Boadicea® Gin 'Classic', 50cl

International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC) medal winner, July 2019

Boadicea Gin in its classic blue bottle is available year round. Distilled in copper to create an ultra-smooth London dry gin. Deliciously enjoyable on its own over ice, or add just a splash of tonic and garnish with orange and fresh thyme to create a longer cocktail.

To create Boadicea Gin, we first build a bed of botanicals in the column of our 300 litre copper alembic still. These are layered in the same order each time to ensure that we achieve consistency of the finished liquid.  Botanicals include juniper, three kinds of citrus and with a nod to the Iceni - nettle.

Alcohol in the still pot is gently warmed to create vapour and this passes up the column and through the botanicals, in a process called vapour infusion. Think of this as the difference between steaming and boiling in cooking. Vapour infusion gently passes the aroma and flavour from the botanicals to the liquid.

The distillation process takes around 10 hours and the newly made gin is collected at very high strength - over 82% ABV across the run. The gin is then gradually reduced to bottle strength over several days, using water that has been reverse osmosis filtered. This ensures that the water is as pure as it can be and enhances the flavour, aroma and mouth feel of the resulting finished gin.

A delicious easy to make cocktail is one part of Boadicea Gin and one part elderflower tonic, served over ice and garnished with a slice of fresh orange and fresh thyme. We call this a Boadicea Gin Thyme!

Why a blue bottle? In Iceni times, Caesar (the Roman invader) wrote that the Britons ‘dye their bodies with woad to produce a blue colour’. We colour our bottles blue in a fitting tribute to Boadicea – the Queen of the Iceni. We also adorn our bottles with pewter triple spirals; powerful symbols of the Iceni tribe.