Summary

- A life at the edge
- The King of England
- Our choice
- Plymouth Gin, the pride of a city
- A straight one
- Tasting it
- The perfect base

If tequila is a symbol of Mexico, as Porto is for Portugal or cachaça is for Brazil, gin is with no doubt a symbol of England. And yet, gin has not been invented in the United Kingdom.
The history of one of the most popular spirits worldwide reminds the fabled biographies of some gangsters of the roaring twenties: long banished from social acceptance, it lived the 14 years of the American prohibitionism as a protagonist. Even if the moralistic society pointed to it as the incarnation of evil, in fact, gin continued to be the most common alcoholic product among the population, even if beyond the allowed.
That was not the first time that gin had troubles with the Law: a strange destiny, for a preparation that was invented as a medical remedy, to live such an outlaw life! Let's have a look to the most intense moments of this amazing biography.


A life at the edge
As said, gin, the king of juniper based spirits, is not an English invention.
Juniper-flavoured distillates became common in many lands in the XVII Century, but they surely were born much before. Two theories seem to be more reliable than others about when and where people started to use juniper as a flavour for distillates. On one hand, it could have been Coptic monks, already in the early Christian age (II -III Century a.C.), who brought from Egypt to northern Europe the knowledge of distilling and infusing with spices and herbs, including juniper; on the other hand, we have written proofs, dating back to the 12th Century, of Italian monks preparing juniper-based distillates with medicinal purposes: the spirits helped to reduce the swelling of the victims of the several plagues that afflicted Europe in the Middle Ages, but we believe they helped them in other ways too…
These were the ancestors, but gin has a real father, with a name, a surname and a nickname: Franciscus de la Boe, but everybody called him Dr. Sylvius. He was a chemist, he was Dutch, he lived in the XVII century and he was also professor at the University of Leyden. He made several botanical experiments, and one of these was particularly successful. Dr. Sylvius was looking for a remedy for bellyaches, and he found it by infusing juniper berries ("juniperus communis") into cereal alcohol. He called his son Jenever, in honour of the juniper.
Jenever was very nice and soon became the apple of every Dutch's eye. But one day in 1688, King William III and some English soldiers kidnapped Jenever, that was giving courage (Dutch courage) to the troops during the long campaigns in the Low Countries, and took him, sorry, it to England. In England Jenever shortly became very popular, but it had a long name and so people started to call him just Gin. At the beginning, Britons imported large quantities of Jenever, but in 1689, when William III came to the throne, his government increased the duty on imported spirits and opened the spirit industry to the public, without any control or license. The government was also trying to make a market for low-grade corn unsuitable for brewing, selling it below cost. There were the best conditions for a spread of a distillate like gin, to beer and ale's prejudice. It took a very few time until distilleries in England shifted to the production of their own Gin, much cheaper than the imported one.
Britons brought many variations to the original recipe, and the main were two: first, they started to put directly the berries in infusion with the alcohol, instead of extracting from the berries an oil for the infusion; second, they refined the taste by adding other flavours and spices, such as orange peel and coriander. Its name changed again, and Gin became London Dry Gin.

Gin was forever kept away from his real father, but he found a large family that loved him as they were their real parents. By the way, the real parents are those who raise the children.

The King of England
At the end of the first quarter of the XVIII Century, six million English folks were drinking five million gallons of gin per year, with the result that they were almost all, almost always, drunk. The government could not bear this behaviour, and in 1736 introduced the Gin Act, an act that curtailed the previous complete deregulation in producing and selling gin. To say, the pouring was limited and a fee was introduced for gin's producers. Suddenly Gin had to take to the bush, and it was not allowed in the bars anymore. However, it never really left the bars: it just took a new identity, and changed its name in Parliamentary Brandy. The ban didn't bring the expected results, and lasted very little: the government went back on its decisions in 1742 and homologated gin's production rules to ale's ones, after an unceasing chain of riots, law breaking and contraband that had the only result to raise the consumption of 50%.
Gin came out of the bush in a better fit than before: the competition amongst producers, in fact, had the positive effect of improving the lowest level of quality of the final product. Gin continued to flow in floods in the infamous Gin Palaces, gaudy taverns where the poor got obliterated, but it was less detrimental to health than before.
Things went even better after the invention, in the 1830s, of the column still. The distillation process saw a revolution and became extremely purer: slowly, the habit of adding sugar in the distillation, to mask the bad flavour, was replaced by a growing attention to botanical ingredients' treatment, in order to obtain a drier and finer spirit.

Americans visiting England could obviously not avoid to run into gin. They brought it back with them in the US, and mostly preferred it in the sweetened version. By the way, they continued to have whiskey as a favourite, but there was a huge shifting towards gin in the prohibition era. The reason was very simple: marketing illegal gin was much easier than whiskey, because it required no ageing, and it could be sold right after its distillation. When Prohibitionism ended, Americans were accustomed to gin and even more to its great mixability. It started the so called Cocktail Age, whose champion was the Martini Cocktail. Gin became one of the three essential drinks for both home parties and night clubs, included in a host of fashionable drinks largely popular still today.

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