![]() “The cool thing is, we have so many options up there that people just want to try different stuff,” says Brendan Dorr, who co-owns Dutch Courage with Eric Fooy. Some exciting options include Corgi “Earl Grey” (black tea, brisk bergamot, and juicy citrus), KI NO BI Dry Gin (yuzu, orange oil, pine note, and eucalyptus), and Catoctin “Watershed” (caraway, faintly floral, woody, and white pepper). The aptly named Dutch Courage in Old Goucher alone stocks 140 styles, and includes tasting notes for each. ![]() The basic definition of gin is “a colorless alcoholic beverage made from distilled or redistilled neutral grain spirits flavored with juniper berries.” But tell that to the pink gins, the tea-colored gins, and the gins that veer way off course from the traditional juniper notes. Today, many different styles of gin are flourishing, from classic Dutch-style genevers to New Western styles, which stray from the unwritten rules. You don’t really see this super clean spirit take hold, especially in the U.S., until the very late 19th century.” We have this sweetened form called Old Tom…and then finally we have London dry style. We’ve got the whole William Hogarth ‘Gin Lane’ period, where basically people that are used to drinking beer and ale across England start drinking genever in copious amounts. It’s always going to be based in grains, but how that grain is distilled is what changes. Usually it was sweetened, but still made on a pot still and based in grains. “They start calling it ‘gin,’ which obviously comes from genever. “So then we have what becomes the first sort of English gin,” says spirits historian Al Culliton, who also runs an online program for home bartenders called Al’s Cocktail Club. The king began encouraging his new countrymen to produce a version of his home spirit. When a Dutchman, William of Orange, took the English throne in 1688, all things Dutch came into fashion. Genever made its way to England during the 80 Years’ War, and it was dubbed “Dutch Courage” because it was given to soldiers to steady their nerves before battle. ![]() This malty precursor tasted more like a young whiskey than the clear spirit we know today, but it laid the groundwork for several hundred years of innovation. And genever itself has been making a comeback. Juniper is still the most prominent botanical in today’s gins, though some distillers have gotten more creative with the flavoring in recent years. It all began with a distilled beverage flavored with juniper called genever, the first record of which comes from the Netherlands in 1552. Gin as we know it today is a far cry from its roots, which are firmly planted in Dutch, not British, soil. Perhaps better than ever.īut first, a quick history lesson. And now, at the dawn of the second Roaring ’20s, it’s back again. It’s been demonized and celebrated, made secretly in dubious bathtubs and proudly in shining copper stills. Gin has experienced a series of meteoric rises and a few steep falls from grace. Luckily, in the 200-plus years since that terrible waste, locals have changed their tune a bit. “The proscribed liquor blazed to heaven amidst the discharge of cannon and the applause of fifteen thousand citizens met to show their love for independence, and to burn gin that had paid tribute to England,” wrote historian John Thomas Scharf. The spirit was so tied to the British identity that, in 1808, as tensions rose leading up to the War of 1812, Baltimoreans even staged their own version of the Boston Tea Party, burning 720 gallons of that other beloved British beverage at Hampstead Hill. For better or for worse, when we think of gin, we often conjure images from across the pond, from the moralists who condemned a lawless, drunken London to the precision of James Bond’s Vesper martini.
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