How to make Gin at home

Today I'm going to show you how to make a really beautiful but simple distilled gin using a small copper still designed for home use. We'll keep the process as straightforward as possible and I want to show you how you can go from your ingredients to a finished gin in about an hour and a half all in one go. So I actually start off my tasting menu with a homemade gin and tonic as a welcome drink and I flavour mine with herbs from the garden that I vacuum distill, which is a more complex process than the one we're going to use today and is something that I've already made a separate video about. But specifically today I want to focus on the simplest possible method for making a distilled gin and that's what I'm going to teach you. I'm going to show you a recipe that's really beautiful and flavourful and will consistently give you fantastic gin and it can also act as a start point for designing your own gins and working with your own preference of flavours too. And I want to get straight into the method so there are some other things I want to talk about, some of the practicalities, legalities and more advanced methods but we'll talk about them at the end and get straight into making some gin. So let's talk about the flavours and the botanicals first and obviously with a gin juniper is our key botanical and then you can either add just a couple or a lot of other flavours to go along with and complement that. I'm going for a meadowy, summery flavour profile in this gin and so I'm using botanicals that suit that like meadowsweet, elderflower and chamomile as well as getting citrus from ingredients like orange and then a little bit of spice from black pepper and Sichuan pepper. Now if you want to work with other flavours you absolutely can, I'd suggest making this version first and then choosing how you might want to adapt it and then you could either remove some ingredients and add others in or adjust the amounts to make a gin that's got a flavour profile that you particularly enjoy. And I just want to note too that we're using quite large amounts of some of these botanicals and that's because they're not getting pre-infused into the alcohol before distillation, everything's all going to go into the still in one go and then be distilled straight away. So you could make a more efficient gin and use slightly less of the botanicals if you decided to pre-infuse them into the alcohol for an amount of time but I wanted to show you how you could make something that you decide to make, get everything together and then you could have that same evening finished. And the alcohol that I'm going to use here is a neutral grain alcohol that's diluted down to 45 ABV and so you could do the same and use a neutral grain alcohol if that's easily available to you or if not you could use a vodka as your base alcohol. Now with our botanicals and alcohol we're going to do a one-shot distillation and this is really the simplest possible method for making a distilled gin. The only thing simpler than this would be making a compound gin where you would just infuse flavours directly into alcohol and then filter it but not distill it. Simple infused compound gins shouldn't just be dismissed either, I regularly make a lemon verbena infused gin and that is so delicious and summery and fresh but these compound gins, their flavour does change over time, they're not as stable as a distilled gin and they can also foam up when added to carbonated drinks so distilled gins have a number of advantages. We're going to use a small copper still to make the one-shot distilled gin that I'm making today so I'll quickly introduce you to that and the other couple of key bits of equipment you'll need. I use a small 3 litre copper still and I'll put a link to where you can buy these in the video description. They're relatively inexpensive, mine was about £300 and I tend to distill about a litre of gin at a time with it. The other two things that you'll need are likely a small pump to pump chilled water over the condensing coils where the gin is going to condense after it's been distilled. I use an aquarium pump and again I'll put a link to that in the description and you're also going to need an alcohol refractometer or some other way of measuring the alcohol content of your finished gin because you are really going to want to know that and be able to dilute it back to the appropriate level especially if you don't want to end up accidentally hammered. Now to distill our gin we're going to start off by placing our botanicals and our alcohol in the pot. I will list all of the amounts and give the full recipe down in the video description so you can work from that. I'm going to start off with a litre of neutral grain alcohol, my juniper, lemongrass, meadowsweet, chamomile, coriander seeds that are lightly crushed, elderflower, woodruff, lightly cracked black pepper, some dried orange, some dried lemon zest, a little orris root powder and a touch of Szechuan pepper. Then like I mentioned before we're going to distill this straight away. If you wanted to adapt the recipe in the future and use less of the botanicals you could let this infuse for 12 to 24 hours first but we're going to distill with everything in the pot immediately. So I set the small heater underneath my still to about 50% to start off with. I want to gently warm up all the ingredients together and just gently increase the temperature in the still. I'll let that temperature slowly rise to about 78 degrees which is where we'll start to see distillation with alcohol vapours evaporating, travelling through the swan neck and condensing in the coils. Now because we're using a neutral grain alcohol that's already been distilled we don't have to worry about things like methanol, you're not going to get anything really nasty in your distillation here but I still like to cut the first 10ml or so of the distillation because I find the flavours that we first get coming off the distillation are the most volatile and aren't necessarily what I'm looking for in my gin. Then I'm going to leave my gin to continue to slowly distill and you can increase the temperature on your heater if you need to. Now we're not going to do multiple different cuts from this distillation, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible. So whilst we will cut that first 10ml that comes out of the still we're then going to collect the next 600ml that we get and that's going to be what we work with to make our gin. What's left over in the still, the last 400ml or so of liquid, we're going to count as our tails which we don't want to use, it doesn't really have that much in the way of flavour and the flavours can be sort of muddier by the time you get to the end of the distillation. So having collected our 600ml back from the distillation this should now smell really aromatic but it's also going to be a really strong high proof alcohol. So now we're going to dilute this back to about the level we want for our gin and typically I aim for about 42 ABV but you could go anywhere really in the range of 40-45 depending on your preference and how you want to use it. This is where I'll use a tool to measure the ABV and make sure that it's where I want it and then once it is, this can be bottled and it's ready to store and use however you want. Generally the gin's better after it's sat for a couple of days, the flavours kind of settle and meld in a nice way but if you're just super excited that your gin has just come out of the still and you've just diluted it, obviously you can make a drink with it straight away if you want. So to serve this I had some ice in the freezer that I've just quickly cut down to pour the gin over and then because I made this gin with summery meadow flavours, I'm going to garnish it with flowers from the garden. The last couple of things I should talk about are some of the practicalities and I think legality is probably something people would have questions about. So here I actually have a rectifier's licence and this licence allows me to do gin distillations like this using alcohol that's had its duty paid and that I've bought in and it wasn't difficult to get the rectifier's licence although I did have to submit a plan of my kitchen and details about what I was doing to the UK government. Depending where you are in the world, you are going to have to check what your local regulations are. These seem to vary quite a lot from country to country so I would be cautious that you make sure you know what you're getting into before you just jump into this. So of course there's some safety and practicality issues that you should be aware of. Anytime you're dealing with alcohol vapour and heat, you've got to be really careful because that can be a recipe for explosions or fires and I know a fantastic gin maker who was caught in an explosion and it really sounds like something you want to absolutely avoid. So with these smaller stills, you are dealing with smaller volumes of alcohol but it can still potentially be dangerous, you could still start a fire so you need to make sure that you're being really safe and that you know what you're doing and I would hate to think of anyone getting injured trying this. So please see this video as an introduction and an example of how to make a nice gin but if you are going to get into this, do extra research, make sure you're doing everything safe, make sure that you've covered what the legalities and the safety implications are and done your research thoroughly. And then if you wanted to move beyond this into some more advanced techniques, the next thing I'd suggest experimenting with is different degrees of pre-infusing your alcohol before it's distilled and seeing how that affects the flavour as well as the amounts of the botanicals that you use. And then if you're interested and you really wanted to look at jumping to another more technical level, I've done a number of videos on how I use vacuum distillation, low temperature distillation using the rotary vacuum evaporator and that's how I make the gin that I serve at the start of my tasting menu. So thanks very much for watching and I'll see you soon.