Happy Monday! For today’s Ginvent we revisit Tappers gin – last year we had a dram of the Darkside gin and this year is their Wintergreen edition. The Tappers range come in beautiful bottles – you know I’m a sucker for good branding – and have a lot of iterations considering they launched in 2016 up in the Wirral peninsula. They are a brand that mean small batch when they say it; their botanicals are sourced as locally as possible and they only produce 40 bottles at a time. This gin was the second in their range to be released, back in October 2016, and is inspired by the range of plants that stay aromatic in the wintertime. As their gin is compounded (made by adding the botanicals to the base spirit with no distillation after this point), it has a natural tinge to it from the juniper and the remaining botanicals – spruce needles, cassia bark, birch bark and meadowsweet (plus five more secret ingredients). They say it has the crisp taste of a winter’s day, let’s find out shall we?
tappers gin
Ginvent 2018 – Tappers Darkside gin
It’s day 14 of Ginvent and today we are drinking Tappers Darkside gin. Tappers have been making gin since 2016 in their home of West Kirby, t’up norf near Chester and Liverpool. This is certainly a small batch gin, every batch they make is a total of 40 bottles, each of which is hand filled, labelled, waxed and numbered. It took them a year to develop the recipe, based on Prohibition Era compound style gins. Darkside gin reflects the mix of seaside botanicals from the area: red clover flowers, chickweed and sea beet alongside five other botanicals (they don’t say that these are, but I’m guessing juniper, angelica and orris root are probably in there somewhere because they always are).