Added: 10/06/2005 |
Plenty of gin brands is another proof of popularutyHere are several main gin brands popular all over the world.
London Dry Gin is the dominant English style of Gin. Bombay sapphire gin belongs to this style .Unlike other gin brands which boil their botanicals with the spirit, the Bombay spirit is distilled alone. To achieve the unique flavour, the spirit passes through the botanicals in vapour form. This allows each delicate aroma to be fully absorbed. The result is a complex, yet subtle taste sensation of bombay sapphire gin. Another gin brands worth of mentioning is gordons gin. It is a popular gin brand produced in the UK. It was developed in London in 1769 by a scot, Alexander Gordon, who had opened a distillery in Clerkenwell. The Special London Dry Gin he developed proved extremely successful, and its recipe remains unchanged to this day. Gordon's gin is unique in that it holds the Royal Patent for gin. Also, the entire recipe for Gordon's is known to only 12 people in the world and has been kept a secret for 200 years.
Plymouth Gin is relatively full-bodied (when compared to London Dry Gin). It is clear, slightly fruity, and very aromatic. Originally the local Gin style of the English Channel port of Plymouth, modern Plymouth Gin is nowadays made only by one distillery in Plymouth, Coates & Co., which also controls the right to the term Plymouth Gin.
Genever or Hollands is the Dutch style of Gin brands. In Holland the production of Genever was quickly integrated into the vast Dutch trading system. The port of Rotterdam became the center of Genever distilling, as distilleries opened there to take advantage of the abundance of needed spices that were arriving from the Dutch colonies in the East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Many of today's leading Dutch Genever distillers can trace their origins back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Examples include such firms as Bols (founded 1575) and de Kuyper (1695).
Belgium developed its own juniper-flavored spirit, called Jenever (with a "j"), in a manner similar to that in Holland (which controlled Belgium for a time in the early 19th century). The two German invasions of Belgium in World Wars I and II had a particularly hard effect on Jenever producers, as the occupying Germans stripped the distilleries of their copper stills and piping for use in the production of shell casings. The remaining handful of present-day Belgian Jenever distillers produce Jenever primarily for the local domestic market.
Gin may have originated in Holland and developed into its most popular style in England, but its most enthusiastic modern-day consumers are to be found in Spain, which has the highest per capita consumption in the world. Production of London Dry-style Gin began in the 1930s, but serious consumption did not begin until the mix of Gin and Cola became inexplicably popular in the 1960s.
Bedinning of production of gin brands in the United States dates back to colonial times, but the great boost to Gin production was the advent of National Prohibition in 1920. Moonshining quickly moved in to fill the gap left by the shutdown of commercial distilleries, but the furtive nature of illicit distilling worked against the production of the then-dominant whiskies, all of which required some aging in oak casks. Bootleggers were not in a position to store and age illegal whisky, and the caramel-colored, prune-juice-dosed grain alcohol substitutes were generally considered to be vile.
Gin, on the other hand, did not require any aging, and was relatively easy to make by mixing raw alcohol with juniper berry extract and other flavorings and spices in a large container such as a bathtub (thus the origin of the term "Bathtub Gin"). These gin brands are generally of poor quality and taste, a fact that gave rise to the popularity of cocktails in which the mixers served to disguise the taste of the base Gin. Repeal of Prohibition at the end of 1933 ended the production of bootleg Gin, but Gin remained a part of the American beverage scene. It was the dominant white gin brand in the United States until the rise of Vodka in the 1960s. It still remains popular, helped along recently by the revived popularity of the Martini.
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