An evening making gin under Bristol

At the back of a tiny Christmas Steps shop, down a small spiral staircase and inside a candle-lit cavern, there’s a feeling of a séance hanging in the air as strangers crouch around a long wooden table in nervous silence.

The vaulted cellar is dim and bare. Dark green lamps and patchwork plaster walls leave a touch of the clandestine.

It’s perfect for a night of effective bootlegging; for spread out in front of the £20-a-head punters are tiny bottles of clear white spirits with handmade labels, funnels, laboratory pipettes, notepads and pens – everything, as it turns out, you need to devise your own gin.

Don’t worry, it’s entirely legal, we’re told. This is the second gin-making session to be held underneath Weber & Tring’s, an off licence oddity where brand names are frowned upon and rare, handmade liquors from around the world are celebrated like trophies on the bustling shelves.

Gin: Make Your Own was an unexpected addition to the fully-booked calendar of spirit tastings, stuffed into September after the first event was overwhelmingly oversubscribed.

That so many people want to cram into this tiny basement for whatever booze is being served is not just a testament to how much people in Bristol like drinking, but also how much the city likes its drink – if you know what I mean.

Over the past five or so years the city’s fine drinking culture has been gently growing, partnered by the emergence of a string of speakeasy-type bars – including this shop’s sister establishment, Red Light – and the rise of Bristol Cocktail Week.

The high-end drinking culture which used to be the preserve of the London crowd is now very much part of the fabric of Bristol. Even some of the top bartenders are fleeing the capital to the West Country (see Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

Not Dee Davies though, who steps down into the cavern, head a-cock to avoid the staircase, to take the gin-making class. Dee has worked her way up through Hermanos, the Milk Thistle and Hyde & Co, before moving to Red Light at the end of last year.

But during this time, she has also fulfilled the dream of many a bartender – to produce her own spirit; gin, of course.

Through an Apprentice-style competition by drinks conglomerate Diageo, she spent weeks at a boot camp in Scotland mixing her own flavours to produce Jinzu, a Japanese-influenced gin mixing juniper and coriander, with yuzu, citrus and cherry blossom, and a finishing touch of distilled Junmai sake. The drink is on sale upstairs, of course, and at a number of bars and off licences in the city and beyond.

This evening, many of those flavours are on the long table in front of us, as Dee explains when she begins the class.

The theory is very simple. Choose your flavours, which come in the form of powerful distillates. You only need a few drops for every 200ml bottle of gin you make. Also: don’t drink the distillates straight “unless you don’t want any taste buds left in your mouth”.

The tiny drops are mixed in practice shots with half juniper distillate and half grain neutral spirit (like vodka), with the ratios jotted down on notepads provided. It’s all very GCSE science class. But made funner, of course, by the Jinzu gin and tonic with shot of Jinzu chaser to get the taste buds going.

Once the ratios are worked out and everyone around the table has created something which doesn’t make them retch, it’s time to bottle up. The gin is made in a little bottle which is yours to keep.

It only needs a name and a label – easy, when you’ve been tasting your way through the process. Oh, and the concept. Not so easy.

Gurt Gin was snapped up early as we pitched our new products around the table. A Bristol-influenced gin with pokey flavours of rose water, coriander and lemon to represent the city’s character, according to its maker

The Gin was a less inventive name. The concept was not memorable.

And then there was the Messy Gin, named after the mess on the table its tipsy creator had made during its conception. Classy.

There were better ones. If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Try A-Gin raised some eyebrows, forced some grimaces and went over some people’s heads. The concept was something about how hard it was to make the gin, probably.

And mine? Well, being a news man, I had to commemorate the biggest story of the week. Thanks, Dave.

Read about what’s coming up at Bristol Cocktail Week.

Main Picture from Weber & Tring’s.