Deciding on the type of gin:
Today we will be looking into how to make your own gin, more specifically how to make a bathtub gin. The first step is to know what type of gin you want to make and to what purpose. Are you looking for a gin to drink neat, to mix with tonic or to be able to do multiple cocktails ?
For right now let’s assume that we want to make a bathtub gin for tonic and cocktails. We start with 4 or 5 ingredients apart from the juniper berries. The type of ingredients you choose will also depend on the aromas you wish to have, in general are you looking for.
For example fruity notes – such as citric, exotic fruit ? Floral notes – more delicate like jasmine or powerful like lavender ? Spicy notes – looking for sweet spices, spicy spices or flavourful spice ? Vegetal notes – herby feel ?
Making your homemade gin:
Materials needed:
– Kitchen pipette with drip.
– Vodka at 40/45%.
– Jars.
The easiest way to do this is to start with a Vodka, a highly purified grain or potato neutral alcohol spirit, with a sufficient alcohol content of 40 – 45%. This is the most neutral type of alcohol and will not add any unwanted flavour notes.
We will now make our basic macerations with the ingredients you have selected, this will be our motherboard. A motherboard is just alcohol maceration bases e.g. rosemary maceration – it’s to be able to understand the flavour profile each ingredient releases in a neutral alcohol such as vodka. It will allow you to construct your gin afterwards, by dosing certain amount of the macerated spirits.
For each ingredient that you have chosen, please weigh out 0.1to 0.5g to macerated in 20 ml of vodka (recommend using jars or a container with lids). You will the proceed to leave the maceration for 48 hours, after you will remove the ingredients from the vodkas and this will be your motherboard of spirits.
From this step forwards, you will have to use a pipette to combine all base spirits to build your gin.
Here is an example below, the total amount of drops for this gin is 10 drops:
– 3 drops of Juniper maceration.
– 2 drops of basil maceration.
– 2 drops of lemon maceration.
– 2 drop of coriander maceration.
– 1 drop of angelica maceration.
Conversions of drops to grams needed for 1L of Gin:
If this mixture suits you, you can keep the same proportions for your final products, for example, 3/10 of a litre of juniper berry maceration in the vodka, 2/10 of a litre of basil maceration in the vodka…… and so on.
Example of quantity calculation for the final product:
– Your basic juniper maceration is 0.3g per 20 ml.
– You want 3/10 = 300 ml of litre of Juniper maceration in the final product.
– You will need to put (0.3*300)/20= 4.5g of Juniper in the 300 ml of vodka.
