Does the world need more gin?

We seem to be undergoing another gin craze. Maybe not the crisis depicted by Hogarth in his cautionary etching of 1751, when six to seven thousand gin mills existed in London alone; but we are besieged by gin which begs the question, why make more?

As I tasted hundreds of gins over the last decades, I grew thirstier and thirstier for a kind of gin that just didn’t exist: a true agricultural gin. Producers have always compromised in some essential ways, largely because gin is historically an affordable cocktail-oriented spirit, which is why we love it. Most people don’t drink gin neat out of their favorite glass, but with these offerings I heartily recommend it. The idea of capturing the fleeting quality of the season in an infusion of fresh herbs, blossoms, fruit, and roots is hundreds of years old, and we are hoping to indulge that aesthetic all the way. If you’ll allow it, I’d like to list for you all the ways in which our gin releases really are in a category of their own.

Agriculture: The grapes used to make our base spirit as well as the botanicals are farmed biodynamically. Our gins are the only in the world that are Demeter™ certified, the oldest and most rigorous agricultural certification in the world. 

Timed harvest: All our botanicals are picked at peak ripeness in conjunction with the Steiner biodynamic calendar. Compare this to the use of dried botanicals bought on the open market , which is standard in the category.

Fermentation: Our base spirit is naturally fermented, relying on the ambient yeasts that thrive on the farm naturally rather than inoculations of off-the-shelf yeast. 

Base Spirit: The base spirit is distilled twice in a copper pot still to a lower alcohol by volume allowing us to use a real artisanal spirit as a background for the botanicals, rather than the industrial, neutral spirits that producers commonly use for their infusions. 

Fresh Maceration: All the botanicals are set to macerate within 24 hours of being picked. This yields a tisane-style infusion which is alive with the oils and fats of fresh living plant s rather than ones that are dried and stored, lifeless. 

Non-chill filtered: This difference was more striking than even I had anticipated. Most spirits, especially gin, are chill-filtered which means reducing the spirit to a near freezing temperature so fats and oils become insoluble and can be stripped from the solution, leaving it more homogeneous and shelf-stable. Leaving these oils and fats from the most beautiful plants we can find in Northern California in the mix renders a spirit with a huge, long finish and a haunting complexity that make these gins a different animal.