For this instalment in our Blind Tasting series, we’ve gone way out west with a clutch of gins.
We asked five Perth bartenders to come down to Enrique’s School For To Bullfighting in Mt Lawley — well, six, if you count former bartender and Masterchef cook Jessica Arnott (and we do) — to give the gins the blind tasting onceover.
We were lucky enough to have bartenders from some of Perth’s best bars — Mechanics Institute, Varnish on King, Angel’s Cut, and The Flour Factory were all represented, as well as newcomer Late Night Valentines.
We were well looked after on the day thanks to Enrique’s manager, Phil Weber, and were lucky with the gins on taste for the day.
The standard was solid and impressed the panel, but there seemed to be a general trend: the more juniper-driven the gin, the more the bartenders seemed to like it.
One of the tasting notes for the Sipsmith London Dry Gin was this: “it tastes like gin.” That might sound redundant, but in a world in which just about any botanical can be thrown into the mix, when juniper is an afterthought in many gins, it seems that these bartenders were looking for a balls to the wall style of gin. Dial up the juniper, and, preferably the alcoholic proof, and they’ll happy.
That’s what the top rated gin from this tasting managed to do: the Sipsmith, again, was all gin: complex, juniper driven, with a traditional cast of botanicals.
And it was the 47% ABV Brokers London Dry that just missed out on the top gong, getting an equal four and a half stars, that offered very much the same thing: big, flavourful, straight-ahead gin. See the results below.
