Bartending Techniques
Greg Horton, ReserveBar Spirits Contributor
Raise your glass to Black History Month and the change makers of the spirits world.
Gin is not just gin. There are multiple styles and hundreds of possible botanicals to build everything from very simple to very complex expressions. A variety of expressions on the home bar makes it possible to craft dozens of cocktails in different styles and to enjoy gin as a featured ingredient, a complementary spirit, or neat in a glass. While there are many fantastic expressions available today, these are the staples that should be considered for your home bar.
Empress Gin is a collaboration between Victoria Distillery and the Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC. The blend of eight botanicals includes a black tea blend served at the hotel and butterfly pea blossom, from which comes the stunning indigo color of the gin. More than just a color additive, the pea blossom offers earthy and floral notes that help balance out the grapefruit and juniper.
As part of your bar, Empress is like an alcoholic cheat code for making beautiful cocktails. The pea blossom is indigo in the bottle, but when combined with other ingredients in the glass, the color ranges from cobalt and azure to fuschia and magenta.
Empress works best as a mixing gin, not a sipping gin. It pairs well in the glass with citrus, herbal and floral flavors — think gin sour or elderflower spritz.
Gray Whale Gin checks several boxes in your home bar: gluten-free, locally grown or foraged ingredients, some of the proceeds donated to charity, and a high-quality New World-style gin. A quick note about the first: spirits are gluten-free after distillation, no matter the grain base.
The process removes any gluten, but some spirits can contain gluten if ingredients — like flavoring — are added after distillation. In spite of that, many people will still ask for gluten-free alcohol, so it’s good to have one branded as such in your bar.
Gray Whale is juniper forward, especially for a New World style, but the addition of mint, fir, and lime to the vapor basket gives it high-toned aromatics and a noticeably citrusy subtext. Because the ingredients don’t get too muddled allowing you to pick out specific tasting notes, Gray Whale is an excellent selection for sipping on ice or mixing in a gin and tonic.
Junipero was a genuine pioneer in American gin-making. Before craft spirits were everywhere, there was a dark period called the 1990s. Junipero emerged in 1996, a blend of 12 botanicals made in a copper pot still in the London Dry style. Typically, a recipe built with so many botanicals would be New World, but the ingredient blend lends itself more to London Dry’s palate, especially the use of bitter botanicals like angelica, bitter orange peel, and orris root.
On your bar, Junipero works as a very traditional juniper-forward gin. It’s perfect in a gin and tonic, Negroni, Last Word, and any other classic gin cocktail. As for sipping, Junipero works for people who love juniper and traditional gin; for everyone else, it’ll be for mixing.
(Photo: Allison Webber Photography)
The Botanist comes from the land of Scotch, and not any Scotch — Islay, the peat bombs most associated with this small island off the coast of Scotland.
On your bar, its purpose is to provide the true gin nerd a gustatory picture of the island, in the sense that the 22 botanicals are foraged on Islay and included as an expression of place or terroir, to borrow the wine term.
The botanicals run the spectrum from wild thyme to one you’ll want to mention, especially when mixing up a gin and tonic, bog myrtle. The lack of familiarity with many of the ingredients will make for what is mainly enjoyment of esoteric flavors, but picking out the botanicals isn’t the point: savoring the complexity is. This one just needs a cube. If you want a cocktail with it, match it with strong flavors like grapefruit and shrubs, or it will take over the cocktail.
Barr Hill Gin offers two very important things for your home bar: a delicious, classic gin and a fantastic story. While the list of awards is impressive (very impressive), the use of raw honey in the distillation process is fascinating.
The collaborative efforts of a lifelong apiarist and a career distiller created a unique method to get botanicals into the gin. In many ways, local honey is an expression of all the flowering plants in a region visited by the hive of bees. Those flavor components end up in the honey, and because Barr Hill uses raw honey to make each bottle, those flavor components create the botanical notes in this juniper-based gin.
Traditional enough to work in a gin and tonic or Negroni, the Barr Hill unsurprisingly makes a great Bee’s Knees, the “go-to” for the distilling team in Vermont. The hint of sweetness and subtle botanical blend makes it a perfect sipper too.
Koval Gin is beautiful. There’s no other way to say it. The creation of master distiller Sonat Birnecker Hart — she’s trained hundreds of other distillers from around the world —Koval belongs on your bar because, again, it’s beautiful.
The spicy, floral, herbal blend starts with juniper, but it maintains a subtlety and elegance that’s best experienced neat. Yes, it works in cocktails, but this one is primarily a sipper.
The stunning bottle design, crafted by Birnecker Hart’s NYC designer sister, makes it a perfect featured bottle and conversation piece. This one is a double gold winner in San Francisco, so it should be on everyone’s bar.
Adding anything to your back bar should be done intentionally. It’s easy to buy more than you need — looking at you, gadget nerds — so choosing spirits with intentionality means they make sense for your palate or your sense of adventure. These staples will greatly expand your cocktail options and provide enough variety to experiment in new and delicious ways.