On a Mission to Creat the Perfect Gin - Next Steps

This is a new project which, if successful, may generate some Christmas presents for some friends and family. You may have already seen The Beginnings, when I unpacked my still, my cleaning run and first distillation of some Apple Brandy. Before I start distilling some gin, though, I need to do some preparation.

I am following a process outlined in a book I got for my birthday, Still Magic, A gin distiller's guide, by Marcel Thompson.

The first steps include getting to know your gins by doing a comparative tasting. Well we have 3 gins in the house at the moment. Tanquerey Export Strength Gin,  Kelso Crow Man's Gin and Greyson's Seville Orange and Persian Lime Gin. For each gin you put a shot of gin and add the same amount of water and then smell and sip and make notes of what you think. I had a go first.

And then Dawn and Sarah had a go.

Sarah's descriptions were the best, including "Lemon sherbet", "Chalky lovehearts" and "Herby mouthwash" but Dawn had the most derogatory. She said the Tanquerey was "Like hand sanatiser". I thought that was her favourite gin!

The next step was to make some initial gin bases  by infusion of 5 different recipes in vodka... a quick and easy way to make a gin. The 5 bases are based on Marcel's experience of different gins and the aim is to do a comparison, as we did with commercial gins, to learn the effects of different botanicals in the mix.

Firstly I assembled my botanicals. Some came from the cupboard. Others I had sourced via the Intenet over the last couple of weeks.

Now I got out my scales and labelled a jar for each base.

I weighed out the botanical recipe for each base and added them to the respective jars. It was here that I discovered our kitchen scales are not precise enough to measure out accurately enough, so the mixtures are maybe a little approximate. Base 2, for example required 12g of juniper, 3g of coriander, 6g of lemon peel, 3g of orange peel, 1g of fennel, 1g of allspice, and 2g of cloves. I also discovered I needed more corinader seeds and needed to use some ground coriander instead for some.

Then 200ml of vodka is added to each jar, they are closed and given a good shake.

24 hours later it was time to pass each mixture through a sieve into a bottle. I kept the spice mixes and put them back in the jar with another 100ml of vodka to see what further infusion for a couple of days more would produce.

Here are my 5 bottles.

As these are infusions rather than distillations they have all been coloured by the botanicals. I left them for any particulates to settle for a day [I think I will use a filter paper in the sieve next time].

And so, tonight, to the tastings, notebook at the ready again. The little thistle glasses were perfect for holding a small amount extracted by pipette from each to sip neat. Dawn had a go too.

Just to the side you can see my new scales which arrived today andhave a  0.1g level of precision. Perfect for my next mixing and I was able to measure out 20g of garlic precisely for our Nasi Goring for tea.

And so to the gins. All quite powerfully flavoured! My notes on each are:
1. Orange and spicy from the allspice and peppercorns even though there is only a bit of orange in the mix.
2. Light and sweet with the cloves coming through a strong citrus flavour.
3. Very junipery and rather earthy, from the angelica and liquorice.
4. Very floral dominated by the large amount of cardamom in the mix.
5. Christmasy with an orange taste. The cassia is what made the difference here, I think.

OK so far. But how about in a gin& tonic. I made one from 1 measure of Gin 2 and 1/2 measure of vodka on ice and topped up with Schweppes tonic water. 1 for me and 1 for Dawn.

Cheers!

But that's enough gin for today, we can try the others with tonic over the next week.