Why gin and tonic

This opened the floodgates for independent gin-makers nationwide to crop up and put their own stamp on the gin market. Cocktails were once regarded as either for only the very rich or strictly for boozy nights out on summer holidays. But this has all changed in recent years with cocktail menus becoming the norm at restaurants, bars and even pubs nationwide.

Gin has fitted well into cocktail culture, as any gin fan will know its highly adaptable flavour makes it a perfect infusion for just about any cocktail. And oftentimes only a splash is needed to shape a cocktail, making it an affordable addition to the cocktail scene.

One of the great things about gin is that it is highly versatile and really quite exciting. Depending on the manner of which it is distilled and processed, it can take on many different strengths, tones and tastes. Delicious popular infusions include: aniseed, orange peel, lavender and vanilla pods.

Gin tastings have cropped up all across the UK, allowing guests to experiment with their own botanical gin creations. Gin has long been part of British culture. The more likely truth is that the creation of quinine beverages simply came about organically over a longer period of time, owing to the recurring theme of humanity steeping medicinal ingredients in booze to market and use as tonics. Medicinal motives aside, the mixture mirrors one of the foundational flavor balances cocktail mixing, one found in everything from the Old Fashioned to the Manhattan and Negroni : spirits, sugar and bitters.

A pink gin, gin flavoured with some dashes of Angostura bitters, was the preferred drink of naval officers at sea. Fever-Tree Tonic Water. Fentimans Premium Indian Tonic Water. Matthew Hartings hates gin. He also hates tonic. Tonic is nothing but water mixed with quinine and sugar. Carbonated tonic water came later. During the Raj, when British soldiers were supposed to ingest very bitter quinine as an anti-malarial, they realized sugar, water, and gin would make it palatable.

The answer is in the underlying chemistry. Hartings explains that the chemicals responsible for the flavors in gin and in tonic, although different from each other, nonetheless come in two kinds of broadly similar chemical structures—the reds and the purples in the diagram below. Similar types of molecules attract each other, and dissimilar molecules repel each other just like oil and water. In the figure above, the purple molecules are like flat pieces of cardboard, which creates attraction between them, whereas the reds are more like out-of-shape cartons, and attract other reds.

The reds in gin attract the reds in tonic, and the same with the purples. The attraction between these molecules creates aggregates, which taste different from how the substances taste on their own. What you need: standard highball glass, 1.