Martin Fone's Blog

The Streets Of London – Part Sixty Three Book Corner – September 2017 (1)

Gin o’Clock – Part Twenty Eight

The ginaissance keeps rolling on. In 2016 the Treasury received £3.4 billion in tax revenue from the sale of gin, up 7 per cent from 2015, and exceeding the £3.2 billion levied from beer. The Wine and Spirit Trade Association reckoned that 43 million bottles of gin were sold in 2016 and that there are now more than 80 brands on sale. And Charles Rolls, who founded Fever-Tree, cashed in some of his shares in May and trousered £73 million. Where will it all end?

I had a useful insight the other day into the power of branding to attract or deter a consumer. I had noticed the bottles of Daffy’s Small Batch Premium Gin on the shelves of our local Waitrose for some time and always found a reason to pass them over. Thinking about it, it was the image on the front of the bottle – a tousle-haired blond above a cocktail glass. It seemed a bit – well, girly. This time, though, as I was anxious to replenish my depleted stocks and this was the only one I hadn’t tried, I swallowed my male chauvinism and bought a bottle.

The bottle is a slightly dumpy one with a natural cork stopper and the hooch, which is crystal clear, weighs in at an acceptable an pedantically precise 43.4% ABV. Leaving the imaging aside on the bottle, it has a helpful strip to the right hand side identifying the botanicals. Pride of place is given to a salad mint from the Bequaa valley in Lebanon – something I had not experienced before in a gin. The rear of the bottle states that this is “the finest copper pot single-batch distilled gin” – no probably here – and “the adventure started with our discovery of what Lebanese mint can bring to the finest gin.”

The other six botanicals listed are juniper (natch), coriander, angelica, lemon peel, cassia and orris. The bottle states that the Lebanese mint is mixed with eight other carefully chosen botanicals; so we are missing a couple. I suspect one is orange peel but as to the other, who knows? The botanicals are steeped in a neutral grain spirit from northern France for four days, distilled in the Midlands and then sent to Edinburgh where it is blended with Scottish water, minus minerals, until the desired ABV is reached.

Having made a great play about the mint, I was going to be fascinated to see what it did to the taste. To the nose the aroma is fresh and floral and in the mouth the liquid tastes rich and slightly oily. There is a hint of mint but it doesn’t overpower the other botanicals, rather adding some freshness to the overall taste. The after taste is warm and nutty and stays long in the throat. My fears that the mint would take over in the way that the horseradish does in Thomas Dakin Small Batch Gin but my fears were unfounded.

It is a lovely gin and one to sip and savour rather than to swill. The moral of the story is never judge a book by its cover.

And if you were wondering, Daffy was the name of an elixir given to children in Victorian times, often mixed with gin or, if there was none available, replaced by gin. As Mrs Mann explained to Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, “’why, it’s what I’m obliged to keep a little of in the house, to put into the blessed infants’ daffy when they ain’t well’..as she opened a corner cupboard, and took down a bottle and glass. ‘It’s gin, I’ll deceive you not, it’s gin’.”