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  • Welcome to Drinks Tube, I'm Sam Carter, gin professor here at laverstoke mill. A gin distillery

  • sixty miles west of London. I've been making cocktails right around the world for the last

  • twenty years so I think I'm the best person to give you the ultimate guide to gin. There's

  • been a huge resurgence in gin and gin cocktails in the last few years but what is gin? The

  • definition of gin states that it has to be juniper dominant flavoured spirit. An agricultural

  • origin, and then bottled above thirty seven point five percent alcohol by volume. Gin

  • has a thousand years of history to it, dates all the way back to ten fifty A.D to an Italian

  • monastery, so gin is Italian. Gin wasn't popularised until the sixteenth century in Belgium and

  • Holland and it's here during the thirty year war the term Dutch courage was coined and

  • the British soldiers would take a wee nip of the local Genever, give them a bit of courage

  • to get out onto the battle fields, brought it back to England and shortened the name

  • to just Gin and claimed it as there own. When I say botanical it stem from the word botany

  • that basically means anything thats grown like a herb, root, spice, plant or even a

  • nut. You've gotta' have juniper in your Gin to be a Gin. Some of the other most common

  • botanicals in gin are like the lemon peel it gives a wonderful bright fresh citrusy

  • element to the Gin. Cassia bark, licorice root, angelica root even grains of paradise

  • and cubeb berries give a wonderful floral peppery spice. But when you bring all of these

  • botanicals together this is what makes Gin so versatile and mixable in a vast array of

  • cocktails. So once you've harvested your botanicals that are gonna' go into the gin you need them

  • in a natural raw berry form. You're gonna' dry them. This is the juniper berry and we

  • extract the oils out of it so you have a wonderful bright fresh green piney note. So there's

  • two main types of Gin you've got that cold compounded gin and you got that distilled

  • London dry gins. Cold compound is basically that nutri grain spirit, mixed with some botanicals

  • for a few days to infuse, add water and then you bottle it. When you make a distilled gin

  • well we all know that water boils off at a hundred degrees C right but alcohol boils

  • at about twenty degrees lower at seventy eight point three seven degrees C. So if you've

  • got alcohol and water together with the botanicals. You're gonna' heat that up and then you're

  • gonna' hit the condenser and condense it back to a liquid. With a distilled gin you are

  • allowed to add artificial flavouring after distillation but with the London dry gin you're

  • not allowed to add anything like that at all. But with the gin they make here they use a

  • process known as vapour infusion and by that I mean they don't put the botanicals in the

  • distill they put them in a perforated copper basket about thirty five foot up in the air,

  • twenty five foot accross the still house and they allow that spirit to pass through the

  • botanicals and extract the natural raw flavour of the botanical rather than the cooked flavour.

  • So in here we've got a wheat base nutrigrain spirit and water that's heated up to eighty

  • degress C so that mean that all of the alcohol goes up the column. So when that spirit comes

  • up the column it then turns a corner and comes down the line arm into this perforated copper

  • basket where those botanicals are held, and this is what is known aˊs the vapour infusion

  • process. It extracts all the natural oils within the botanicals and then comes out the

  • other size as a flavoured vapour then it hits the condenser and condenses back to a liquid.

  • So it passes through the pipe work into the spirit safe. This liquids coming off pretty

  • much double bottling strength so that's like eighty five to ninety percent alcohol. This

  • is the access point for the stillment to be able to nose and taste the gin. We don't want

  • the first twenty liters or so, we're gonna' wait for a lovely bright fresh citrus note

  • to come through . That then leads into piney notes floral notes, rooty notes and then spicy

  • notes and all of this is the heart of the gin. And then after about six hours or so

  • they'll be nosing it every minute and once they finish getting those spicy notes they'll

  • switch it over and that's the tails. So it's that heart that we want right in the middle.

  • They take that high strength botanical spirit add water to it to dilute it down to bottling

  • strength, put it in the bottle and it's ready for you to make your favourite gin cocktail.

  • To see me teach you how to make my favourite gin cocktail click right here in the sublime

  • moment button or follow the link below and you will learn all about how flavour trans

  • modification is amazing. Subscribe to Drinks Tube right here and it will teach you all

  • about cocktails, beers, wines, soft drinks, everything. Cheers

Welcome to Drinks Tube, I'm Sam Carter, gin professor here at laverstoke mill. A gin distillery

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