Gin Herbs Thread

[Odin]

More and more distillers develop gins. As a gin afficionado I think that is a good thing. But what herbs to use? I am not talking about complete recipes, but about ... new, old, innovative herbs. Gin is about trying new things, new herbs. I hope this thread becomes a place where we can share ideas and/or experience with herbs and what they do to your gin. Let's all chime in and discover where gin herbs can take us!

Why? Really, you want to ask why? Well, good question actually. If you don't like gin, maybe you are not interested. But bear in mind: the gins you don't like are the gins you bought in a store or drank in a bar.

Just another blind test I did like 3 weeks ago with some people that had a clear opinion on gin and what they liked (one liked Tanqueray, another person was in love with Bombay Saphire, a third one was crazy about Hendricks). So I had these gins available. I also had a variety of home as well as craft distilled gins up for the tasting. For each and every participant it was the same: after drinking the home and craft distilled stuff, they will never go back to the ones they previously liked.

Learning point? 1. If you don't like gin it may be because you never had a good gin; 2. With no other drink it is easier to outcompete "pro" stuff yourself. Just a small and steep learning curve. So ... let's start!

I will start with a specific herb. And give you my opinion about it. How I work with it, what I like in it. What's the catch, and what to do or not to do. My choice for today's gin herbs discussion? Liquorice!

I love liquorice, because it gives a nice spicy taste to my gin. I hate liquorice because it is either there ... or it isn't there at all in my end product. If it's not there, I miss it. But so often, when I put it in, it is overpowering. Not in taste, but in hotness. As if you are drinking gin mixed with hot sauce.

In my early gin recipes I aimed for 1 gram of liquorice per liter of boiler charge. Hot! I then dialed the amount back to 1/10th of a gram per liter boiler charge. Still hot! Dialing back to 1/100th of a gram per liter boiler charge gave me the desired results ... or not. Sometimes the gin was great and the liquorice added just that little bite I was looking for. And sometimes it just wasn't to be found anywhere.

More reading, more testing, more investigating thought me that the issue with liquorice is that most of the taste is found in very peculiair parts of the wood. Knots. If that is the correct word. One gram of liquorice wood has many. Another gram is devoid of these knots and does not add anything. Tastewise or spicyness-wise.

How can you get around this? There are a few ways in which you can work with liquorice and get desirable results.

One easy way is to skip them all together and replace them by cloves. Go for 0.5 grams per liter boiler charge. They give the spicynesss, but not the hotness.

Another way is to distill liquorice seperately. And dilute with neutral/vodka to get to the desired taste level. Then add an X amount of this liquorice drink to your final gin. Hmmm ... I don't like that because I am a fan of a one go approach on gin, but that's me.

A third way to treat liquorice is in the following way: just distill 1/20th of a gram of liquorice per liter of boiler charge. It may come over too hot. Or it may hardly be there. No problem. Make another batch and distill that. Do a third one and distill that as well. You now made the gin recipe three times. If you blend all of them together, for sure the hotness of run 1 will be compenated by the less hot results of run 2 and 3 (example). Solera approach to your gin is a way to manage liquorice.

A fourth way is not to add the liquorice to the boiler charge, but to vapour infuse it. As a rule of thumb vapour infusion only gets like 1/100th of the taste over, when compared to boiler distilled gin herbs. So for sure the liquorice won't overpower your gin. On the other hand ... your gin will be thinner in taste. Just so you know.

Okay, over to you. What herbs do you like? Why? And how do you use them?

Regards, Odin.