Bostonist Nerds Out With Beefeater Gin Master Distiller Desmond Payne

The challenge is, okay, what do you do that's different, that produces a different gin? And to make it sort of contemporary and modern so that—the great emergence of interest in cocktails, all over the world, really, you know, gin is definitely back.

There are really only two things that make one gin different from another. One is, what are the botanicals that the flavor comes from? The other is, then, how you make the gin. And anything else does have such significant impact as those two things.

So I thought, great, here's my chance. Help! What do I do? Where do I start?

[Four or five years ago], I was visiting southeast Asia, doing presentations to bartenders [and so forth]. You know how it is, at the end of the day, you like to relax with your favorite gin and tonic. And the trouble was, it wasn't the same, because the tonic water is different. In Japan they don't allow quinine, and that's what gives tonic its bite, its bitterness.

So I was kind of looking around for something else to put into my gin. The soft drinks that people were drinking were things like iced lemon tea. So I was putting that into my gin instead of tonic water, and it was a really nice balance.

So the inspiration for [Beefeater 24] was, why not use tea as a botanical rather than as a mixer? That was where I started... And I found that the green teas were the ones that worked.

Bostonist: Lately there's been a proliferation of black-tea-flavored products—Absolut Boston, which is vodka with black tea and elderflower, and there's this baffling profusion of sweet tea vodkas. So what was it about green teas?

Payne: The lack of tannins. And they have the right fragrance. My obvious, first thoughts were teas we're used to drinking—darjeeling and assam.

But I didn't want to make a tea gin. I just wanted to use tea as a botanical. I wasn't particularly interested in whether tea was fashionable or not—turns out it is—but I used it because the flavor works... To me, in gin, that little bite should come from the juniper. And tannin is a different bite.

If you just take the Beefeater recipe and add tea to it, you're going to throw it out of balance. I had to then look at all the other botanicals to see what-if. Because as well as tea, I also added grapefruit peel, a lot of citrus.

So, one of the botanicals used in Beefeater is angelica seed, which has brought that kind of hoppy, bittersweet note to it. It's the nearest thing to tea that we use already. So, the what-if was, if I'm putting tea in the gin, does the angelica seed complement the tea or get in the way of the tea, should I take the angelica seed out? If I put grapefruit in, do I cut back on the lemon?

I actually ended up using all the botanicals that are in Beefeater—not necessarily in the same proportion—and then identified a Chinese green tea, and the grapefruit peel, and it's very strange—tea almost acts as a catalyst. It changes the relationship between all the other botanicals, so that they work together in a different way. It took about 18 months, I suppose, of experimenting.

I then kind of needed some feedback, because I'd sort of done it on my own. Which was great, but it was a bit scary as well. So we put together two tasting panels, one in London, one in New York, of the sort of top gin experts. People like Audrey Saunders and Gary Regan and Sasha Petraske.

So, very good results from that, and a big sigh of relief from Desmond. The comment I got was, yeah, we like it, but we don't really get the tea from it. Which I don't particularly mind, but—so I went back and found another tea, a Japanese sencha tea—sencha teas are green teas where they steam the leaf to keep the chlorophyll green, and they have these beautiful aromas to them.

Bostonist: Were there any botanicals that you tried out that didn't work at all?

Payne: Oh, yeah. List as long as your arm.

Bostonist's friend and fellow gin sot J.D. McLawyerpants: There's a range of gin styles—juniper up front, or slightly sweeter gins… Where do you see Beefeater 24 in the spectrum of styles? Is it more of a mixing—

Payne: I think all gins need to be mixing gins. There are a lot of new gins coming to market and... quite a lot of the new style gins are adding things after distillation. Nothing wrong with that. I mean, distillation is quite a barrier to certain things happening. You can't get color, obviously. You can't get sweetness through distillation. But if you want your gin to be, for instance, blue and sweet, you've got to do something to it after distillation.

Bostonist: But that makes it not London Dry Gin, right?

Payne: That's the thing. The London Gin definition changed halfway through the development of [Beefeater 24]. Beefeater, if anything, it's authentic London Gin. Not only are we London Gin by definition, but we're in London. We're the only major brand of London Gin that's still made in London. All the rest are made somewhere else. Scotland…

Beefeater, we say a lot about our London-ness, so we'd better be a London Gin, that's for sure. And the new product is made with the classic London Gin method, but we've given it a more contemporary flavor profile. That's the art of it I think: to use traditional methods, but to create a new style. So, luckily, I was already down that road when the definitions—I was part of the definitions committee, so I guess that may have something to do with it!

There are some gins now that have taken the London Gin claim off their labels. Because they were doing something else. For better or worse.

McLawyerpants: Where do you see the future of gin? Do you see more distillers having their own take on it?

Payne: I hope so. I do from time to time meet my opposite numbers in other gin companies and, without naming any names, I met one distiller of a big brand of gin, and in conversation, I said something like, how are you finding this year's juniper harvest? And he said, oh, goodness, I don't get involved in that. That's all down my our procurement department.

I thought, oh, how sad. If you're not in control of what you're doing, and don't have that influence, it's very hard to get to the right end results. So I'm involved in buying all the botanicals...

The whole thing about the name, Beefeater 24, is that we steep our botanicals on the spirit twenty-four hours before we distill, to get more complexity out.

Bostonist: I was going to ask about how the twenty-four-hour steeping schedule works. I mean, do you have to go in on the weekend, if—

Payne [laughing]: Okay, I have to let you in to a little secret, then, don't I?

First of all, the reason we do it is that we do get more complexiy of flavor, and it holds together better. The flavors really stay there; they don't disappear too quickly, like they do sometimes when gin's made other ways.

But, yeah, the weekends. Thank goodness, we go home, and have fun, and drink gin.

So, ah, if we're going to make gin on a Monday, we've got two options. Someone goes in on Sunday and charges up the stills—no thank you. Or, we charge them up on Friday—which is what we do. So, umm, the gin we make on a Monday is slightly richer in flavor, because that's steeped for seventy-two hours or whatever it is. Then, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, what do—at the distillery we've got five gin stills, big pot stills. We alternate between steeping and distilling in each still, three and two, two and three. What we do for every distillate that we collect—we blend together a whole weeks production. So that "Monday gin" element is factored into the blend.

Sometimes our bottling friends jump up and down with excitement—sometimes—and say, oh, what about Monday gin? Wouldn't that be great? But you can't, because if you take that out of the blend, you're changing the blend.

Bostonist: Does anybody swipe little bottles of it and bring it home?

Desmond: Certainly not.

[Laughter]

It's a batch process, and every batch is slightly different. We've actually got two distilleries, back to back, as we've expanded over the years, and the two stills in the newer distillery are twice the size of the stills in the old distillery, and I can always detect a slight difference, a tiny, tiny difference. I can always say, that's the new distillery, that's the old distillery, but by blending, the same way we blend the juniper berries and everything else—it's all about keeping the end result the same. But by blending things together I also think you get more vitality about a product.

Bostonist: What do you find are your favorite cocktails to use the 24 in?

Payne: It has to work across the board. Gin that doesn't work with tonic water you may as well forget. But particularly, we see it as being used by this great modern generation of bartenders that are being innovative and experimental, and looking sometimes at classic cocktails but maybe with more of a modern twist to them, using fresh ingrediants—we see it very much working there.

Bostonist: So what's your go-to drink?

Payne: My favorite drink? Well… this works beautifully in a martini. At the distillery we actually tend to use Lillet rather than vermouth, so it's not strictly speaking a martini.

Bostonist: That's closer to a martini than lots of martinis nowadays.

Payne: My favorite cocktail, actually, is the Negroni. It's a good, serious drink.

I had a negroni last night with 24. It's different than making a Negroni with Beefeater dry, but it really works well, because it's that relationship between all the flavors, that's what makes it exciting...

I think what a gin needs to do is keep its tail up and have something to deliver after the juniper, and with Beefeater it's the licorice that gives it that smoother finish. With 24, right behind the juniper, I get some of the softer tannins coming through and then it picks up again. I think that's the trick, or the art, if you like, of making a decent gin, that you can give it that complexity, so it's not just a one-shot flavor.

Click through the gallery to see the party that Beefeater threw at Drink (348 Congress St., in Fort Point). And, if you really want to read more about sourcing botanicals or changing gin definitions, see the director's cut of this interview at the author's own blog.

J.D. McLawyerpants contributed to this post.