“Dry January” is long since over… and Since it’s over, I decided it’s time to post a short tasting on an alcohol-free gin alternative. I’d have posted it earlier but I didn’t want to risk persuading anyone to think about going sober in that long, dark, miserable, month.. you know, the one during which you could really use a gin. Having a month off the alcohol is never a bad thing for your body to recover…I just can’t bear to do it in January with the post-Christmas funk going on! I will be starting on a low carb diet shortly to trim some of the Christmas excesses so this will be sating my need for a juniper hit.

If I’m watching the alcohol, and the calories, The Duchess, makes abstaining for a period much more bearable and is generally my goto. I discovered The Duchess when we ran across the guys who came up with it at Junipalooza in 2017, and then again at the 2018 event when they’d reworked their recipe. It comes to us courtesy of two gents in South Africa, Johannes Le Roux and Inus Smuts.

At its heart, The Duchess is a combination of re-distilled juniper berries, and tonic water infused with various botanicals including orange peel, allspice and star anise. The fact this is basically re-distilled juniper and tonic is what I think really makes it able to hit that gin spot if you’re not drinking. When you smell it, that juniper comes through on the nose, and the spices in the tonic really hit you as well, but with less citrus hanging around than you’d expect to more usually find in a Gin. Tasting is much the same, you start off with that Juniper flavour at the fore, and then the spices hit you. There’s nothing subtle about the spice in this, they’re full on and follow the juniper up immediately which could possibly be a little overpowering for some, but for me is pleasantly warming. I do find a big wedge of Orange or a good bit of zest just gives it an edge more citrus to cut through the spice a little. For those watching the waistline, or those that are a little bit anal with counting their calories etc like me, there’s a bonus to this as well. At just 38 calories and 6.6g of carbs a bottle, you can feel fairly guilt free about having a drink, and thanks to the fact it’s partly sweetened with cane sugar, and party with stevia, you don’t get that artificial sacharine taste.

If of course, you’re not abstaining from alcohol, and you have a gin that you’re not terribly impressed with on the juniper front, the joy of this is that you could quite happily use it as a mixer as well! (Rather defeating the object, but there we are.) It’s got too much going on to go with most gins, but I think if you had a fairly sub-par gin that was lacking, it could do something just to bring it up a notch.

While the Duchess isn’t terribly easy to get hold of in the shops, it’s getting easier and easier to find online at the usual places, Gin Kiosk, 31 Dover, Master of Malt etc. Now, to make the most of the day before the low carb horror begins tomorrow….

Time to break the unintentional hiatus!  Due to being on a low carb diet for 6 weeks (I know how to have fun!), the tasting has gone by the wayside a bit along with the alcohol in general, but it’s time to get back on the wagon and work through some of my backlog of gins.

First up, the lovely Siân at the Gower Gin Company kindly sent me over a bottle of their Pinnwydd Gin, and since I enjoyed it so much, I felt it was a good place to get back into things.

The Gower (Gŵyr if you’re lucky enough to speak Welsh) Gin Company distils in their MicroDistillery on Gower in Port Eynon and is headed up by Siân and Andrew Brooks.  There’s a strong sense of provenance and really showcasing what the area and Wales have to offer which is always lovely to see.  It was great trying the London Dry for the first time at Junipalooza this year (and their use of Christmas lights wrapped around the bottles!), so I was excited to try this to follow up and see if it could stand up to the original.

Let’s get right into it.  I have a bit of a love affair with the bottle design, it’s really quite simple with the Breton inspired stripes and a simple glass bottle, but it stands out like anything and a love the combination of simplicity and a bit of French “va va voom“. 

The double upshot is that if you feel so inclined, you can dress to match if you happen to have something suitably French/Nautical! (This needs to become a thing I think.) 

The original London Dry Gin is distilled with eight botanicals, including juniper, lemon, pink grapefruit, and both green and bronze fennel, and bottled at 43%.  The Pinwydd (Pine Trees!) edition mixes up their original London Dry a bit bringing the namesake pine flavours into the mix, along with orange, cranberry and pink peppercorn.  On the nose, the first thing that smacks me in the olfactories is the orange.  It almost reminds me of smelling a bottle of Grand Marnier when you first open it, that deep, citrusy, orange oil smell that gives you a bit of a  Christmassy feeling at this time of year.  After letting it rest for a minute or two, the orange eases off a little, and you get some more of those pine notes coming through.

Tasting neat, the gin has a glorious oily mouthfeel to it, with that citrusy orange there are the fore.  Held for a little while, the orange does retreat slightly and you get some of the pine, though perhaps not as much as I expected given the name.  I don’t think this is any bad thing as the pine is there, apparently tempered by the peppercorns, but without being fully in your face like some gins I’ve tasted.

A little splash of light tonic added, unusually, pushes the citrus into the background a little bit more (normally I find it brings the citrus forward).  The orange being muted a little gives the other botanicals a chance to come more to the fore and you get more of that pine, and at the end, more of the pepper and spicy notes coming through which I wasn’t expecting to get as strongly as I did having tasted it neat.  I have to say, on the whole, this makes a really great, easy drinking Gin and tonic for me. 

Garnish wise, I’m a bit all over the place here, and not in a bad way…  I think you could equally garnish it with more citrus to pushing it towards being quite a summery G&T, or indeed add more spice to bring the festive feeling more to the front.  I’d also be remiss not to give it a try in a Negroni, and it works marvellously.  That oily citrus mouthfeel makes for a really deeply flavoured, satisfying drink, with a hit more of the orange to go alongside the Campari.

Overall, I’m really impressed – the core of the London dry isn’t lost, but it’s given a different twist that works in so many different ways.  Very much looking forward to seeing what these guys can do with some future seasonal offerings.

Since it has become expected of me lately, and I am a self-confessed “proud Catdad”, the ribbon that wrapped the bottle was as equally as well received as the bottle itself.

I do love a bit of Norse mythology, always considering them to be one of the most interesting pantheons, so Raven Gin tickled that interest before I’d even started. In Norse myth, Huginn and Muninn are a pair of ravens that fly all over Midgard, scouting for Odin, the All-Father. Roughly translated from Old Norse, Huginn means “thought” and Muninn means “memory”, and some say they served as such for Odin, being projections of his power, or his…spirit (hah!).

Raven Spirits is a new company, founded by two brothers in Royal Deeside, Aberdeen. For their first release, they’ve done two gins, a limited founders edition, and their signature gin, “Thought & Memory”, named after Huginn and Muninn. To Quote, “Raven Gin takes inspiration from Huginn and Munnin. A premium gin, it brings together a thoughtful mix of soft spice and delicate mandarin to reveal a long, warm and memorable finish.”

First up, the bottle. A fairly standard glass bottle, but for me, it’s the label that really stands out. The two ravens stand either side of the label, around a bronze embossed centre, over a rather Celtic style background. It probably comes back to the love of the Norse Myth, but I really like the focus on the birds and what comes together as a fairly simple, but well composed and quite striking design.

Onto the contents. Thought & Memory is a “Premium Dry” gin and has the slightly unusual botanical of Mandarin to provide some of the citrus. I don’t think I’d have been quite able to identify exactly what it was, beyond something orangey, but once you know it’s there, you can really smell it. The Juniper on the nose sits back a little bit and lets the mandarin come to the fore with some spice underpinning it.

Tasting neat, it flips around a bit from the nose and you get more of the juniper at the fore with the mandarin following in after, and then as you’d expect, the cassia and other spices rolling in for the finish. Interestingly, the addition of a splash of light tonic didn’t make a huge difference for me on this one, a great G&T, but the same flavours came through in a similar fashion, maybe with a bit more emphasis on the citrus. A nice little slice of lemon peel added in just pushes the citrus even further forward. What I did find though was that after the spice had passed, I was left with just a lingering impression of that mandarin making for a pleasant and quite fresh finish. Bonus marks for the fact I gave my other half a taste while I was writing this and the only response I got was, “Yes please”, which is apparently my cue to go downstairs and get another glass and some more ice.

Good stuff. The addition of the mandarin is something different and gives it a twist without taking it too far from the spirit of a London Dry style gin. Looking forward to seeing what else the guys come out with and whether it continues to appease my little nerdy joy over Norse myth. I tried to translate the runes on the little bottleneck tag at the top of the page, but they confirmed it’s a fairly incomprehensible alphabet called Elder Futhark and… well… it’s just decorative in this instance. At least I don’t feel bad that I couldn’t translate it! If you’re interested, you can pick it up directly from their Web Site.

As a quick extra note, Thought and Memory also just picked up a gold award at The Gin Masters 2018 – not bad for your first month or so out there!

I love Elephant Gin, I’m going to make no secret of that… not that I could make a secret of it considering how many people I tell to get the stuff.  I also love a Navy Strength gin as I enjoy the bigger kick you tend to get out of the botanicals and the depth of flavours.  Finally, I love Elephants… so that’s pretty much the trifecta.

Elephant Gin, despite the name, is distilled in Germany, about an hour outside the wonderful city of Hamburg.  While it’s distilled in Germany, the heart of the gin and its origins are found, more appropriately, in South Africa where some of their botanicals originate from.  14 botanicals are used to distil the gin, including the more unusual South African ones of Buchu, Baobab, Lion’s Tail and Devil’s Claw.  The other South African link that the gin has is, of course, the elephants themselves.  Elephant is one of a number of gins with a charity element to their business and 15% of the profits from their sales are donated directly to charities that work at elephant conservation.  If you’re interested in their wonderful conservation work, you can find more information about it HERE.

Now, as much as I may love elephants, 15% of your profit isn’t much use if the gin is no good and nobody buys it.  Thankfully, that’s not the case here, and I’ve chosen to take a look at the Elephant Strength (Navy Strength) variant as fewer people seem to have tried it than the London dry.  Nothing to do with the fact I love a navy strength gin and it’s always nice to have an excuse for another!  The Elephant Strength uses the same recipe as the London Dry but with a few tweaks.  Firstly the ABV is, of course, cranked up to 57% and they’ve used twice the quantity of botanicals with a focus on the buchu, orange peel and pine.

I think identifying some of the flavours in Elephant is a bit tricky since I have no frame of reference for Buchu or Baobab etc, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway.  One really nice touch before moving onto the contents is that each bottle bears the name of an Elephant.  To quote the distillery, “The Elephant Strength labels carry the names of the so-called Magnificent Seven: the strongest and most impressive elephants known to Kruger National Park, South Africa, these precious bull elephants all bore tusks weighing more than 50kg each.”  In the case of my bottle, that’s “Ndlulamithi”, which apparently is a traditional Tsonga word meaning “taller than the trees”.

The gin itself is slightly oilier and more viscous than the London Dry, you can see it’s movement and it clings to the glass slightly more than usual which is always a pleasant sign for me.  On the nose, you get that initial hit of alcohol that you’d expect at this ABV, but it’s not as overpowering as some.  Once the alcohol has passed you get the piney juniper up front, but it’s, for me, strongly joined by a lovely citrus note which I assume is part in thanks to the baobab.  Tasting, it doesn’t disappoint when it comes to the mouthfeel, it is indeed as oily and viscous as it looked from the glass.  As you’d expect, it packs a punch, but not in an unpleasant manner as some navy strength gins have a tendency to do.  The juniper comes up first and is soon followed by that citrus edge hinted at by the smell, before leading you into something a bit more herbal and fruity.  Finally, once you think it’s done, it suddenly finishes with a really warm, spicy peppery note that lingers.  Adding a splash of tonic really brings the herbal flavours out to the fore to join the juniper, but does seem to mute the spicy peppercorns somewhat.  This leaves you with a less intense taste at the end, still with that spice, but softened by more herbal notes.

Having tried it with a few different tonics, for me it’s a light tonic that really works with it.  I light my gins more on the dry side, and Elephant Strength is actually surprisingly sweet for a navy gin.  The light tonic takes the edge off the sweetness to balance it perfectly for me, whereas an Indian tonic wound up with a drink just a little too sweet.  Overall though, I’m a big fan of both the London Dry and the Elephant Strength.  As a lot of good Navy gins do, this one still maintains the spirit of the original, but just cranks some of the flavours up and delivers a complex but enjoyable, and worryingly easy to finish, drink.

I shall leave you with a picture of the rather cool little map that sits on the back of the rear label.  Very “Here be dragons!” adding to the navy theme!

It’s time I dipped my toe into writing up a tasting.  Decided I’m going to call these tastings rather than review since they’re just my thoughts on a gin and I don’t feel quite experienced enough to call it an actual review yet!  Since it’s the first, I thought it only right that I start with something local, and relatively new to the market, and so here we are with Betty’s Gin.

Betty’s Gin was launched back in February by Martyn and Karen, a husband and wife team, from their newly opened Heart of Suffolk Distillery in Bacton, Suffolk, and named for Karen’s mother.  Sadly, I didn’t make it down for the opening since I already had tickets to the London Gin Festival (timing), but popped in the week after and heard the queues had lasted all day!  Well worth popping in to see them for a chat if you’re interested in how the gin came to be.

Neat in the glass, the first thing to hit my nose was the anise, which came through quite strongly along with the Juniper.  Given a little time to sit, the anise mellows out a bit and lets more of the citrus through from the orange.  Tasting, in contrast to the nose, the orange seems to come through most strongly, while still not overpowering anything, leading into the anise again and leaving a nice oily mouthfeel which I assume is attributed to the almonds.

Interestingly, adding a splash of tonic seems to switch the initial nose and taste.  The citrus comes through more strongly when you smell it, but upon tasting the tonic really brings the anise flavour to to the fore, which then mellows off into the orange.  I’m generally a big fan of all things anise, so this really works for me, again,  without overpowering all the other flavours.  A little extra orange works really well if you want to bring the citrus out more, and they also recommend some pink peppercorns to add a touch more spice if you want a different serve.

Delicious first gin from Heart of Suffolk, can’t wait to see what they might come up with later this year in terms of some limited edition gins they’ve been talking about.  If you happen to be near Bacton in Suffolk, the distillery is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday (you can find the details HERE), and also buy directly from them if you want.

Everything else about them you can find at https://heartofsuffolkdistillery.co.uk/