Gin Day

What the day is

Gin Day is observed on June 13, marking a spirit defined not by its raw material but by one flavor it is obliged to carry.

Origin and background

Gin is the loosest of the major spirits in one respect and the most precise in another. It can be distilled from grain, potatoes, grapes or anything else fermentable, and the base contributes very little to the finished taste. What the law requires is juniper, which must be the predominant flavor. Everything beyond that is optional.

London Dry is a production method rather than a place, and it can be made anywhere in the world. The term means the flavor arrives entirely from redistilling the spirit with botanicals, with nothing added afterward except a little water, and no sweetening at all. A gin with flavor or color introduced after distillation belongs to a different category whatever the label implies.

This is also the economic fact behind the number of small gin brands. Whiskey has to age for years before it can be sold, which is a long time for a new distillery to finance. Gin is built on neutral spirit and can be distilled, bottled and sold inside a week, which makes it the obvious first product for anyone starting out.

The history is less charming than the current image. Eighteenth century London went through a period of mass gin consumption severe enough to constitute a public health crisis and to produce a series of Acts of Parliament attempting to curb it, and the prints from that period still color how the drink is discussed.

Tonic water is a colonial leftover. It carries quinine, which genuinely treats malaria, and the bitterness was made drinkable with gin and sugar by the British in India. Modern tonic holds far too little quinine to do anything medicinal, so what survives is the bitterness and the habit.

Juniper, incidentally, is not a berry but a fleshy cone.

How to take part

• Taste a gin neat and judge whether juniper is genuinely dominant.
• Read the label for anything added after distillation.
• Try your usual gin with a different tonic. The mixer is most of the drink.
• Look closely at a juniper cone and note that it is not a berry.