I thought Toebee could sell anything, more eggs than hens can lay, geese to restaurants when an exclusive deal was in place etc. What has happened to the Silver Tongued One ?
Mind you I would have given Lillian first dibs, doesn’t she drink it by the bucket load ?
Artisanal gin is much like most of the other “artisanal” products one can get these days: distinguished from the cheap stuff entirely by its marketing. Historically, the entire point of gin is that you’ve got primitive distilling but it has all sorts of nasty side flavours, so you add the juniper to drown them out.
I have personally conducted a blind tasting of five gins (all that I had round the house), and Aldi cheapo came out second (behind Hendrick’s, which is encouraging because that’s also my favourite when I can see the label).
Of course, none of this stops suckers from buying the stuff. Ah well; in Ambridge everything is very simple, but even the simplest things become very difficult. (With apologies to von Clausewitz.)
I did wonder 'before or after or, best of all, both?'when I read ‘blind tasting’, Hedgers… Hic.
Is one of the herbs in the secret blend mugwort? If not, I feel it should be.
So a sort of refined moonshine ? It’s a wonder the Grundys didn’t beat Toebee to the idea in the first place 
Mind you things like the legalities might have been a bit inconvenient !
Yeah, “early Dutch moonshine” is pretty much the size of it. 
I don’t get on with gin, for some reason, or rather it doesn’t get on with me.
So the early Slavs turned things into vodka, and the early Scots turned them into whisky, which tastes very different even at its nastiest?
Somebody once described gin to me as “vodka with pretensions”. Is vodka closer to the simple spirit as it comes out of the basic still, then?
Modern vodka is just alcohol in water. It originated as distilled grape-must (probably imported from Genoa in the 1300s), but it was usually drunk about about 24-ish percent ABV until the mid 1800s when distilling got better. Even then, the tradition of peppering your vodka comes from wanting to soak up the grot and oils floating on top. Whisky gets started about a hundred years later. Basically, alchemical/medicinal distilling got out to the secular world from about the 1400s, was slowly improved, and then got sharply better from around 1850.
Thank you. I shall make raspberry vodka as usual, but thinking about that little snibbit of history when I do so.