The History of Gin: Medicine, Madness and the Martini
Gin has lived more lives than any spirit I know. It has been a medicine, a national disaster, a naval ration, and a symbol of glamour. Most articles tell you one or two chapters. Here is the whole book, including the parts almost nobody tells.
It Started as Medicine
Long before anyone drank juniper for fun, they used it as a cure. Ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls mention juniper as medicine. During the Black Death, plague doctors filled the beaks of their famous masks with juniper, believing it would protect them from the disease. And here is a fact most gin lovers never learn: the juniper "berry" is not a berry at all. Juniper is a conifer, like a pine tree, and the berry is actually a tiny, soft cone.
By the 11th century, monks in Salerno, Italy were already distilling juniper into medical tonics. The idea travelled north, and in the Netherlands it became something bigger.
Genever and Dutch Courage
The Dutch turned juniper spirit into a national drink called genever. The famous Bols family began distilling as far back as 1575. When British soldiers fought alongside the Dutch against Spain in the late 1500s, they noticed the Dutch drinking small glasses of genever before battle, and they noticed the calm that followed. They called it "Dutch courage," and they took the habit home.
The English shortened the word genever to something easier to say after a few glasses: gin.
The King Who Flooded London with Gin
In 1689, a Dutch king, William of Orange, took the English throne. He did two things that changed drinking history: he blocked French brandy (England's enemy at the time) and he made it easy for anyone in England to distil spirits. The result was a flood. Within a generation, London was producing unbelievable amounts of cheap, rough gin. At the peak, roughly one in four households in some parts of London was making or selling it.
The Gin Craze: When a City Nearly Drank Itself to Death
The first half of the 1700s is one of the darkest chapters in the history of any drink. Gin was cheaper than beer and safer than the water. London's poor drank it in shocking amounts, and Parliament panicked. They tried four times to stop it:
The 1729 Gin Act brought heavy taxes and licences. It failed: there were simply too many gin sellers to police.
The 1736 Gin Act banned small sales completely. The result was riots in the streets and a huge black market. Within seven years, gin production actually rose by a third.
The 1743 Act tried the opposite: lower taxes, cheaper licences. The black market died, but the drinking did not.
Only the 1751 Act, with tighter rules on who could sell, finally began to slow the madness.
Here is my favourite unknown story from this era. When the 1736 ban made selling gin illegal, a man named Dudley Bradstreet invented a trick: a wooden cat mounted on a wall in Covent Garden. You put a coin in the cat's mouth, whispered "Puss, give me two pennyworth of gin," and gin poured out of a pipe under its paw. It was called the Puss and Mew machine, and it was, in effect, the world's first vending machine. Invented to sell illegal gin.
The human cost was real. In 1734, a woman named Judith Defour murdered her own child to sell its clothes for gin money. In 1751, the magistrate Henry Fielding warned that if gin drinking continued, there would soon be "few of the common people left to drink it." That same year, William Hogarth published his famous engraving Gin Lane, showing a London destroyed by gin (he published a happy twin picture, Beer Street, to show beer as the "healthy" choice). This is when gin earned its darkest nickname: mother's ruin.
Old Tom: The Gin Named After a Cat
Between the rough gin of the Craze and the clean gin of today sits a forgotten style: Old Tom, a slightly sweetened gin. Sugar hid the rough edges of poorly made spirit. The name likely comes from those black cat signs on pub walls. If you see Old Tom on a menu today, it is usually in a Tom Collins, the cocktail literally named for it. You can read about all the gin categories in Different Styles of Gin.
Technology Cleans Gin Up
In the 1830s, the Coffey still arrived (the same invention that transformed whisky, as I explained in The Complete History of Whisky). For gin, it changed everything: suddenly distillers could make a clean, pure base spirit. There was no longer any need to hide flaws with sugar. The dry, elegant style we now call London Dry was born, and gin moved upmarket into the glittering, gaslit "gin palaces" of Victorian London.
The Empire, the Navy, and Three Drinks Born as Medicine
Gin's next chapter was written far from London, and almost every classic gin drink from this era began as medicine:
The Gin & Tonic. In colonial India, the only protection against malaria was quinine, which tastes horribly bitter. British officers mixed it with sugar, water, and their gin ration. Winston Churchill is said to have joked that the gin and tonic saved more English lives than all the doctors in the Empire.
The Gimlet. Royal Navy sailors mixed gin with lime juice to fight scurvy. Simple, effective, delicious.
Pink Gin. Navy officers added Angostura bitters to gin as a cure for seasickness.
The Navy connection goes deeper: gunpowder-proof "Navy Strength" gin at 57% still exists today, and I explain why 57% matters in Different Styles of Gin.
Glamour, Prohibition, and the Long Sleep
At the start of the 20th century, the Gin Martini gave the old slum drink something new: glamour. Then American Prohibition (1920 to 1933) gave gin a strange second boost. When people made illegal spirits at home, they made "bathtub gin," because juniper flavour was the easiest way to hide the taste of bad alcohol. History repeating itself.
After the Second World War, vodka slowly stole gin's place behind the bar, and for decades gin was seen as an old person's drink. The category went to sleep.
The Craft Revival: Gin's Best Chapter Yet
The wake-up call came from two directions. In 1999, Hendrick's dared to build a gin around cucumber and rose. And in 2009, a tiny London distillery called Sipsmith fought a legal battle to win the first new copper-still licence in London for almost 200 years. The law changed, the doors opened, and thousands of small distilleries followed worldwide.
Today gin is made everywhere, and it carries its home with it: Ki No Bi in Kyoto distils with yuzu and green tea, Inverroche in South Africa uses fynbos plants that grow nowhere else on Earth, and in Germany's Black Forest, one distillery packs 47 botanicals into a single bottle. That one has my favourite founding story in all of spirits: read The Distillery I Will Never Forget: Monkey 47.
From plague masks to craft cocktail bars: gin's story is proof that no drink has fallen lower or climbed higher. And it all still depends on one small cone pretending to be a berry. That story is here: Gin & Juniper Relationship.
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