The Winter holiday season is coming up and this year most of us can’t socialize indoors with extended family and friends as we would like. But there will be modified visits and gifts. Where you might ordinarily give a bottle of wine as a host gift, for just a little more money you can give a far more interesting gift of a small bottle of Canadian artisanal gin. 375mL bottles are available from some of the best distillers who delivery directly, meaning it’s available to everyone across the country. So support small Canadian distillers! And order early as the shipping streams may get extra clogged this holiday season.
I love that each of these gins also has a strong terroir element, expressing the botanical and agricultural environment of their origins. Find a gift for your friend from West coast with Schramm’s or Evolve, and for those from the West Coast, Gin Royal, or one of the other options from Compass Distillers. Full reviews for each of these are in progress here at Gin Social.
- Schramms’s is probably the best Canadian gin, and inexpensive too! Herbal, smooth, even luscious — with a particular body and what I can only call a yumminess from the potato base. You can’t go wrong with this one. I bought a few small bottles in the Summer to justify the shipping costs for tasting from larger bottles. (Fortunately the base price is low.) Only one of those gift-sized bottles actually became a gift and the rest were used to host people for outdoor socializing — always making a sensation. Schramm’s makes the most amazing hot toddy, especially if you use fresh bay cordial as your syrup and lime instead of lemon. Schramm’s also demonstrates one of the newest trends in gin — the herbal — and it may be unlike anything you or your friends may have had but it’s still clearly a gin. Such new herbal flavours inspired the innovation of a sixth division on the flavour diagram for The Gin is In.
- Gin Royal from Compass in Nova Scotia, who also offer sample-sized bottles suitable for a couple of drinks. They have 6 gins plus a Genever, and I’ve barely cracked the range, but Gin Royal seems to be their headliner and it is interesting and pleasing in multiple ways. Terroir elements come from local botanicals and touches of honey and royal jelly. The flavour is lightly spicy and the blue colour, from butterfly pea flower, makes for all sorts of fun cocktail play — as much for the bartender as for the imbiber.
- Another blue gin, with a different terroir expression, is Evolve Gin, with a base spirit distilled from Okanagan apples. It’s probably the fruitiest gin I’ve tasted yet. Although the apple base remains in the background to its floral and herbal elements, that fruitiness lends an excellent character to cold-weather drinks. The other Okanagan gins are available in 375mL too, and so far I quite like them. But Evolve has my heart: it plays charmingly on its colour changing properties with a gender equality theme. Feminist gin! I’m sold.
All of these make great Hot Toddies or Negronis, because (say it with me) gin is not just a summer drink! And for New Year’s they are great in a French 75.
Gin Social 