Month: October 2018

TBGC Finger Lime Gin

Posted on by jennyinbrighton

Note: The team at Maverick Drinks sent me a bottle to try, but as always – I’ll let you know what I think.

That Boutique-y Gin Company have done it again. They’ve found a random new fruit for us all to try. Today is is a finger lime. Finger limes come from Australia and they burst open with caviar-like balls which pop in your mouth (FYI this is not something I am a fan of, I have a strange thing about textures) to release a zesty burst of citrus. There’s some debate around whether a finger lime is actually a citrus fruit – currently it is classed as a “microcitrus” although apparently on a molecular level it is nothing like citrus fruits at all. But anyway. Enough nerdy chat. Let’s drink some gin.

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TBGC Cucamelon gin

Posted on by jennyinbrighton

Note: The team at Maverick Drinks sent me a bottle of this to try, but as always I will let you know what I think.

That Boutique-y Gin Company seem to have exploded recently. At first, there were a few collaborations using the unwanted spirits from distilleries. Then a few more. And a few more. Then suddenly they had a massive range including some gins they have made all by themselves. Today we are trying the Cucamelon gin. What is a cucamelon I hear you ask? Basically, it’s a native plant to Mexico and Central America which looks like a mini watermelon, but tastes like a cucumber injected with some lime. Obviously. TBGC distil these whole along with other botanicals to create what they call a “fresh, citrusy drink”. They say this works well as a G&T, but even better as a gimlet or a Cucumber Cooler with watermelon juice and mint leaves.

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Cabin Pressure gin

Posted on by jennyinbrighton

We’ve all heard of small batch gin where small teams hand craft their gin and run the whole business from their homes. Cabin Pressure gin is about as small as it can get – a husband and wife team working out of their garden shed in Horsham; indeed when we met David at the Sussex Festival of Gin, his wife was frantically bottling the next batch back home as they didn’t have enough stock for the coming week. They’re able to distil their gin in their shed as they use the lesser used method of vacuum distilling which allows them to distil at a lower temperature and generally in a much safer way. Due to the lower temperatures, they manage to retain more flavour from their botanicals. Talking of botanicals, they use just six of them, all of which are either organically cultivated or organic wild harvested. They use juniper (obviously) along with green cardamom, angelica root, ginger, liquorice and coriander, unusual perhaps in that it lacks a citrus fruit.

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Gin Eva La Mallorquina Olive gin

Posted on by jennyinbrighton

Note: I met the Gin Eva team at Junipalooza and the kindly sent me some samples to try, as always I’ll let you know if I don’t like it.

You may have already seen my posts on Gin Eva‘s Mallorcan Dry and Bergamot gin and today we are drinking their special edition La Mallorquina. Named after a traditional olive variety that can only be found on Majorca, they use the leftover olives from a olive mill that have had the oil extracted. They then steep these in pure grain spirit for several weeks before the distillation process to then blend with juniper and coriander distillates. Whilst they say this works well as a gin and tonic, this is really designed to be drunk as a dry martini – even better if you replace the vermouth with sherry. That might be a bit much for me, but let’s see how it tastes.

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Langley’s Old Tom gin

Posted on by jennyinbrighton

Note: I was sent a bottle of this to try, but as always, I’ll let you know if I don’t like it.

I am often asked how I got into drinking copious amounts of gin, so today I tell the story. Basically, at my first proper job I was the only one that didn’t drink gin and tonic. So I started drinking gin and lemonade (which I stand by as a drink) but that wasn’t good enough. I just couldn’t get on board with the tonic. Randomly there was an event being hosted by Yelp at a bar in London with Langley’s gin and Fever Tree tonic. So off we went and I discovered a world bigger than Gordon’s gin and Britvic tonic. Since then, Langley’s has always had a place in my heart as I think of it as the first proper gin I tried. So when I was offered a bottle of their Old Tom gin recently, I jumped at the chance. Langley’s was founded in 2011, but it took them until 2013 to get the first bottles of Langley’s No. 8 gin into the market. Since then they have won a plethora of awards and they launched the Old Tom gin in 2016 and First Chapter gin in 2017. If you’ve read my blog before, you’ll know I’m a fan of Old Tom gins and a Tom Collins cocktail, and Langley’s version is based on a recipe from 1891 using eight botanicals with notes of orange, tangerine, fennel and nutmeg.

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