Ginpourium Gin Fight – Round 2 – Butler’s Gin

Round 2 – Gin Dandy, Jam & Ginger

This was a really interesting cocktail comprising of Butler’s Gin, ginger ale, jam and ginger syrup and beer from Deviant & Dandy.

Deviant & Dandy is made up of a team of three; Byron Knight Head Deviant, (who it must be said, has a truly unique and incredible dress sense!) Rupert Selby Head Dandy and Ben Taub Head Fixer.  With varying backgrounds, one thing they do have in common is beer, and good stuff it is too!  Their first beer was a pale ale called Trust and they have followed up with two others, an American style larger called Steve and Strange Brew, which was based on a cream larger recipe.  The artwork on their cans is bright, bold, rather psychedelic and has a fascinating lure to it.  I wish these guys much luck for the future, they deserve every success!  The Deviant & Dandy blog is a great read too, so you really ought to head over and check it out.

Butler’s Gin was established in 2012 by Ross William Butler and was originally inspired by a Victorian recipe and developed aboard Fletcher, a trusty speedboat.  The flavour of Butler’s Gin is achieved using infusion bags, which contain organic lemongrass, cardamom, star anise, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, lemon, lime and fennel.  These bags are placed into each 20 litre batch of base gin and are left to infuse for 18 hours, before being hand bottled and signed by The Butler.  Describing itself has having a light, crisp character and with a suggested garnish of cucumber, I was interested to see how this gin would stand up in a cocktail with such a dominating flavour.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of ginger, Hubby on the other hand is, but in the name of the Gin Fight I decided to give it a go…plus I was really intrigued as to how they were going to get the beer into it!

First ice, then the gin, (obviously,)…no beer yet, next the jam and ginger syrup, topped up with ginger ale…still no beer.  Then came the beer, added on at the end as a frothy foam top.  We were given instructions on how to drink the cocktail to get the most out of it.

“Take a sip of cocktail, then lick the foam.”

I’m not sure I’d had enough gin for this, but what the heck!  So, a good slurp of cocktail and then a rather awkward lick of the foam, but the chap wasn’t wrong, it was delicious…and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t like ginger!!  The sweetness of the jam and the sharpness of the lemongrass, lemon and lime from the gin really cut through the ginger, that teamed with the slight bitterness of the foam, WOW, it really did work!  Interestingly Hubby didn’t enjoy this one so much, he found it a little too sweet, he’s more a fan of the spicier, more peppery gins, or really dry ones.

Overall a great cocktail, and I did love the quirk of it having a beer foam top.

For a full rundown of my day out at The Ginpourium please click here