Oxley Small Batch Premium Gin, Coldcraft Distilled in Sub-Zero Temperatures for Vivid Botanical Clarity, 47% ABV, 70cl / 700ml

Product Information

Oxley’s reason for doing things this way makes sense if you think about it. When you cook food, you’re changing the way it tastes and smells. And really, when you distill gin, you throw a bunch of different grains, herbs, spices, and fruit into a still along with the base distillate and crank the heat to create vapor. Which means those helpless ingredients are gonna get cooked—boiled, technically—and are by definition no longer fresh.

Things took a turn for the weirder in 1751, hallmarked by a series of very dark etchings (read: propaganda) by William Hogarth. “Beer Street,” displayed on the left side of the top of this article, depicted the relative safety of beer drinking. Gin can only be bestowed with that title if it contains juniper as one of its botanicals and has a minimum alcohol content of 37.5% ABV.This led to a period in England that is often dubbed the ‘Gin Craze,’ a period where a pint of gin was cheaper than a pint of beer,” Ford says. Oxley is 'distilled' at sub-zero temperatures in a vacuum utilising the fact that that the boiling point of all liquids is reduced as pressure is decreased. Cold distillation lowers the pressure to a near vacuum so allowing distillation to take place at approximately -5ºC. Re-condensing takes place at a staggering -100°C around a probe cooled by liquid argon. The purported benefit of this process is that the natural botanicals are not cooked during distillation so reputedly giving fresher flavours to the finished gin. Another category boost came courtesy of the British Royal Navy. England’s sailors often found themselves traveling to destinations where malaria was prevalent, so they brought quinine rations to help prevent and fight the disease. Quinine tasted notoriously awful, so Schweppes came out with an “Indian Tonic Water” to make it palatable. Making something this good takes time. So small batch just means we purposefully make Oxley gin in limited quantities, so we can ensure the quality of each and every individually numbered bottle.

The fourteen botanicals are macerated and then all distilled at once before being bottled at 47% ABV. Tasting Notes What I take from this is that the British were too drunk to pronounce genever so they abbreviated the word to ‘gen,’ which eventually gets anglicized to the word that we use today.” We may be a nation of gin and tonic devotees, but that doesn’t mean that your imagination has to stop at ‘ice and a slice’. Take inspiration from a bottle’s botanicals, and choose a couple of those as a fresh garnish. Our favourites include slices of cucumber, a sprig of rosemary or a wedge of grapefruit, to name but a few. With an unquenchable thirst for innovation, there has never been one Master Distiller but instead a collective of scientists and distillers who set out to change the world of gin as we know it. At the same time, William III instituted The Corn Laws in England. These decrees provided tax breaks on spirits production, resulting in what Ford calls “a distilling free-for-all.”

Overall, Oxley Gin

This gin is distilled in a copper pot still named "Marjorie." The botanical list includes juniper, angelica root, cassia bark, cinnamon, coriander seed, lemon peel, licorice, nutmeg, orange peel, and orris root. It is bottled at a standard 40 percent ABV (80 proof).

By 1830, beer became cheaper than gin for the first time in over a century,” Brown says. “England became, for a few minutes, a nation of beer drinkers once again.” The Gin Road to Redemption

Winner of 1 spirit awards

Aviation is produced in Portland, Oregon, by House Spirits Distillery. It is distilled from neutral grain spirit with 100 percent rye base, an unusual beginning in the gin market. It's flavored with juniper, anise seed, Elettaria cardamom, coriander, lavender, sweet orange peel, and sarsaparilla. It, too, is slightly overproofed, bottled at 42 percent ABV (84 proof), so it's not as delicate as it's often made out to be. The classic gin botanicals plus the rather more unusual meadowsweet, vanilla and aniseed. These are placed in the still with a high quality neutral grain spirit and allowed to macerate for up to fifteen hours. And this is when it all gets high tech. Instead of the more conventional methods of distilling botanicals in the spirit through the application of heat – think here either of straightforward ‘boiling’ or the less used ‘infusion’ methods – Oxley Gin is made by a unique Cold Distillation process at sub zero temperatures. Feather & Folly is an unusual gin, distilled from sustainably farmed vinifera grapes. Feather & Folly There is a beautiful gin inside this distinct green bottle with its red wax seal. Tanqueray's crisp, dry style is the benchmark for a London dry gin without any citrus in the botanicals. It is a standard to which all other gins are compared and contrasted and also sells for a reasonable price.