The gin gimlet has longer history than you may realize. Rose’s lime cordial, a mix of lime juice and sugar, has been around since 1867, when it was used to provide a citrus ration to British sailors, in an attempt to prevent scurvy. (The use of limes in British sailors’ diets is where the term “limey” comes from.) Although many people will make a gimlet these days with fresh lime juice, which is a perfectly good drink, the original was made with Rose’s — which is what I continue to use in mine.

The availability of Rose’s most likely precipitated the drink’s creation, and people continued to insist on it even when fresh limes were available. Raymond Chandler — who lived in Los Angeles and would have had no trouble getting good fresh citrus — called for a 1:1 ratio, half gin and half Rose’s. Most recipes you’ll find in cocktail guides lean more towards 3:1 or 4:1, but I love Chandler’s version. Stirred on ice, and remembering that when we shake or stir a drink we want to wind up with a dilution of about 15-20%, it’s a rich drink, but the sweetness and tartness are in balance. Rose’s gives you consistent results, helpful when you’re making a lot of drinks — which may have been what Chandler found appealing, after all. Fresh lime juice varies more in its sweetness and tartness. I would certainly never give it up in a margarita, but once or twice a week I’ll make my gimlets with Rose’s, till the day they stop making it.

So let’s take that as our basic gimlet, the Chandler version with Rose’s. Because it’s such a simple drink, it’s extremely simple to create variants. The lime-and-mint combination of the mojito has been so popular in recent years that there are mojito-flavored malt beverages, sorbets, and chewing gums now. The cool juniper notes of gin go very nicely with mint — bruise some mint leaves with crushed ice before building your gimlet over them, and you have an excellent summer cooler; it wouldn’t be out of line to top it with a little soda.

Even better in my view, though, is a ginger gimlet, though after the first two you may find yourself accidentally softening the G in gimlet. Like with the Rose’s, I’m going to have to call for a specific brand’s ingredient here — feel free to substitute if you know of one, I just don’t, and making this from scratch is impractical unless you’re making a large quantity of drinks. Add to your gimlet a few dashes of ginger juice from The Ginger People — generally available in your better grocery stores and gourmet shops — and you have a ginger and lime combination that the rum drinks will envy. Unlike ginger-flavored syrup or powdered ginger, ginger juice still has some real heat to it, some definite spice — any other form of ginger makes this a different drink. Again, gin’s strength in this drink is in those big, booming base notes from the juniper — the heat of the ginger and the tanginess of the Rose’s play against that like lights strewn around a Christmas tree.

For a very very dry gimlet … get rid of the Rose’s altogether, and use Hangar One’s Kaffir lime vodka. (Or cheat further and use the tasty  Tanqueray Rangur gin.) Even if, like me, you eschew flavored vodkas, it’s worth looking into Hangar One’s offerings, which are high-quality, dry, and interesting cocktail ingredients — no sour watermelon bubblegum vodka to be had here. The kaffir lime is a Southeast Asian lime, used frequently in Thai cooking. The vodka has a pronounced lime flavor with floral notes reminiscent of some of gin’s botanicals; the combination, in about a 3:1 gin-to-vodka ratio with a little simple syrup, well-stirred to dilute, is a potent one. If the gimlet is a casual drink with its collar loosened and its shoes kicked off, this is its more formal cousin, practically a martini — and you may want to take the potency down a notch with a little vermouth. You can even add a dash of orange bitters if you like to add a note of complexity to this form of gin gimlet.

Traditional gins are best for for your holiday gin cocktails, including Tanquaray, Beefeater and even Gordons. For an extra holiday jolt, use Junipero gin.

Our five favorite gin drinks for this time of year are:

1. Negroni

A frequently-mentioned favorite here at Wired Gin, Campari and sweet vermouth impart a festive red color to the Negroni, making it the perfect gin cocktail for the holiday season:

1 oz gin
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 oz Campari

Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds full of ice and add the ingredients. Shake for approximately 15 seconds, strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a slice of orange.

2. Emerald Isle

While the Negroni provides a gorgeous red color, the Emerald Isle cocktail provides a subtle green tint along with a winter-crisp flavor that fits the season:

1 oz gin
2 tsp Creme de Menthe liquor
2 dashes of bitters

Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds full of ice and add the ingredients. Shake briefly, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and garnish with a mint leaf or a maraschino cherry “ornament”.

3. Gin Toddy

Warm your cockles this Christmas with a hot gin toddy. It is simple to make, and it will certainly make you feel better if you catch a cold while doing all your holiday visiting. Here’s a great recipe:

2 oz gin
½ teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
8 oz boiling water

In a coffee mug, dissolve sugar into boiling water and add lemon juice and gin. Optionally, add a dash of bitters for a more exotic flavor. Garnish with a lemon twist.

4. French 75

Nothing says “New Year’s Eve” like a glass of champagne. But to give the evening more zing, the perfect New Year’s cocktail is the French 75, rumored to have been named after named after a 75 millimeter French artillery shell used in World War I. Caution: as much as a French 75 might seem quaff like friendly fire, it carries quite an impact.

1 oz gin
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
Dry Champagne or dry sparkling wine

Put sugar, lemon juice, gin and ice in a cocktail shaker filled two-thirds with ice. Shake with enthusiasm and pour into a champagne glass. Fill remainder of glass with champagne and garnish with a lemon twist. Happy New Year!

5. Best Gin Cocktail for the Holidays: Martini

Surprised?  I hope not.  Elegance and grace flow from a well-crafted martini made from a foundation of quality gin. Don’t get it wrong by forgetting the importance of vermouth!

2 oz gin
1 oz dry vermouth

Pick your gin wisely based on your audience. Gin aficionados will appreciate Junipero or Oxley, but casual drinkers may prefer a lighter, more frivolous gin like Hendricks or Leopold’s. With reverence, pour your selected gin into a cocktail shaker two-thirds filled with ice. add dry vermouth and shake while thinking festive holiday thoughts. (Frosty the Snowman, perhaps?)  Pour into a chilled martini glass, slide a lemon wedge over the rim of the glass and garnish with it. Perfect.

Enjoy the gin cocktails – in moderation – this holiday season, and best wishes for a fabulous new year!

Sipsmith Gin

The reference to the still is not random. Sipsmith is distilled in an old-fashioned copper still named Prudence. The still is the first to launch in London in 190 years, designed by Christian Carl, a German family business who has manufactured stills since 1869.

As you can imagine, having such a specialized still means that Sipsmith can only produce a few hundred bottles of gin per batch in their small Hammersmith location. There are rumors that founder Sam Galsworthy sets off at 4 a.m. every morning to collect water from the Thames for distillation.

All very crafty and heritage-based, isn’t it? But you’re probably wondering about the actual gin.

Unusually, the bottle is closed with a cork rather than a screw-top, just like a fine Scotch whisky. Each cork features a batch number, and if you go to Sipsmith’s website, you can find the particular history of the batch you’ve purchased from.

Once you pop the cork, you know this is no experimental gin. The scent is dominated by juniper. Thankfully. Sipsmith’s website suggests such botanicals as Chinese cassia bark, Madagascan cinnamon, Sevillian orange peel and Italian orris root, but none detract from the basic juniper base. They all come together as a delightful complement to a sophisticated gin that will drive your cocktails to the next level.

Sipped neat, the flavors are all well-balanced, with only the cinnamon notes to distinguish it from an old-fashioned London Dry. It is versatile, and the flavors come through cleanly whether you enjoy it with a little bit of ice and water or mix a G&T. We strongly recommend Sipsmith Gin.

Encouragement for the Cocktail Beginner

Many potential bartenders are just starting to explore the possibilities, but without proper equipment to deliver the flourish and flavor. These people crave the Oggi Pro Stainless-Steel 10-Piece Cocktail Shaker and Bar Tool Set. It’s everything you need to produce brilliant cocktails in one elegant package.

A Cocktail Party Gift for People on the Go

For the cocktail lover on the go, the perfect bar gift idea is the Picnic Time Manhattan Portable Cocktail Party. It features everything you need for cocktails for two on the go, including space for two bottles of your favorite spirits. We’d recommend a high quality gin along with some Noilly Prat vermouth.

Bar Gifts to Equip the Talented and the Hopeful

The WMF Loft Boston Cocktail Shaker is the perfect choice for both the beginner and the advanced mixologist. The Boston style allows for theatrical and efficient mixing. It is perfectly designed for at-home use and will certainly bring delight as a gift to a cocktail enthusiast.

A Brainy Bartender Gift Idea

For those looking for a bar gifts that make you think, consider a good book.  To start, don’t miss Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail, from Lowell Edmunds. It provides an in-depth and very readable history of the martini’s power to advance civilization from someone who clearly knows the subject. For those with a perspective beyond gin, check out Jason Wilson’s Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits that wanders through the most esoteric and wonderful spirits you’ve never known. Also, don’t miss Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them. Although the recipes are a bit on the sweet side, they provide a brilliant insight into the cocktails of today.

The Best Bar Gifts are the Best Bar Supplies

Finally, despite some hesitation in today’s puritan times, a bottle of gin is always an excellent bar gift idea for bartenders with good taste. Choose unique premium gins like Oxley Gin or interesting locally-produced unique gins like Greylock or CapRock.

Finally, and the best gin gift of all from our perspective is the bartender’s GIN compendium. Of all bar gifts, there’s none better to understand gin and why it is the foundation for so many brilliant cocktails.

Orris root is the root of an iris plant. The plants are dug up in late summer, the third year of the plant’s life and are dried for 2 years until they have a chalky appearance. They are ground up and the resulting powder is used as a base for products such as natural toothpastes or as a fixative in sachets or potpourris that enhances the other scents. It is also used as a stabilizer in cosmetics and is used in dry shampoo and in the rinse water for laundering bed linens. The makers of Plymouth Gin, Bombay Sapphire and Mercury Gin, as well as many others use orris root to harmonize their flavors and add a touch of violet.

The oil of orris has a constituent called Irone that is used to impart the scent of violets to many perfumes. This oil has a strong yet delicate scent of fresh violet. It is used by perfumeries to substitute for the more expense real violet oil and is used to strengthen other scents and fix them to keep them from evaporating or getting lost.

This botanical has some of the medicinal properties of gin’s other herbal infusions. It can be taken for colds and sore throats and as an anti-inflammatory. Historically it was used to cure bronchitis and chronic diarrhea. It is a diuretic and was also used as a cure for edema, also known as “dropsy.” Due to its high allergen content, it should be used only under the care of a professional.

Orris root oil has magical uses, also. It is used for rites of exorcism, love, protection, spell-breaking, to stop gossip and for commanding. It is used with rose oil for casting love spells. They say to put a tiny amount on your finger and touch the object of your desire. Adding a bit of cinnamon to the powder increases the strength.

Orris root powder was at one time used as snuff to cause exaggerated sneezing to clear a sinus headache. Pieces of the root were chewed, also, to cleanse the breath. The root had to be dried for this, when the root is fresh it causes the mouth to pucker up. The powdered root form is used in the kitchen to make Ras el Hanout, an exotic blend of up to 30 spices used in Middle Eastern cooking. The name translates to “top of the shop” and it is a point of pride among Moroccan spice sellers to have the best of each spice. Orris root adds the floral fragrance to this spicy mix.

Gins focused with a concentrated presence of Orris root are interesting in their variety. Some adhere to the London Dry style, tradition strong in their production and recipes. Others use both traditional botanicals but add innovations so as to push the standards. And there are those in between. Whether the focus is on the astringent, warm characteristics like the juniper berry or it’s more about the mellow, floral tones held together with the help of orris root, it doesn’t matter. Just keep experimenting and have another round.

Many of the best gins carry with them the taste of London, where gin first became famous. This one, despite carrying the name of the trendiest neighborhood in the city, carries a different taste, one of Jamaica, perhaps.

According to marketing materials, the brand takes grain spirit and blends it with a mix of coconut, grapefruit, juniper, iris, tarragon and ginger.

The grapefruit flavor doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but the coconut overwhelms the palate. In its defense, Hoxton Gin garishly announces its unique flavor right on the bottle, with an obvious “Warning!” Take the warning at face value, because no matter what cocktail you attempt, you can’t hide from the coconut.

However, one can’t escape the idea that this may be the perfect gin to attract people who claim to dislike it. A number of London bars are trying to sell the idea that people who say they don’t like gin actually don’t like tonic, and are trying to push different mixes, particularly with grapefruit juice. Hoxton Gin is perfect for that.

In a nutshell, Hoxton Gin is not a bad spirit, but it may be better suited to experimental cocktails than old classics. If you don’t treat it like a traditional gin, you might just find that you love it.

One of the more popular examples among fans of mainstream gin is Hendrick’s. A traditional gin in most respects, Hendrick’s subtracts nothing noticeable from the blend of botanicals we’ve come to expect — but it adds cucumber and rose, and the cucumber in particular isn’t a background note like the grains of paradise used in Bombay Sapphire. It’s a pronounced, distinctive flavor — hardly as much as if it were cucumber schnapps we were talking about, or dill pickle vodka, but the cucumber is very much alive on the palate. Hendrick’s recommends that it be served with cucumber slices as garnish in place of the usual olive in the martini.

Another new gin that is a little further from the mainstream is Junipero, from the same part of the country responsible for the new century’s predilection for extreme IPAs. Anchor Steam Distillery — based in San Francisco — boosts the juniper in Junipero, making it the most Christmas tree smelling liquor you can imagine — a gin for gin-lovers who want strong flavors without cloaking that traditional blend. A gin to drink with cigars, perhaps, kicking brandy out of the back room, at least for the evening. San Francisco is also home to No. 209, a subtly herbal and spicy gin that diminishes the juniper considerably.

209 and many of the newer gins — especially the new gins that gin drinkers mean when they talk about “these modern gins” — are sweeter than the norm, which can make for an odd martini but should appeal to vodka drinkers accustomed to the sweeteners added to their flavored vodkas. One of the world’s best and most popular gin producers, Tanqueray, recently unveiled their latest gin: Tanqueray Rangpur is infused with rangpurs (a lime-like mandarin orange from India), floral and citrusy and electric green, and is sweet and smooth enough to drink straight or on the rocks. You may find it out of place in a martini, but it makes a good gimlet or gin and tonic.

Two French gins that have entered the market are less extreme than the new Americans. G’Vine is distilled from grapes (like the French vodka Ciroc) and includes grape blossoms in its botanicals; Citadelle has more citrus in the botanical blend than most gins. Citadelle, though, has considerably more juniper than its sweeter and mellower countryman.

In England, Whitley Neill is one of the more exotic gins around, using South African botanicals — baobab and Cape gooseberries — in a sort of “this could have been developed in the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t” blend. The usual botanicals are all still present, but the additions along with the diminishing of the juniper create something orangey and spicy — if you do make a martini with it, be sure and add a dash of orange bitters. Less spicy, despite the name, is Bulldog gin, which uses the longan (or dragon eye, as the company calls it, a relative of the more familiar lychee fruit), a fruit that does go especially well with gin. This is a gin that could easily be lost in a cocktail with too many ingredients — in a martini or a gin and tonic, it would be good garnished with a fresh longan or lychee, to emphasize that slightly fruity tropical note that has replaced some of the pine nose. It’s also excellent with grapefruit juice, in a Greyhound or Salty Dog. New gins can be quite good gins.

American gin has been struggling to compete with the best of Old Blighty, and often that’s due to the fact that they’re trying to steal from the lucrative vodka market. As a result, the American market has produced a number of gins with only faint flavor, afraid to hit you with juniper berries.

Like many of those gins, Leopold’s sits on the mild end of the gin spectrum. Todd Leopold, the master distiller, seems to have intuited that it isn’t juniper that’s driving away premium vodka drinkers, but pine.

Gin is normally flavored by adding botanicals to a neutral spirit and then distilling. But Leopold’s Gin distills each signature botanical – including hand-zested Florida oranges and California pummelos – separately and then mixes them together for one final distillation, the rationale being that different botanicals have different boiling points. The result is a mild gin that’s still extremely tasty, with citrus notes that might normally be covered by the juniper.

As Leopold’s is quite dry, I felt it better suited to martinis than G&Ts. It isn’t bad in a G&T, but you might need to balance out the citrus flavor with a sweet element.

In sum, this may not be the best gin for the gin connoisseur. It is very much “gin light”. Nevertheless, if you would like to convert others to the gin experience, Leopold’s Gin may be a good choice to ease them in.

Junper Berries

Think of the botanicals as being like chili powder. Everyone has a good idea of what chili powder tastes like, and certain combinations, even if they included many of the same ingredients, wouldn’t “taste right.” A little more or less onion in the mix won’t make anyone flinch; but add peppermint or lemon peel, and it may no longer be recognizable. Classically, gin botanicals include citrus peel, warm spices like cinnamon, orris root (which smells like violets and accounts for the floral nose of a gin like Bombay Sapphire), and licorice or anise. The dominant flavor remains the juniper berry, the seed cone of the juniper tree, which is also used in traditional game recipes, corned beef, and choucroute garni, the traditional dish of Alsace. Juniper itself has several flavor notes, the most distinctive of which is contributed by pinene, the same natural chemical found in the resin of pine trees — which is why cheap gin (made with few or poor-quality botanicals) has the reputation of smelling like turpentine.

Classically, gin is not a noticeably herbaceous liquor, not a busy one. Compare it to Coca-Cola, the original formula for which includes cinnamon, nutmeg, and four kinds of citrus, all of which are just accents on the cola flavor. Similarly, gin is fundamentally a juniper-flavored drink; that’s the substance of its identity, and the name itself is derived from it. In modern times, some new gins play fast and loose with the traditional botanicals: New Zealand’s South gin uses native kawa kawa and manuka berries, England’s Hendrick’s Gin uses cucumber and rose, and Whitley Neill includes the fruit of two native African plants, the baobab and the Cape gooseberry. Some of the new gins are formulated for specific drinks: Tanqueray’s latest offering, Rangpur, includes rangpur “limes” (actually a relative of the mandarin orange) and is well-suited to the gimlet; Bulldog, infused with the Asian longan fruit, is designed for dirty martinis and tonic.

The original gin — distilled in the Netherlands in the 17th century — was aged, but gin’s popularity reached its apex in England in the next century, when unaged gin distilled from grain rejected by beer-brewers became a bargain-hunter’s phenomenon after the government imposed a heavy tax on imported liquor. The cheap intoxication of this gin was the driving force behind its popularity — it vastly overtook beer’s sales, not because of any preference of flavor, but because the juniper was strong enough to mask the harsh alcohol and a bottle of it would keep you drunk all day. Gin quickly became associated with drunks, while beer was something you drank for flavor.

Clearly that hasn’t remained the case. When London dry gin — produced in a fairly simple still and easy to make in the British colonies — was developed in the nineteenth century, the gin and tonic was born: the British used gin to mask the bitterness of the quinine-containing tonic water they drank to prevent malaria. This was one of the earliest mixed drinks, and the simplicity of the still helped to popularize gin for a new type of drinker: the cocktail drinker. The simplest liquor to distill at home or in a small business like a speakeasy, gin became the liquor of choice for the Prohibition generation and the cocktails they loved — the Tom Collins, the martini, the rickey, the gimlet, and for the ladies, the gin milk punch. When Prohibition ended, gin remained the drink of choice for many, particularly as so many American whiskey distilleries had gone out of business; since it’s an unaged product, a gin distillery can begin selling its product almost immediately, while a new whiskey distillery has a few years of waiting and hoping.

In recent years, gin — the victim of many of the drinking trends of the last half of the twentieth century — has regained much of its old popularity with a new prestige, as its complexity and combination of bold and subtle flavors appeals so strongly to the modern cocktail culture. Gin is made from juniper berries, botanicals - and history.

The martini is the most obvious, of course; while a martini was for decades a gin drink and only ever a gin drink, by James Bond’s time vodka had begun to appear, and by the age of the three-martini lunch, one or two of those tax-deductible martinis were probably vodka spritzed with the breath of vermouth and floating a plastic-sword-speared olive.  The gin and tonic, thankfully, has gin right in the blessed name, so at least people who want vodka have to order a vodka tonic.

But order a rickey or a gimlet and you just might get vodka and lime.  Even the Tom Collins has been to a great degree displaced by its vodka cousin, the lemon drop.  Had the trend continued unabated, might we not soon see the Ramos Vodka Fizz, or a French 75 made with Ciroc?  It is, luckily, very easy to fight back — by replacing the vodka in traditional vodka drinks with gin.

A Cosmopolitan is, to its credit, one of the better vodka drinks.  The combination of cranberry juice, vodka, triple sec, and lime juice is built to proper cocktail proportions — this is a far cry from the vodka and Diet Coke concoctions that put drinkers up in arms.  But use 2 parts gin to 2 parts cranberry juice and 1 part each of fresh lime juice and triple sec, and you’re dealing with an even more well-rounded drink — the dryness of the cranberry and tartness of the lime play against the flavor notes of the gin beautifully without being overshadowed, and given the piney nose of gin’s juniper, what more festive pairing than cranberry?

Then there’s the Greyhound and the Salty Dog (which is just a Greyhound in a glass with a salted rim).  So often made with vodka these days, both vodka and gin are attested in older cocktail guides.  The bitterness of grapefruit juice is a good complement to gin — and without the gin, well, it’s just a glass of juice that’ll get you tipsy.  Where’s the pleasure in that?  Combine three parts grapefruit juice to one part gin, on rocks or with soda, and enjoy.

One of the drinks that put vodka on the map was the Moscow Mule — vodka and ginger beer.  Audrey Saunders, the bartender behind the Pegu Club in New York City (one of the epicenters of the modern cocktail scene), has come up with the Gin-Gin Mule, showing that the Moscow Mule was missing something all along.  To 1 1/2 ounces gin, add 1 ounce ginger beer, 1 ounce simple syrup, 3/4 ounce fresh lime juice; muddle mint in the glass before pouring the drink, serve over ice, and garnish with more mint.  Audrey insists on homemade non-carbonated ginger beer, which she makes in bulk: boil a gallon of water, blend a pound of ginger with two cups of it, return the ginger puree to the water, and let it stand for an hour with the juice of two limes; strain, pushing on ginger to extract as much juice as possible, and add 1/4 cup of brown sugar.

Of course, these drinks needn’t be used purely as revenge against vodka’s crimes — they’re also good introductions to gin for people familiar with the vodka versions.  None of these drinks hides gin’s flavor, but they pair it with familiar “safe” flavors — if you’re new to gin, it would be better to start here than with a Singapore Sling or an Aviation.