He goes: ‘this is what I think about the taste but here’s a load more information so that you can understand the human aspect of the distillery, the production, the provenance. Enter Dan Jones, bestselling gin author and cocktail enthusiast, who will make you love this tasty drink even more. I just read the opening bit, about him going downstairs and drinking his parents’ tonic when he was a boy and being hooked. Filled to the rim with history, how to’s, what for’s, drinking games, cocktail recipes and serving suggestions as well as a whole host of ‘gintellectual’ curiosites, The Little Book of Gin is ‘ginfinite’ in its revelry.

He ll take imbibers on a journey around the world to some of the top producers, uncovers new trends, and shares over 100 tasty recipes, from classic cocktails, batch drinks, new concoctions, homemade syrups and more, and answers all the gin questions you were afraid to ask. All images owned by Cooper King Distillery, The Old Stable, Stillington Road, Sutton-on-the-Forest, York, YO61 1EH.

I'm influenced by English folk horror, vintage queer-edged film and lit, heroes and monsters of legend, buddy movies, Indiana Jones, screenwriting, photography, tattoos, magic, sandwiches, and Australiana.

The Sky Wave Distillery, The North Tanker Sheds 105, Bicester Heritage, Bicester, Oxfordshire OX27 8AL.

There are a lot of good history tales about captains and adventurers who did just that to be able to propagate the seeds elsewhere. You’d drink it before battle and it would either numb the pain of what was about to happen or it would numb the senses to the fear of going to what was, essentially, certain death at that point. The base spirit always used to be cereal—though no longer, because you can make it from grape and all sorts of weird and wonderful things, even whey. I think one lady was excused for killing her husband and throwing him down the stairs because she had been made so senselessly drunk that it therefore incapacitated her ability to judge what was right and wrong. The book will entice both cocktail aficionados and students of socio-political change, as it chronicles gin's evolution from humble berry to modern alcoholic marvel.

The other guys are growing too but it’s very much these small producers all across the country that are taking gin to the next level and are seeing double digit growth year-on-year. When I look at, say, Olivia Williams’s book which is a nice read, or Lesley Jacobs Solmonson’s, which is also a good read, they’re really just summarizing similar content without necessarily covering any new ground.I’ve never really seen any evidence to say that it was cheaper than beer, which was widely commented on at the time. The big four or five gins that you can think of—Gordon’s, Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire etc—are still eighty percent of the market. Originally sought after for its host of medicinal properties, curing (almost) everything from the pestilence to malaria, gin has seen many peaks in its popularity.

Most people are more familiar with wheat or even grape-based spirits, which have been popularised through the big vodkas in France. It covers both distilling and cold compounding, providing advice on equipment and detailing step-by-step processes, whilst discussing a wide variety of gin production issues.I find it quite difficult because it’s one of those things where I can’t separate the people, the production and the place in which it’s made, to the end outcome. Gin and tonic as a cocktail is slightly different in that it has its roots in the colonial era, when they were mixing gin with quinine for the troops. Can you give an example of a bit of the history that you particularly like that people might not know about? You’ve got to remember that back then—and even before then, we’re talking about the 12th and 13th centuries—juniper had this ridiculous, medicinal, all-curing, all-conquering folklore about it. You can track it to South America, and then it was propagated in Indonesia predominantly by the Dutch, and then into Africa.