Let me recall… I must have had my first drink six years ago, so how old were you guys when you first started drinking?
I remember the first drink I had was a bottled cocktail that was about 3% volume. At the time, I didn’t have a good understanding of alcohol, and I even stupidly thought that drinking was adult behaviour, so it was cool, but it was really childish. I tried whiskey, wine, vodka, sake… But above all, Gin became my favourite.
Friends would invite me to the bar for drinks to relax in my spare time, and I tried many kinds of cocktails, such as smoky, sour, sweet, and those sparkling wines with intense fruit flavours. Sour cocktails, like Zombie, of these flavours, especially grab my taste buds.
Now, I have combined Gin and sour to come up with my favourite alcoholic drink, Gin and Tonic. Every time I went to the pub, I would order a few glasses and ask for two more lemons from the bartender just to make it more sour.
Gin and Tonic has a history:
As one of the six base wines, Gin is known as the “heart of cocktail”, and it certainly has a long history. According to Wikipedia, Gin is a kind of western distilled liquor based on fermented and distilled grains, flavoured with various herbs and spices, mainly juniper berries. The name comes from one of its main flavouring ingredients, juniper berries, so it is often called Gin, but not all gin drinks use juniper berries as the main flavouring, for example, sloe gin.
In 1857, after the failure of the Great Indian Uprising, India became a British colony, and a large number of British went to India to colonize. Not only did India contribute taxes, tea, and mercenaries to the British Empire, but it also provided a plant, the Chinchona tree. This plant has saved tens of millions of lives in treating malaria. Moreover, quinine was too bitter to swallow, so British soldiers mixed it with Gin to reduce the bitterness. This was the original Gin Tonic. Later, to improve the taste of quinine, soda water was mixed with sugar, fruit extract and quinine to make tonic water.
This year, Sipsmith London Dry became the top-ranked Gin. And on the 16 Best Gins to Drink in 2022 list, my favourite Gordon’s Dry didn’t make the cut, and I feel sad about this… just joking.
Anyway, in another 10 years, I think the bubbly Gin and Tonic will still be in the first place in my heart.
