Old English Gin 44% Vol. 0,7l

When buying Gin in the 1700's and 1800's you'd be offered a simple choice: English Gin or Holland's Gin. Hollands Gin was the Jenever, and English Gin was branded fancy names as Young Tom or Old Tom, or named after the distillery as Booth's and Warrington. At that time, England was the largest importer of French Champagne and consumers would buy such bottles filled with gin at the gin shops. And most likely they would enjoy a dram or two on site. The quality and taste of gin would depend on the supplier and whether the gin was stored in bottles or barrels. And gin kept in barrels would apply flavors from the wood and new aromas would develop over time.

Old English Gin is made from a 1783 recipe, distilling eleven botanicals in the oldest pot still being used in England today. Old English Gin will come in champagne bottles with organic sealing and silk print, all as they did back in 1783, or from a barrel as the Barman's Special Reserve. This way we are reinvigorating how English Gin was made and distributed back then.

So to taste a cocktail as it was intended, you need a Gin that hasn't changed. Old English Gin is how it was: TRULY ORIGINAL

The first recorded use of the word cocktail is found in The Morning Post and Gazetteer in London, England on March 20, 1798. But obviously people had been drinking spirits in many constellations a long time before then.

In the 17th century, the most common way of drinking alcohol was straight up or from bowls mixed with sugar, water, fruit, spices, wine and spirits - the so called punches that were adopted in from India by the Englishmen in the early 1600's.

In 1731 James Ashley, the first English celebrity bartender, opens the Sign of the Two Punch Bowls in London where he was serving various punches. He would use the fruits of the season and whatever spices that were available, and he would definitely use gin as the base spirit, since it was in the middle of the Gin Craze and everybody wanted gin.

We have gathered a selection of original recipes with gin from the beginning of the 1700's and up to 1935 where the London Dry Gin styles took over, and the use of the original Old English Gin seemed to be lost in confusion. Please enjoy this historical cocktail journey responsibly!