Gin O’Clock – Part Ninety One
One of the ways to muscle your way past the crowd generated
by the ginaissance is to have a decent marketing edge and there is no better
race to concoct a riveting tale than our friends the Irish. I had been eying up
a bottle of Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin on the shelf of one of our
local supermarkets and what had always put me off was paying £30 or more for a
50cl bottle, a tad expensive when there are so many other gins to try. A drop
in the price and running out of options persuaded me to take the plunge and
sample the product of the curious mind of drinks entrepreneur, P J Rigney, and
his bold experimentation, allegedly, in a shed in the Irish town of Drumshanbo,
on the shores of Lough Allen in Country Leitrim.
Rigney claims that originality is not just about innovation
but also about “bringing together unrelated things for the first time”
and “seeing the possibilities that others don’t”. His website, for a gin
distiller, is unusually informative and a work of art, a delight to wander
around and explore, complete with sound effects. Even if you go no further, I
urge you to visit it.
It is tempting, as we are talking about an Irish product, to
associate the gunpowder in the gin’s name with the black explosive stuff, a
terrible piece of racial stereotyping but there you are. In fact, it refers to
gunpowder tea, a form of green tea which has been slowly dried and whose leaves
have been rolled carefully into pellets resembling bullets and makes a bold
bright, slightly spicy cuppa, a key ingredient of the gin. The other
distinguishing feature of the gin is the use of exotic oriental botanicals.
As you would expect from a distiller who has invested so
much into creating an image and developing a story, the bottle is a work of art
too. It is short and dumpy, blue in colour with vertical ridges in the glass, a
wooden stopper complete with a copper collar stamped with Gunpowder Irish Gin
and an artificial cork. The label is a light brown colour with serrated edges,
rather like a large postage stamp. The front label tells me that it is made of oriental
botanicals with gunpowder tea. Beneath that is a picture of a jackalope, a
cross between a jackrabbit and an American antelope, a mythical creature for
sure but one that conveys the sense of a bizarre or unusual concoction. What
baffled me, though, was that it was North American and nothing else about this
gin is about that continent. For good measure, some oriental characters appear
to the right of the creature.
The label at the back informs me that “the ordinary is
made extraordinary” and that Rigney is a “boundary-pushing begetter of
hand-made spirits who slow stills gin with nature’s finest oriental botanicals
and gunpowder tea”. As well as a red seal the bottle has “DGIG 19/07”
stamped on it. It also comes with a little booklet affixed to the bottle’s
collar with a red tie, each edge of which is delicately snipped.
There are twelve botanicals which make up this gin, eight of
which are added to the neutral grain base spirit in the copper still –
meadowsweet, cardamom, juniper, coriander, angelica, orris, carraway seed and
star anise – and four – gunpowder tea, Chinese lemon, Oriental grapefruit and
Kaffir lime – are put into the vapour basket. After a long, slow distillation
process, the spirit is reduced to an acceptable fighting weight of 43% ABV and
then bottled and labelled by hand at Rigney’s Shed Distillery.
Is the gin worth all the effort that has gone to its
production and the marketing?
Surprisingly, yes. I was worried that the juniper may have
just sunk without trace as can happens with a more contemporary style and this
concern was heightened when I opened the bottle and took a sniff. It seemed to
lack the intense hit of juniper that I look for and was very citrusy. In the
mouth the initial sensation came from the citrus but then the juniper announced
its presence, hand in hand with a taste analogous to green tea before finishing
with a perfect balance of sweet and spicy. The aftertaste was warming, finishing
off an interesting and well-balance drink. A definite hit with me.
Until the next time, cheers!
