London - The River Test flows through the new home of Bombay Sapphire gin at Laverstoke Mill, in the Hampshire countryside between London and the south coast of England.
It's among England's purest chalk streams. You can watch fish swimming in the crystal water and smell the fresh, cool air. The sound is of birdsong. It's as if the distillery - old red brick and modern glass - is in harmony with nature.
Things weren't always like that with gin, described in 1714 as “an infamous liquor” in the Oxford English dictionary.
Gin was uniquely vilified when it became the drink of choice for the poor in 18th-century London, destroying lives, families and communities. It was the crack cocaine of the age, and there was no shortage of dealers. Artist William Hogarth depicted the horrors and debauchery in his 1751 print “Gin Lane.”
The amount Londoners drank quadrupled between 1720 and 1730 and almost doubled again in the 1730s, according to Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother's Ruin Became The Spirit Of London, a new book by Olivia Williams.
Prostitution and violence accompanied the gin craze, which was seen as a threat to the social fabric. The drink became known as Mother's Ruin, a name that also relates to the fact it was used in attempts to induce miscarriages. Eight acts of Parliament were passed between 1729 and 1751 in attempts to undo the damage, Williams says. And after corner gin stores - insalubrious neighbourhood joints dispensing cheap liquor - were forced out of business, gin palaces sprang up.
These bore some resemblance to modern fast-food joints: They were smart and clean, with consistency of product and service. And lingering wasn't encouraged. These ornate bars made their money by serving a lot of customers quickly without making them too comfortable.
Demand for gin finally eased over the decades, to the point where it was considered unfashionable by the time I was growing up in the 1960s.
“Gin has had a very peaky-trough kind of existence: It's back and forward in fashion,” says Sam Galsworthy, co-founder of Sipsmith, which distills gin in an old garage in suburban Chiswick, west London. “Vodka came in through the '80s and '90s and gin was pretty uncool, a pretty dour spirit.”
But in recent years, the spirit has taken over at bars across London. Tony Conigliaro, who serves innovative cocktails at 69 Colebrooke Row, is among bartenders who have helped make gin fashionable again. In 2005 he founded the Drink Factory, in Pink Floyd's former recording studio, to promote creativity; in 2009 he won International Bartender of the Year.
The winner for 2008 was Nick Strangeway, who co-founded Strange Hill, a creative agency working with brands such as Beefeater Gin, and helped create the drinks served at the restaurants of chef Mark Hix. One was the Pegu Club: Barrel-aged Plymouth Navy Strength gin with orange curacao, lime juice, Angostura and Bitter Truth orange bitters. This is a drink that started life in a British officers' club in Rangoon, Burma (now known as Yangon, Myanmar).
Gin's flavour comes from the so-called botanicals that are added to grain neutral spirit, or GNS. Bombay Sapphire uses eight core botanicals - juniper, lemon, coriander, orris root, almonds, cassia bark, licorice, and angelica - along with grains of paradise, a relative of ginger, and cubeb berries from the pepper family.
At the new distillery, a re-purposed 300-year-old paper mill, the botanicals are displayed in dramatic curving glass domes created by Thomas Heatherwick, designer of the Olympic Cauldron that was lit during the opening ceremony at the London 2012 Games. Heatherwick is also the creative brains behind the new Routemaster red double-decker bus, a modern interpretation of a British icon.
The vapour-distillation process for the gin produces excess heat that might otherwise be wasted. Here, the challenge was to pipe it into the two glasshouses - one tropical, the other Mediterranean - to help produce the required climates. Almost 900 individually shaped panes of glass and 1.25km of bronze-finished stainless-steel frames make up the asymmetrical structures, according to Heatherwick Studio. The ribbed greenhouses swell and taper like an armadillo, warm plant smells rising up through the air.
Bombay Sapphire, a brand of Bacardi, is known for its citrusy, floral style. The man behind all this - albeit working from a 1761 recipe - is master distiller Nik Fordham. He's passionate about gin and bristles when I mention its poor historic reputation.
“Within England and London it has had a checkered past, but a lot of it wasn't the gin we see today,” Fordham says as he shows me Henry and Victoria, two of the four stills on site. (It's normal for gin stills to be given names.)
“I see gin today as a beautiful, crystal clear, vibrant drink that is so flexible to mix within many cocktails such as a martini or a G&T or a Negroni. It's that level of flexibility that brightens the star which is the gin category,” he says.
The Laverstoke Mill distillery opened to the public last month, hewn from the shell of a former corn mill that had been leased in 1719 by a Huguenot called Henry Portal to make paper for bank notes. (Hence, the name Henry for one of the stills.) Visitors can smell the individual botanicals and mark a card with the plants whose scents they enjoy. This creates a flavour profile that is used to craft a cocktail for them to try at the end of the visit. Mine was a citrusy Tom Collins that was delicious.
Sipsmith, which won Best UK Newcomer in the 2010 Observer Food Monthly Awards, is one of several small distilleries that have sprung up recently in London after an incredible lull: When the company sought a licence to distill gin in the city five years ago, it was the first such application since 1823.
It may have taken 90-odd years, but the drink that was once the ugly face of London life has undergone a rebirth. Gin is kicking.
Washington Post/Bloomberg News
* The Bombay Sapphire Distillery is about an hour outside Central London by train.
* “Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother's Ruin Became the Spirit of London,” by Olivia Williams, is published by Headline in the UK.