14th June: World Gin Day

Today is World Gin Day. So following on from 10 tonic water facts on Tonic water Day, here's 10 facts about the gin that goes in it.

1. Gin is a spirit made from distilled grains and flavoured with juniper berries. While it must, by definition, have juniper in it, it can be flavoured with many other fruits or herbs as well, so there are many, many different flavours.
2. Juniper berries are not actually berries, but female seed cones, ie. a type of pine cone. When researching this I found a site that describes gin as "tasting like Christmas Trees", and this is why. Though how anyone knows what a Christmas tree tastes like is a mystery to me!
3. Juniper berries are not usually cultivated - you won't see fields of them like you do wine grapes or hops. They grow wild, across Europe and are harvested by independent workers who sell them to companies who distribute them to the gin producers.
4. Gin is not meant to be drunk neat. It was made for cocktails, of which there are many. The Savoy Cocktail Book lists about 400 of them, including Martini, Gin and Tonic, Pimm's and Singapore Sling. It is said that Winston Churchill drank his gin just with ice. A "Churchill Martini" then, is gin on ice with just a glance at a bottle of vermouth.
5. Which brings us neatly to gin's reputation as a quintessentially British tipple. It wasn't invented by the Brits. Spirits infused with juniper were made by monks in Italy in the 11th century (strictly for medicinal purposes, naturally, although it was strangely ineffective against the Black Death). It was called genever in those days. Gin as we know it was invented in Holland, and soldiers would drink it to calm their battle nerves. It came to the attention of the British when British soldiers went to support the Dutch in the Thirty Years War, when they saw their allies drinking it. The term "Dutch courage" for having an alcoholic drink before any scary task originates from this.
6. Although it didn't work on the Black Death, a spoonful of gin certainly helped the medicine go down. Sailors mixed it with lime to ward off scurvy, and with angostura for seasickness. In Colonial India, it was mixed with quinine tonics to ward off malaria, which was the origin of gin and tonic.
7. Gin's reputation hasn't always been pristine. In its early days, the UK government allowed unlicensed production of gin while imposing heavy taxes on other spirits, which naturally led to it being very popular with poor people, so it took the rap for any number of social problems in London. The term "Mother's Ruin" dates back to this period.
8. In the US, it became popular because it could be produced easily at home in a bathtub during prohibition (hence "bathtub gin") and the term "gin joint" for a dodgy bar dates back to these times.
9. Contrary to the popular myth, gin does not make you depressed. Drinking a lot of it can give you a Hangover, but there's nothing in it to link it with depression.
10. Which country drinks the most gin? Again, it isn't the British! It's actually the Philippines, who drink nearly half of the world's production of gin.