It is one of the booze industry’s great reinventions: a spirit once seen as the preserve of the old and the posh, become the hipster tipple of choice. And this year, as enthusiasts celebrate the seventh annual World Gin Day, distillers are also jubilant that exports of UK gin have risen by more than a third in the last four years, reaching a record £394m in 2014.
Yet as the quintessentially English drink’s fortunes have soared, boosted by a rash of craft distillery openings and premium offerings from the big brands, its key ingredient has been in peril onEnglish shores.
Juniper – which by law must be the dominating flavour for a drink to be classed as gin – has been in decline in England for decades, thanks to milder winters, air pollution and hungry rabbits; the conservation charity Plantlife has warned it could be extinct across much of lowland England by 2060. The juniper used in English gin comes almost exclusively from overseas – mainly Italy and the Balkans.
But on the precipitous slopes of Box Hill in Surrey, where only a handful of bushes remain on the scenic Juniper Top and Juniper Bottom areas, the National Trust countryside manager, Andy Wright, and chartered engineer-cum-ginmaker Neil Beckett are trying to boost the native juniper harvest.
In return for being allowed to harvest berries for Becketts Gin from the Duke’s area, where between 60 and 70 bushes have survived, Beckett – more used to designing carbon monoxide alarms and professional audio gear – is financing an ambitious scheme for the Forestry Commission to propagate 200 juniper seedlings that can eventually be planted out on Juniper Top and Bottom. He believes his gin is the only one in the world to use the slightly tarter English berries (admittedly topped up with juniper from Macedonia).
Balanced beside a ferociously prickly bush on a hillside, Wright admits his initial reaction to Beckett’s request to pick the berries was “no chance mate”. Not only is juniper a protected species, but Box Hill is a protected habitat. The plan they eventually hatched needed the consent of Natural England.
It’s a lengthy business: it takes a year for seedlings to emerge and then they need another year in the nursery before they’re ready for planting. But letting juniper take its chances in the wild has left it vulnerable, not least because – in Wright’s words – it’s a bit of a diva. “If you’ve got very exacting requirements you’re always going to be rare, whereas if you roll with the punches a bit you’re more likely to be common,” he explains. “Juniper’s got everything going against it.”
That includes the female plants’ tendency to catch not the male pollen intended for them, but pollutants that block off their receptors, preventing pollination. Seeds that do get pollinated need to be eaten by birds and come out the other end to remove a tough outer layer, and then need to go through two frosts. And the hurdles don’t stop there. Wright points to a stunted and wizened bush nearby. “The other problem is, it’s delicious to rabbits,” he says. “Little buggers.”New seedlings at Box Hill will be protected by rabbitproof cages.
Since 2009, when Sipsmith became the first new copper distillery to open in London since 1820, more than 35 micro-distilleries have sprung up around the country, as well as numerous specialist gin bars.
Cocktail blogger Emma Stokes (aka Gin Monkey), who runs World Gin Day, puts the spirit’s revival down to the popularisation of 1930s-style cocktails like martinis and French 75s in shows such as Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire. “People have looked to books like the Savoy Cocktail Book and 60% to 70% of the recipes use gin; vodka wasn’t available.”
Gin’s heritage also helps explain demand, Stokes says: “A good story will always help you sell your product.” Plus, it can be made quickly: you can distill gin in just eight hours, a doddle compared to ageing a whisky for 10 to 12 years.
Last October, Wright and Beckett handpicked 500g of berries but all the seeds turned out to be empty. This autumn they will try again. Wright, now a self-professed juniper nerd, remains optimistic: “Juniper can live for over a century, so it might just save a viable population for many, many years.”
