Tassel Gin #19

Time to make some more gin for Christmas presents, my third batch of the year.

I thought I'd persevere with trying to imitate Tanquerey gin (as I tried in #18 - see here) and see if I can get closer to its taste. Last time's was a bit strong in Angelica root so I reduced that in the recipe. I also ordered some fresh Angelica root and Liquorice root as my Angelica's use-by date was in 2021 and I wanted some liquorice in a shredded form as the sticks I had were hard to cut and splinter into small pieces. This was my recipe...

Botanical	Last Time	This Time
Juniper	30g	30g
Coriander	15g	15g
Angelica	4g	1g
Liquorice	4g	3g
Lemon Peel (fresh)	2g	1.5g

Yesterday, as usual, I measured out my botanicals into a kilner jar with 1l vodka, gave it a shake or two and left it overnight to use for distilling today.

You can see my new packets of angelica and liquorice

The made up jar.

And so to the distilling today.

Ready to start assembly. The contents of the jar will be added to the body of the still and it topped up to its capacity of about 1.7l

I don't think I've shown my setup from this side before.

On a kitchen chair I have reservoir of water with a little pump. 

It pushes water up into the condenser

The tube at the top returns the cooling water to the reservoir. The pump is set for there to be a steady trickle back into the reservoir. By the end of a distillation run the temperature of the water in the reservoir typically has risen from cold water tap temperature to about 35-40 degrees, so that's quite a lot of heat extracted to condense the liquor.

Today I had my target gin along side to sample and compare with the fractions of distillate I collected.

I collect the distillate in fractions of about 100ml at a time and taste each one as I go by taking a small amount (c 1ml) using a pipette and adding a similar amount of water.

By the 5th jar (107ml @ 77% ABV) it was tasting quite close, "Not as sweet as Tanquerey but similar", says my notes, but the earlier fractions were sweeter and more lemony. The final result after blending and dilution initially tastes a little bit strong on coriander, I think, but it will take a couple of weeks to settle down before I can really compare.

By the way, I have a little spreadsheet to help me get the strength right. I had collected a total of 845ml of distillate with a strength of 70% ABV. The spreadsheet....

...calculates the amount of alcohol in the distillate and works out what the total volume should be to get to my target strength (i.e. 40%). Subtracting the volume I have collected from that gives me how much water I have to add to get the strength right. I tested it after dilution and mixing and it was pretty close - about 40.5%.

And here are the labelled bottles.

Job done! And it tastes pretty good. We'll see how close it is to Tanquerey at Christmas.