After making over 300 cocktails in about three years, I am going to try and go a little deeper in understanding and learning about alcohols. (I know, what excuses I will come up with drink some more 🙂 ) Seriously, though, I want to learn more about one particular class of alcohol – gin. You might even call it a new be”gin”ning 🙂

Over the next year or two, I hope to learn a lot about the history of gin, the differences among the various gins and their places of origin, the different cocktails that are made from gins and in general learn a lot about the effect of botanicals and herbs in gins.

To start off, I have loaded my library with three supposedly authoritative books on gin (still trying to get past the fourth chapter of the first book – I tell you, the continuous sipping of gin and tonic to appreciate the literature on gin remarkably slows down my reading speed :-)) and have stacked the bar with over a dozen bottles of gins from different places. Not to forget a crate of tonic water. Fever Tree Indian Tonic Water, without doubt.

If you get too bored with my posts of gin, you can try drinking some of it. It takes the edges off having to read my boring posts 🙂

In this picture is my first set of bottles to errr…. “study”. The bottles are arranged left to right in increasing distance of my house to the place of its manufacturing. (The left most one is made, believe it or not, in Dallas, Texas. The right most one is from the Netherlands). Conversely, from right to left, the bottles are arranged in increasing distance from the birthplace of gin – Flanders area in Belgium!

Cheers! 🙂