Gin: The Manual
by david broom
mitchell beazley, 224 pages, $19.99
Britain’s two national drinks—beer and gin—have both undergone a revival in the last decade. Twenty years ago, if you drove through Kent, you would see them plowing up the hop fields. No one, it was thought, would ever want to drink old-fashioned English beer again. German and American lagers would satisfy the drinkers of the future. Gin, similarly, was a drink for the aging bourgeoisie, consumed in golf clubs, or the bars of provincial hotels, usually with tonic water, lemon, and ice—as in Philip Larkin’s poem “Sympathy in White Major”:
When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge . . .
When Larkin wrote this poem in 1967, gin was all the things he was, or wanted to be: provincial, small-town, anti-smart, anti-cosmopolitan. Tony Blair is probably too much of a power maniac to have wanted much alcohol in his life, but the Blair era swept over Britain in a tsunami of Chardonnay. White wine was the first drink of the evening for the forerunners of the new age. The old beer-drinkers, slurping into their pints, and the old gin-drinkers were surely on the way out.
Those times are past, however, and all their dizzy rapture. One of the most noticeable trends in recent years has been the upsurge of small British breweries, making beer according to old-fashioned recipes, and proving commercially successful. By a similar token, gin has revived. Step into a bar now in the more sophisticated cities of the United States and of Europe, and you will not only find gin on offer, you will be asked by the bartender what sort of gin you prefer—Cambridge Gin or Brecon Botanicals; Tanqueray London Dry or Tanqueray No. Ten; Bombay Dry, Bombay Sapphire, or Bombay Sapphire East. (This last choice was recently offered me in a hotel bar in the capital of Estonia.)
To help one sort through these options, Dave Broom has written his gin “manual.” It is many kinds of book. On one level, it is a modest compilation of the huge variety of gins at present on the market, with some jokey accounts of how to mix them, serve them, and enjoy them. It is also a history of the miracle juniper berry, extolled by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History as a remedy against flatulence and coughing, esteemed by medieval alchemists, and eventually, in the clever Low Countries, made into our drink. It was probably in Bruges, some twenty or so years before Chaucer started to write, that Johannes de Aeltre, in 1351, first wrote down the recipe for his “Aqua vitae, dats water des levens . . . Ende maecten van hertten vro ende oec stout ende coene” (It makes people forget about sadness and makes their hearts happy and brave).
