sixty miles west of London. I've been making cocktails right around the world for the last

twenty years so I think I'm the best person to give you the ultimate guide to gin. There's

been a huge resurgence in gin and gin cocktails in the last few years but what is gin? The

definition of gin states that it has to be juniper dominant flavoured spirit. An agricultural

origin, and then bottled above thirty seven point five percent alcohol by volume. Gin

has a thousand years of history to it, dates all the way back to ten fifty A.D to an Italian

monastery, so gin is Italian. Gin wasn't popularised until the sixteenth century in Belgium and

Holland and it's here during the thirty year war the term Dutch courage was coined and

the British soldiers would take a wee nip of the local Genever, give them a bit of courage

to get out onto the battle fields, brought it back to England and shortened the name

to just Gin and claimed it as there own. When I say botanical it stem from the word botany

that basically means anything thats grown like a herb, root, spice, plant or even a

nut. You've gotta' have juniper in your Gin to be a Gin. Some of the other most common

botanicals in gin are like the lemon peel it gives a wonderful bright fresh citrusy

element to the Gin. Cassia bark, licorice root, angelica root even grains of paradise

and cubeb berries give a wonderful floral peppery spice. But when you bring all of these

botanicals together this is what makes Gin so versatile and mixable in a vast array of

cocktails. So once you've harvested your botanicals that are gonna' go into the gin you need them

in a natural raw berry form. You're gonna' dry them. This is the juniper berry and we

extract the oils out of it so you have a wonderful bright fresh green piney note. So there's

two main types of Gin you've got that cold compounded gin and you got that distilled

London dry gins. Cold compound is basically that nutri grain spirit, mixed with some botanicals

for a few days to infuse, add water and then you bottle it. When you make a distilled gin

well we all know that water boils off at a hundred degrees C right but alcohol boils

at about twenty degrees lower at seventy eight point three seven degrees C. So if you've

got alcohol and water together with the botanicals. You're gonna' heat that up and then you're

gonna' hit the condenser and condense it back to a liquid. With a distilled gin you are

allowed to add artificial flavouring after distillation but with the London dry gin you're

not allowed to add anything like that at all. But with the gin they make here they use a

process known as vapour infusion and by that I mean they don't put the botanicals in the

distill they put them in a perforated copper basket about thirty five foot up in the air,

twenty five foot accross the still house and they allow that spirit to pass through the

botanicals and extract the natural raw flavour of the botanical rather than the cooked flavour.

So in here we've got a wheat base nutrigrain spirit and water that's heated up to eighty

degress C so that mean that all of the alcohol goes up the column. So when that spirit comes

up the column it then turns a corner and comes down the line arm into this perforated copper

basket where those botanicals are held, and this is what is known aˊs the vapour infusion

process. It extracts all the natural oils within the botanicals and then comes out the

other size as a flavoured vapour then it hits the condenser and condenses back to a liquid.

So it passes through the pipe work into the spirit safe. This liquids coming off pretty

much double bottling strength so that's like eighty five to ninety percent alcohol. This

is the access point for the stillment to be able to nose and taste the gin. We don't want

the first twenty liters or so, we're gonna' wait for a lovely bright fresh citrus note

to come through . That then leads into piney notes floral notes, rooty notes and then spicy

notes and all of this is the heart of the gin. And then after about six hours or so

they'll be nosing it every minute and once they finish getting those spicy notes they'll

switch it over and that's the tails. So it's that heart that we want right in the middle.

They take that high strength botanical spirit add water to it to dilute it down to bottling

strength, put it in the bottle and it's ready for you to make your favourite gin cocktail.

To see me teach you how to make my favourite gin cocktail click right here in the sublime

moment button or follow the link below and you will learn all about how flavour trans

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