Be Cool, Drink Bombay Sapphire Gin

More evidence that I am way ahead of my time. I have been drinking Bombay Sapphire with tonic, for decades.

Bloomberg reports:

The River Test flows through the new home of Bombay Sapphire gin at Laverstoke Mill, in the Hampshire countryside between London and the south coast of England.

It's among the country's purest chalk streams. You can watch the fish swimming in the crystal water and smell the fresh, cool air. The sound is of birdsong. It's as if the distillery -- old red brick and modern glass -- is in harmony with nature...So what’s with the current gin craze, where bartenders push crafted cocktails made with the stuff? I tried ordering a vodka cocktail at Sushisamba and the barman said, "We don't really like vodka." Gin is a much safer bet to be cool...

The flavour of gin comes from the so-called botanicals that are added to grain neutral spirit, or GNS. At Bombay Sapphire, there are eight core botanicals -- juniper, lemon, coriander, orris root, almonds, cassia bark, licorice, and angelica -- along with grains of paradise (a relative of ginger) and cubeb berries (from the pepper family).

At the new distillery, a re-purposed 300-year-old paper mill, the botanicals are displayed in dramatic curving glass domes created by Thomas Heatherwick, designer of the Olympic Cauldron that was lighted during the opening ceremony at the London 2012 Games. Heatherwick is also the creative brains behind the new Routemaster red double-decker bus, a modern interpretation of a British icon.

The vapour-distillation process for the gin produces excess heat that might otherwise be wasted. Here, the challenge was to pipe it into the two glasshouses -- one tropical, the other Mediterranean -- to help produce the required climates. Almost 900 Individually shaped panes of glass and 1.25 kilometers (0.78 mile) of bronze-finished stainless-steel frames make up the asymmetrical structures, Heatherwick Studio says. The ribbed greenhouses swell and taper like an armadillo, warm plant smells rising up through the air. It's Hotel California without the drugs. (Oh, and yes, you can leave.)

Bombay Sapphire (a brand of Bacardi Ltd.) is known for its citrusy, floral style. The man behind all this -- albeit working from a 1761 recipe -- is Nik Fordham, the master distiller. ..

"I see gin today as a beautiful, crystal clear, vibrant drink that is so flexible to mix within many cocktails such as a martini or a G&T or a Negroni. It's that level of flexibility that brightens the star which is the gin category," he says.

-RW