Tag: gin

Most of the world's gin is made as a botanical concentrate and reconstituted later with neutral spirit and water. The law permits it explicitly, a blind panel of 54 could not tell the difference, and the arithmetic is startling — in a 1:4 multi-shot, roughly seven-eighths of the finished bottle never shared a still with a juniper berry, and the single largest component is water added at the reduction tank.

Most of what a distiller boils is water — a spirit still charged at 25% ABV is three-quarters water by volume, and a gin still is charged at 40–60% ABV on purpose. Charge strength is a deliberate setting that governs reflux, extraction and safety, and the water used to set it is a process input with its own specification. Here is why distillers dilute before they distil, and what that water has to be.

Whisky gets the water debate, but it is the category that needs the least added water. A bottle of vodka is roughly 60% water a distiller poured in deliberately, and gin punishes a bad spec in ways an aged spirit can hide. Here is what the regulations require category by category, why unaged spirits are the least forgiving, and how to tell a botanical haze from a water fault.