Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Most gins trace their lineage back to the United Kingdom, a place where 70 degrees Fahrenheit can be considered steamy weather and the sun was long rumored to be a myth. This is alarming, because there may not be a better hot weather cocktail than the simple, beautiful and thoroughly British gin and tonic.
The simple combination of juniper and botanical slurry with lightly sweet quinine-infused bubbles and a twist of citrus (lime for me, because I am not complicated) creates a crisp refresher that will quench your thirst and, crucially, get you drunk. Crushable is a word that’s been commandeered by the IPA business — more colonizing nonsense — but ultimately it has always applied to gin and tonics.
And thus, as it is 95 degrees in Wisconsin today and the world around us is broiling, it seems like as good a time as any for a G&T taste test. I’m pairing up three relatively new gins — OK, two new-ish gins and one variant from Hendrick’s, which has been around since 1999 but looks much older — to figure out which I want to add to my stable.
And it’s a pretty small stable; my go-to gin is The Botanist, distilled on Islay in Scotland against the backdrop one of the world’s last truly perfect towns. But The Botanist, delicious as it is, can be tough to find in middle America, so it’s time to broaden my horizons.