to think posh gin is a scam

[pisacake]

Basically it's industrial ethanol with flavourings. It's not like cognac or something where you potentially start with a good wine and distil it. It is literally just a flavoured, diluted ethanol.

So the production cost could vary perhaps £1 or £2 at most between the cheapest Asda Smart Price and the super-duper-deluxe.

And blind taste tests repeatedly pick the cheapo ones.

metro.co.uk/2017/07/27/aldis-10-gin-declared-one-of-best-in-world-by-experts-6811653/

Just marketing.

It's the Craft Gin Club that I use. They have offers on at the moment too for £10 off membership.

No you get distilled or blended gin

Blended gin is just neutral alcohol plus flavouring extracts mixed in.

Distilled gin must by law have the botanicals in the still with the neutral alcohol, it's a distilled product.

So the cost depends on the number and types of botanicals you use.

Gordon's is a distilled gin using actual botanicals for example.

What Jaggy said, the distilled gin has to go through the still again so there's also the added cost of energy, labour to monitor it etc as well. Plus a gin still is going to cost tens of thousands to make.

Yeah I'm sure there's a cost, it's just I'm not convinced it bears any resemblance to the price.

YANBU..suddenly there are gin bars everywhere and Gin stalls at every local (ripoff) farmers market in suburbia. People are brewing hooch in their garage,bottling it and selling it with some homespun label.

It all tastes like celery, vile stuff.

Cuckoo Gin from Lancashire make their own gin on their farm including making the initial alcohol.

YABU. The same applies to everything. Take cosmetics for example. I assumed higher brands like Estée Lauder and Clinique would have top class ingredients. Then when DH used to work for Burmah Castrol they occasionally used to sell bags of cosmetics including the above very cheaply. Turned out they were made from byproducts of the oil and petrochemical industry not beeswax and flowers like I'd thought.Same base ingredients as any other just a higher spend on marketing and packaging.

The flavourings are different in different Gins. Zymurgorium takes massively different to eg Manchester Gin and you'd drink it with different things. They're made in batches on a small scale so it's more labour intensive. Hence the higher cost.

For a cheap gin Greenalls is quite nice. Just make sure you use decent tonic!

I buy the cheapest gin and flavour it myself.
Rhubarb gin went down very well this summer.

Sipsmith is bloody lovely. Don’t know if they have a high mark-up on it but I don’t mind paying for the flavour. They also have a taster club, four small bottles quarterly. It’s interesting although if I follow their cocktail suggestions the relatively subtle gin flavouring seems to get lost.

Aldi, very sensibly, have renamed the gin from Oliver Cromwell gin to Corley's gin in Ireland.

The do a really nice Irish one called Boyle's gin. I made a rhubarb gin with it over the summer. Delicious with fevertree ginger ale.

Gordon's is rank

Gordon's came out best in that blind tasting programme with Michel Roux.

Cheap gin is disgusting. It's basically just gin flavoured vodka isn't it? I'm not too big on alcohol though but a high quality gin with proper tonic water and some lime on a hot day is sublime.

The quality of the water used is very important to the overall taste

Gordon's came out best in that blind tasting programme with Michel Roux

Still tastes rank though.

I couldn't drink Gordon's gin in a g&t, although I do use it to make sloe gin.

I like Gin Mare, Tanqueray or Plymouth.

Yup.

And it has encouraged otherwise dull people to post gin memes all over Facebook and think themselves ever so hip.

Silent pool is fabulous.

Don't ruin good gin with nasty tonic water though

OP I don't believe you know what you are talking about. My favourite gin does not use any kind of industrial ethanol, I can assure you. It uses locally distilled small batch whey alcohol from Irish cows.

Gordon's came out best in that blind tasting programme with Michel Roux

But it wasnt up against any decent gin, so that doesn't mean anything at all.

But it wasnt up against any decent gin, so that doesn't mean anything at all.

It was up with a poncey one. Can't remember which one.

I buy gin for the taste. IME so far the dearer smaller batch gins have a nicer flavour. So, thats what I buy. There are some of the dearer ones I haven't enjoyed so don't buy them, but on the whole they have been.

Not tried the Aldi one but I can definitely taste the difference between Gordons and other dearer ones. I don't like Gordons personally. The cheaper ones I like are Bombay Sapphire, Hendricks and Tanqueray.

We have just had a new gin arrive from the Gin Club - we get a delivery every other month. From New Zealand but not tried it yet. The one we had last time was Finish I think, that was nice.

Gordons is shit, I can tell that's what it is even when I've consumed a few quite a lot of alcoholic units so am certain I'd pick it out as fucking horrible on a blind taste test
There is a vast difference between cheap & expensive gin though not everyone prefers expensive stuff. Gin festivals or tasting events are great for finding your taste.

It was up with a poncey one. Can't remember which one

I think you mean Bombay Sapphire, which is shit.

I love lakes gin, bloom and Brighton gin at the moment. The tonic water has to be good too!

"Gordon’s was the clear winner in the taste test, knocking the £21 Bombay Sapphire into second place, Martin Miller’s into third and the cheapest, Aldi’s Oliver Cromwell into fourth."

No idea how rated Martin Miller’s is with gin lovers but was touted as the posh one.