The Proper Gin

Anthony Lane writes in The New Yorker:

Beryl is the one and only still at 58 Gin, a small but purposeful firm, founded by an Australian named Mark Marmont, in 2014, and now tucked away down a mews in the East End of London. You go through an archway, and there, at the rear of the premises, stands Beryl, a steampunk dream in copper and steel. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would probably ask yourself why the brass, woodwind, and timpani sections of the London Symphony Orchestra had been moved to the lair of a Bond villain.

On the left is a pot, as bulbous as a genie and as big as an igloo. Polished to a blinding shine, it can hold four hundred and fifty litres. There’s a lockable metal hatch, which swings open, as if to admit a deep-sea explorer. (Marmont is a former dive instructor. He must feel right at home.) Down the hatch you tip your personal potpourri of ingredients; inside, they mingle politely with near-pure ethanol and demineralized water. Once heated, the mixture emits vapor, which steams out of the top of the pot and passes through a network of pipes, cooling as it goes, and eventually emerging, from a column on the right, as a clear liquid. This you dilute. And that, give or take a hundred adjustments, and a few perspiring years of practice, is how you bring gin—proper gin—into being.

I’ve always loved the distinctive taste of gin.