My Top Ten Gins of 2017

Another year has flown by and what a year it was! Both for gin as a whole and also for my more personal gin pursuits. It has, on the whole, been an outstanding year for the industry with sales reaching an all-time high and gin being declared the most popular spirit in the UK. But, with the highs of sales in excess of 47m bottles of gin, came the inevitable lows as people looked to sell out and cash in. The wonderful gin community rallied though and, desperate to protect our sacred spirit, the #StopFuckingWithGin hashtag was born! While The Pool asked if the gin joke had gone too far, and Gin Monkey – rightly – reminded us to use the hashtag with due respect, there were plenty of offenders who deserved little sympathy – such as gin and tonic tea bags, crisps and, quite possibly the worst of them all, G&T fun buns!

Continue reading

Turning Japanese with Dekantā

IMG_0013

Anyone who’s watched Lost In Translation, in which Bill Murray plays an aging American movie star in Tokyo to film an advertisement for Suntory whisky, will be familiar with the wonderful world of Japanese whisky. Dekantā have been specialists in this field since 1985, and have been selling Japanese whiskies online to enthusiasts worldwide since 2015. But the gin revolution has recently hit the shores of Japan and, thanks to Dekantā, we can now partake in that too.

Continue reading