Gin O’Clock (103)
What with one thing and another, I have hardly been out over the last few months, save for a weekly trip to the local Waitrose. It has meant that the opportunities to explore the world created by the ginaissance have been limited. There have been two positives, though. My enforced bout of reclusiveness has afforded me the opportunity to revisit some of my favourite gins, ones that I go back to even though I am keen to sample the new and unusual, and to give some thought to the state of the gin industry.
It is no use distilling the finest gin in the world, if no one has heard of it, let alone drunk it. One of the trends that come through loud and clear is that distillers must have a strong marketing message. It is a crowded market, almost saturated and verging on the unsustainable, I would suggest, and to break through and survive, it is almost obligatory to have a back story, the quirkier the better. Some, frankly, are just plain daft and barely survive even the most cursory inspection, and I have highlighted some of them. Some seem to be straight out of a Marketing 101 manual – tell me in a sentence what is distinctive about your product. Others seem designed to aim the gin at a very distinctive subset of the market.
Here are two, neither of which I have sampled (yet), which have gone out of their way to differentiate themselves wildly from the rest of the pack. I have come across Arbikie before, enjoying their Highland Estate Kirsty’s Gin (https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/gin-oclock-part-seventy-four/), whose USP is that it is a single estate gin ie all the components are sourced from the distiller’s locale. Even the spuds which make the base spirit are grown on the farm, a sort of from soil to bottle approach.
It was probably, therefore, a fairly natural step for the master distiller, Kirsty Black, to have developed what Arbikie claim to be the world’s first climate positive gin. Called Nàdar, which is Gaelic for nature, it has a carbon footprint of -1.54 kg CO2e per 700ml bottle. How do they do it, I hear you cry? The secret ingredient is the peas which are used in the distillation process. The leftover parts of the peas from the distillation process are mixed with spent yeast to produce something known as pot ale, which is then fed to the animals.
You are helping to save the planet by drinking the gin, something we can all raise a glass to. Of course, where all these initiatives go wrong, laudable as they are, is that the distribution process is reliant upon carbon emitting transport, but you have to start somewhere. I will be intrigued to sample it.
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The fad for throwing more and more botanicals into the mix is a tad time consuming and it is tempting to introduce a middleman into the process. This seems to have been the thinking of South African couple, Paula and Les Ainsley, when they developed their Ibhu Indlovu Gin. Its principal constituent is elephant dung, a batch of 3 to 4,000 bottles requiring five large bags of dung. The dung is dried, washed and then crumbled to leave behind the remnants of the fruits, leaves and bark eaten by the elephants. It can be a bit hit and miss, the taste changing dependent upon the season and what the donor elephants have actually consumed. The taste is described as woody, earthy and almost spicy. I wonder what the aftertaste is like.
Our gin is shit is an interesting marketing strategy.
Until the next time, cheers!
