As part of research for a new project, I found myself duty-bound to explore one of London’s most compelling recent obsessions: gin. Difficult work, but someone has to do it.
Gin is having something of a renaissance here, and most of that can be credited to a small distillery in Hammersmith called Sipsmith. To understand why Sipsmith matters, you have to understand a little history. Specifically, what happens when a city goes completely, catastrophically mad for a drink.
The Gin Craze
In the first half of the 18th century, gin consumption exploded across London, the result of legislation that actively encouraged domestic production while restricting brandy imports. It became the drug of the urban poor, cheap and plentiful and thoroughly ruinous, the effects on society nearly impossible to calculate. This period of distress that nearly brought down the entire city is known as “The Gin Craze.”
In 1730, around 10 million gallons of gin were distilled in the Capital each year, and the average Londoner knocked back a staggering 14 gallons each year.
Parliament eventually passed five major acts between 1729 and 1751, each designed to claw back control. The 1751 Act, the one that finally stuck, prohibited distillers from selling to unlicensed merchants, raised fees for small-time traders, and pushed gin out of the shadowy gin shops and into larger, more regulated establishments. By the time William Hogarth published Gin Lane that same year (image above), a famous piece of art depicting a gin-soaked mother letting her baby tumble down a flight of stairs, the craze was already dying.
By 1757, it was largely over. The spirit that had nearly broken London was tamed, legislated into respectability, lorded over by a handful of major producers. It stayed that way for nearly two centuries. Various progressions of the Act, including an 1823 excise tax, made it impossible for small distillers to legally make gin.
Two childhood friends, Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall, challenged this idea when they had the idea to start an artisan copper pot-based gin distillery along with master distiller Jared Hall.
https://sipsmith.com/After two years of lobbying and legal wrangling against British liquor authorities, the law was finally changed in 2008. In the spring of 2009, Sipsmith opened its distillery, the first small-batch, copper-pot gin operation to launch in London in almost 200 years.
The “ginaissance,” as Sipsmith cheekily calls it, was born.
Small-batch distillers began popping up across the capital. By 2017, what had been a mere 23 distilleries in England in 2010 had grown to 135. London’s bars followed, and a whole new culture of gin appreciation, including flights, botanicals, bespoke tonics, dried citrus, took hold.
This is how Chef Ted and I found ourselves at the Gin Parlor at Mr. Fogg’s Tavern in Covent Garden.
Gin Tasting in London at Mr. Fogg’s
Mr. Fogg’s Tavern, for the uninitiated, is part of a small chain of London bars built around the mythology of Phileas Fogg of Around the World in 80 Days fame. The décor is Victorian explorer meets steampunk fever dream: taxidermy alongside sextants, antique maps next to bottles of obscure spirits, model ships suspended above your head as though you might suddenly need them.
On our first visit to the main pub, Ted and I were seated next to a taxidermied fox in the window, our table located under a cluster of antique wooden planes. It is, in a word, a lot, but so charmingly done, I mean it as a compliment.
The Gin Parlor is the jewel of the collection. Tucked away behind a fake bookcase door and upholstered within an inch of its life, it houses over 200 gins, ranging from well-loved classics to bottles you’ve genuinely never encountered before, flanked by an impressive roster of tonics and botanicals.
The walls are crowded with trinkets, curiosities, and the accumulated oddities of an imaginary Victorian gentleman’s long career of adventure. It feels less like a bar than like someone’s very well-stocked, very eccentric study.
Ted and I sank into a pair of Victorian-style wingback chairs alongside a replica tall ship and a pair of vintage binoculars. We settled on two flights: the historical collection, and the fruity options.
Each flight is a one-ounce pour of three gins, which is precisely enough to feel educated without wandering out into Covent Garden in an uncertain condition. The historical flight began with a Dutch genever, the OG, the grandfather of all gin, malt-forward and faintly medicinal in the most interesting way. It then moved to an Old Tom, the sweeter style that had been fashionable back in those very 18th-century gin shops, and finished with a modern London Dry, a Bombay Sapphire, as a kind of clean resolution.
The fruity group offered gins infused with pomegranate, orange, and anise. Each came with a carefully paired garnish: dried rounds of blood orange, Meyer lemon, or naval orange, plus sprigs of bay leaf, rosemary, and thyme, arranged like a small, fragrant bouquet.
Our knowledgeable server walked us through the experience: taste each gin at room temperature first. Then add a piece of ice. Then, if so inclined, add the garnish, and finally, if adventurous, a slug of tonic.
I’ll be honest with you: warm gin is not my thing. Two of the fruity options tasted not unlike cough medicine at room temperature. The notable exception was Brockmans Kiss of Orange, a gin so peacefully resolved in its own identity that both Ted and I agreed it needed no embellishment whatsoever.
The ice cube was a revelation. The cold opened everything up, smoothed out the rough edges, and brought the botanicals forward in a way that felt almost miraculous. But the real discovery of the afternoon was the dried citrus garnish paired with each gin.
Left for a few minutes to slowly rehydrate in the gin, a slice of dried blood orange or Meyer lemon releases something extraordinary: concentrated flavor, a kind of intensified essence of the fruit that fresh citrus simply cannot replicate. It added depth and sweetness and a faint caramelized quality that transformed every glass, even the ones that had started out mediocre. By the time we added the tonic, even our least favorite pour had become genuinely pleasurable.
Ted and I looked at each other with the identical expression of people who have just learned something useful. From now on, we both resolved, dried citrus goes with gin. Always.
How to Dry Citrus for Cocktails
Slice up lemons, oranges, blood oranges, whatever you have. Lay them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment in a sow oven, around 140°F and leave them until dried, two to four hours, depending on thickness. Store them in a jar. Your future cocktails will thank you, and your guests will think you’ve been secretly trained by a Victorian apothecary.
This post is part of a series of travel tales from my time in Ireland and London in April 2026. Visit the main page for more stories. All images copyright Kathleen Flinn; the drying citrus image above was assisted by AI.
Leave a Reply