Last Updated on March 10, 2021
An award-winning tasty tipple for “the adventurous, the confident and the curious”.
In my youth, hanging out with girlfriends in London’s pubs after work, I spent too much money on my favourite tipple: spoiling perfectly good whisky with dry ginger ale. This habit was scotched (literally) after a trip north to the land of heather and clearest water where I was introduced to the time-honoured art of whisky distillation. Fast forward many years and I’m looking at a glass of Jawbox Small Batch Dry gin and ginger ale and wondering how this can be?
Jawbox is a classic small batch dry gin made in a traditional distillery in Northern Ireland on an estate dating back to the 16th century, where the base spirit’s grain is grown and harvested. The spirit undergoes triple distillation with eleven botanicals, including the local Belfast Black Mountain heather, producing a 43% Abv London dry gin which I found “soft”, herby, slightly citrus, flavoursome. In a controlled blind tasting by 50 of the UK’s leading bar professionals, Jawbox Small Batch Gin was awarded a Gold medal in the 2020 CLASS Magazine’s Bartenders’ Brand Awards (highly commended for its aroma, complexity, and taste) the highest endorsement from experts in the industry.
What to mix with such an interesting flavour? The Jawbox website tell me this is the gin brand “for the adventurous, the confident and the curious”. They also tell me that they suggest I mix it with ginger ale. In fact, the Jawbox team are so confident with this blend that they created two interesting gin liquers: Pineapple & Ginger and Rhubarb & Ginger. (Check out London-Unattached’s Editor, Fiona, using the latter to produce a fabulous Rhubarb & Custard Cocktail ).
They are the experts, of course, and I can confirm that the Jawbox dry gin with ginger ale (another Belfast invention) is delicious. But I decided to meet their challenge and be “adventurous, confident and curious”. I added 50ml of Jawbox to a tumbler of ice and topped up with Fentiman’s Pink Rose Lemonade. Fentiman is another producer who takes their botanicals seriously and their Rose Lemonade is made with pure Otto rose oil from the world-famous Rose Valley in Kazanlak, Bulgaria. The combination of fragrance and flavours worked wonderfully well together. The gin retained its distinctiveness, the lemonade complemented the gin rather than dilute or overwhelm. The result was a refreshing, aromatic cocktail with an underlying sweetness. A perfect aperitif, or an equally lovely afternoon “refresher”.
Retailing at £27.99 you can buy Jawbox Small Batch Dry through the distiller’s site where you’ll find more information on the background to the production and details of their delicious liqueurs.
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