with gin.

Brand ambassador Louis Xavier Lewis-Smith gave us a preliminary talk on the history of distilling and gin in particular, with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation which he himself had not previously seen— perhaps a test of prowess through which all ambassadors must go before they can get the really good postings. (It wouldn't surprise me to discover that Hendrick's has its own embassy in Moscow.) We were also confronted with an array of samples that turned out to be a rare opportunity to taste the liquid as it comes out of the still.

Around the bath it reads, "I can resist everything
except temptation." Wilde, I believe.

Hendrick's is made by William Grant, the whisky distillers. Their involvement with gin dates from when they bought a gin recipe and two stills at auction in 1966 from the London firm Taplow's. One was a Bennett pot still made in 1860 and the other a Carter-Head still fashioned in 1948; both have been restored and have been used since 1999 to make Hendrick's, which is itself a blend of the output from the two stills.

The Bennett still is basically a copper pot that is filled with neutral grain spirit and botanicals (Hendrick's aren't too specific about what these are—"flowers, roots, fruits and seeds" is all they will admit to, though juniper, coriander and orange and lemon peel are clearly involved), which are left to steep before the whole lot is heated and the resulting vapour condensed into a distillate that emerges at 80% ABV. One of our samples was precisely this—we were warned that we might not want to put it into our mouths undiluted, advice which we, of course, ignored.

The Bennett still has a reputation for producing a robust product and at 80% the predominant note for me was caramel or butterscotch, but when you add water to bring it down to roughly 40% there is a huge rush of citrus aromas, earthy roots, pungent, piney flavours and a hint of warm aniseed. Robust indeed. The long maceration prior to distillation has extracted profound flavours and plenty of oils from the botanicals, visible in the "legs" up the side of the glass when swirled—moreover, when you add water it "louches" like absinthe, going slightly milky. As with absinthe, this is the oils, dissolved at 80% ABV, emerging as an emulsion of fat droplets as the alcohol concentration drops.

Sitting down with Louis and an array of samples before us

The Carter-Head still, also very rare, is a more complex affair. Louis showed us a diagram which was frankly over my head, but in essence the rising vapour passes through a matrix of channels and baffles with the intention of controlling just what parts of the molecular soup are allowed through and which fall back down into the bubbling liquid. The botanicals are not steeped, in fact not even allowed into contact with the neutral spirit: they are packed into a "flavour box" through which the vapour passes on its way to be condensed back into liquid.

Our next sample was the 80% ABV distillate from the Carter-Head. It was fascinating how it clearly had the same general flavour profile as the previous one (having been made with the same botanicals)—there was citrus and earthy spices—yet its aroma was finer, lighter, more delicate and dry, and it was sweeter and peppery on the palate. There was no clouding when water was added, suggesting the heavy essential oils had been left behind.

The finished product is a blend of the two distillates. For professional reasons Louis was not able to reveal in what proportions they were mixed, though I pointed out that the high-strength sample of the blend louched almost as much as the pure Bennet sample, something Louis had not thought of before and which he admitted was a bit of a giveaway. (Not that I have enough of a science brain to know how to interpret this.)

Brand ambassador His Excellency Louis Xavier Lewis-Smith

But there is more to the Hendrick's formula than this: it famously includes rose petals and cucumber in the mix, yet these are not flavours that can be acquired by adding rose and cucumber to the botanicals, so they are added as essences to the final blend before dilution to bottling strength. Some bartenders turn their nose up at Hendrick's for this reason. (Interestingly, Martin Miller's gin also contains cucumber essence—though it's not something they dine out on as Hendrick's does. There is a rumour that someone from Miller's actually defected, taking the idea with them.) We were given samples of these essences—the rose from Bulgaria, the cucumber from the Netherlands—and again warned against tasting it, which we again ignored. The rose essence was a bit too concentrated to get the full bloom of aroma but the cucumber was rather delicious, I thought.

More forecourt shenanigans. The ornament on the bonnet of the car is,
unsurprisingly, a winged cucumber

We have talked before about how it was only 18 months ago that the EU defined gin at all. Louis mentioned with some pride that Hendrick's was, in a way, responsible for this, what with their audacity in adding flavouring essences after distillation. As such, Hendrick's cannot be classified as a London gin, but is technically a distilled gin, and Louis is happy with that. In the exploding gin market* there is clearly room for all sorts and Hendrick's extraordinary marketing efforts clearly have more effect on the typical consumer than any EU definition.

In the interests of science, Mr Bridgman-Smith did the Institute proud and attempted to create his own Hendricks by blending the two distillate samples, adding rose and cucumber essences and bringing it down to bottle strength**—though, under the imperious eye of a stuffed stoat, he admitted he had done this "without much success". Thus proving that a premium gin is not something that any old muppet can knock up with a few flavourings.***

*There may actually be a market for exploding gin which no one has tapped yet. I did come across a rum the other day that is made by a Kiwi bloke who blends various spirits then adds chilli, pipe tobacco and gunpowder. Perhaps mercifully you can't readily buy this stuff but allegedly have to barter for it with him online.
**Like many gins Hendricks is bottled at two strengths, 41.4% for the UK market and 44% for the US. This whole concept of "export strength" is something we will look into in greater depth in the future, but DBS was rather fascinated by the fact that the two Henrick's ABVs were so close, and so precise. Louis explained that at different concentrations different flavour elements manifest themselves, and rigorous experimentation had found that these two ABVs were both "sweet spots" at which the drink tasted particularly good.
***Interestingly, Sacred, an incredibly artisanal gin, is made by an ex-headhunter in the City who distils all the botanicals separately then blends them. You can even buy a kit of the separate botanical distillates, so you can create your own version.