The Distillery, 186 Portobello Rd, London W11 1LA, UK
Portobello Road Competitive Gin Distillery
The Ginstitute
Join us at The Ginstitute for an in-depth journey through gin’s colourful and checkered past. Your Ginstructor will guide you through the history of gin in through the years, explain the flavours each botanical contains so you can make your very own bespoke bottle to take home with you.
The Ginstitute Experience
£120 pp
Join us at The Ginstitute for an in-depth journey through gin’s colourful and checkered past; from its creation by the Dutch, its journey across the sea with William of Orange, to Hogarth & his gin lane, finishing with the golden era of gin. Once sufficiently briefed, your Ginstructor will guide you through the blending process as you nose your way through an eclectic range of pure botanical distillates and choosing your favourites to create your own bespoke blend of gin. You’ll be lubricated by a multitude of our favourite gin cocktails along the way before leaving the session with a bottle of your own personal blend to take home and enjoy.
Rated 5* experience by Tripadvisor with over 130,000 attendees making their own personal gin. All our custom gins are kept on file to reorder as required.
THE EXPERIENCE
The Ginstitute Experience
Now On Tour
On the day of your visit to The Ginstitute please get yourself to your chosen location at least 10 minutes before your session starts to ensure your party sits together. Announce yourself at the bar and team will be sure to direct you to the correct location to start the experience.
Meet & Greet
Once all the guests have arrived downstairs you will be greeted by your Gin Instructor. Ginstitute attendee numbers have been reduced to allow for appropriate physical distancing. Each table will be supplied with a bottle of hand sanitiser. There will be a Tom Collins ready and waiting for you to enjoy and your host will then explain to the group the format of the next few hours, if you’ve read this you can just ignore them.
A History Lesson in Gin
For the first hour of your session the Gin Instructor will take you through the long, and frequently miserable, history of gin. From the drinks origins as a medicine through the gin craze which gripped Britain for 200 years and onto the Golden Era of gin as a cocktail ingredient and finally to how gin has taken its position in the modern world and the ‘ginaissance’ it is currently.
How Gin is Made
Once you’ve met King Henry, our illustrious 400L copper pot still and his diminutive roommate, Copernicus The Fourth (don’t ask about the other three), your gin instructor will explain to you the processes involved in creating gin and give a quick overview of the many rules and regulations which gin producers are obliged to abide.
Get to Know the Botanicals
Now it is time to get a little more hands on (in a covid-19 compliant way of course), and noses on as well, as you will be given a tutored tasting and nosing of the botanicals that are available to you, some will be familiar to you from the worlds of cuisine, perfume and confectionary, others less so. This is where you really get to understand the impact on your gin that the selection of these ingredients is going to have. Each guest will have their own personal box of botanicals, ensuring no sharing of any equipment or ingredients and perspex screens have been installed for physical distancing.
Craft Your Own Gin
Having made your selections, your Gin Instructor will now assist you in blending the various distilled botanicals together to create your completely unique recipe. A full bottle of this will be assembled which each guest of The Ginstitute is able to take home with them at the end of the night. This recipe is also recorded on our database which means that additional bottles can be purchased via the website at any point in the future.
Graduation
Once each of the guests present has created and received their blend of gin you’ll all be given one last cocktail, usually a Martini if you’re feeling up to it, and we’ll also present you with a bottle of our personal blend to take away, which of course went on to become Portobello Road Gin.
Our Story
In late 2011, nestled above a 19th century drinking on London’s world famous Portobello Road, three longtime friends; Ged Feltham, Jake Burger & Paul Lane decided, after amassing a staggering collection of gin and alcoholic artifacts to open The Ginstitute, London’s premier educational institute and home to Copernicus II a 30L alembic copper pot still.
It was here that whilst putting together this experience, which has since become one of the world’s leading gin experiences, that these three Messrs noted that if they were going to provide the opportunity to blend ones own gin, then it really wouldn’t be complete without a gin which could call The Ginstitute home.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
THE GINSTITUTE
Nestled away on the top two floors of a 19th century public house on London’s world famous Portobello Road is The Ginstitute: London’s second-smallest museum and home to our 30L alembic still, Copernicus the Second.
It was here, whilst putting together The Ginstitute, that Ged, Jake and Paul decided that if they were going to provide this experience it really wouldn’t be complete without a gin which could call The Ginstitute home.
OUR BOTANICALS
Our base spirit is distilled here in England from English-grown wheat. Our nine botanical ingredients come from around the world; these include juniper berries and orris from Tuscany, Spanish lemon peels, bitter orange peels from Haiti or Morocco, nutmeg from Indonesia and cassia bark from South East Asia.
NO. 171 – OUR LONDON DRY GIN
CRAFTING PORTOBELLO ROAD GIN
In the nine months of experimentation that followed the character of the gin was slowly created – a little more of this, a little less of that, this one makes a nice Martini, that one makes a nice Negroni, well you get the picture. Slowly but surely something we could be proud of emerged. Thus Portobello Road No 171 Gin was born.
THE PERFECT BLEND
Bottled at a punchy 42% ABV these ingredients combine to create a uniquely versatile gin, with enough of those robust gin flavours like juniper, citrus and coriander to make a gin & tonic that tastes of gin not just of tonic, enough elegance to work in a Martini and because of the spices we use, enough depth of character and intensity to work in drinks like the Negroni or the multitude of modern cocktailian creations where it’s going to come up against other powerful flavours.
THAMES DISTILLERS
THE TOM THUMB DISTILLER
Copernicus the Second, being somewhat diminutive in stature and volume, the decision was taken to find somebody with the knowledge, talent, artistry and wherewithal to distill Portobello Road Gin on a larger scale. This was when we were lucky enough to find ninth generation distiller and former chairman of the Worshipful Company of Distillers, Mr Charles Maxwell – a man whose family have been involved in distillation in London for over 300 years and the owner of The Thames Distillery in South West London.
PORTOBELLO ROAD GIN NO.171
WE CREATED A CAPITAL BRACER WE ARE PROUD TO PUT OUR NAME ON.
WE DISCOVERED THE PERFECT POUR WITH ICE, TONIC WATER & A TWIST OF PINK GRAPEFRUIT
NOW A FAST GROWING FAVOURITE AMONG SPIRIT LOVERS
Born on something of a whim, Portobello Road Gin has quickly established itself as a favourite amongst connoisseur consumers, bartenders and gin fans everywhere. Taking home a Gold Medal from the 2014 San Francisco Spirit Awards, it seems the judges are fans too.
DISCOVER OUR PORTOBELLO ROAD DISTILLERY BRANDS
For 10 years the team have been passionate about crafting quality, premium spirits inspired by the long, rich and on occasion miserable history of gin. Discover our timeline below to follow our journey.
PORTOBELLO ROAD GIN DIRECTORS CUT NO. 5
£39
Portobello Road Directors Cut Edition Gins are an occasional release of Limited Edition bottlings which allow the team to flex their proverbial creative muscles, usually resulting in incredible liquids that sell out rapidly. Previous versions included the world’s first Asparagus flavoured London Dry Gin, a Smoky Gin made with Irish peat and Lapsang Souchong tea, a Christmas Gin incorporating parsnips and pears and a gin inspired by the extraordinary “Pechuga” Mezcals of Mexico distilled with a turkey breast in the neck of the still.
For this, our fifth expression, we have looked to the gin recipes of the past for inspiration, in particular this passage from 1853; a description of the recipe for Hodges Gin, a famous but sadly lost gin from London’s past.
“Take 135 gallons of spirit, 7 percent over proof, 5lbs of Italian juniper berries, 14l bs of German ditto, 15l bs of coriander seeds, ¾ lb of angelica root, 2oz of cassia, 2oz of calamus aromaticus…
The reason that two sorts of juniper berries are advised to be used, is, that the French and Italian berries contain most oil, being produced in warmer countries, while those of Germany origin contain most resin. The oily berries communicates the finer, and the resinous berries the stronger flavour; were the latter only used, the gin would want delicacy, were the former kind wholly employed, the gin would turn blue or milky, when mixed with water, on account of the superabundance of oil.”
As renowned, inherent gin fans, here at Portobello Road Distillery we have always loved a juniper heavy gin, and indeed have, ourselves, found terroir to be hugely important in juniper berry flavour.
As such, we decided to make a gin with the most diverse selection of Juniper Berries we could find, foraging some ourselves from the Brecon Beacons in Wales, and sourcing others from Macedonia, Tuscany, Serbia and Albania.
Using not just more kinds of juniper but also more juniper than we do in our classic London Dry,
this Director’s Cut No.5 – Five Juniper Gin is bottled at 47.3%, as Hodges and all good gins would have been in that era.
Rich, oily, juniper forward, high strength gin, it’s a real connoisseurs choice.
70cl | 47.3% ABV
PORTOBELLO ROAD GIN LOCAL HEROES | MARK KNOPFLER
£41
The Local Heroes collection is an occasional release of very limited edition gins created in collaboration with some of our own personal heroes and people whom we feel best embody the spirit of Portobello Road.
We are delighted to announce the third installment in this collection is with none other than the legendary Mark Knopfler, frontman of the Dire Straits and one of the world’s best guitarists.
Mark – who is a passionate gin fan and former Notting Hill local – worked with Portobello Road Gin’s co-founder, Jake F. Burger to create Local Heroes No.3, which is a bold gin that combines Portobello Road Gin’s nine signature botanicals with lime zest, fresh cucumber peel and olive oil. The unique combination of botanicals results in a robustly ginny profile with strong spice flavour and heat which are quickly tempered by the coolness of cucumber. It has a soft, full, creamy mouth feel.
Each of the limited edition, artisan bottles made will be distilled on Portobello Road in their 400L copper alembic still ‘King Henry, then bottled and labelled by hand. The bottle’s decorative label design, which was designed by creative agency Analogue alongside Mark, is inspired by the Dire Straits frontman’s passion for guitars. On the inside label of each bottle there is an image of Mark’s famous 1937 14-fret National Style “O” Resonator. There is also a nod to the days when Mark would sport a headband for his live performances, so each bottle come with its own miniature version in red.
70cl
42% ABV
PORTOBELLO ROAD CELEBRATED BUTTER GIN
£33
Our Celebrated Butter Gin is a unique experience overall from the scent on the nose to the lingering finish on the palate. We take our Portobello Road Gin and redistill it with 10 blocks of English unsalted butter. The butter gives the gin a creamy mouthfeel and just a touch of sweet and saltiness.
Check out some recipes we have whipped up with our Celebrated Butter Gin.
70cl
42% ABV
In all of our expressions at Portobello Road Gin, there is an element of history and tradition. The Celebrated Butter Gin is no different – in fact the idea came from a book of short stories by Charles Dickens – ‘Sketches by Boz’. Dickens loved to observe and document London in its industrial growth and social turmoil. This is most probably where he took inspiration for many of his characters such as Oliver Twist.
In ‘Sketches by Boz’, Dickens talks about the experience of being in a Gin Palace. Whilst in the Palace he recorded different expressions of Gin which included titles like: “The real knock me down”, “The strip me naked”, “Cream of the Valley” and the “Celebrated Butter Gin”.
The names or ‘brands’ of gin were very descriptive, perhaps due to the fact that the majority of those drinking them would have almost certainly been illiterate. It is also very unlikely that Gin producers would have been distilling with butter.
The name ‘Celebrated Butter Gin’ was probably a very early marketing tool used to suggest that the gin was of high quality, much like Crème de mure or menthe as in these times, sugar and fats were the pleasantries of the wealthy. If you were a pauper, you wouldn’t have been able to afford butter on your bread but something cheaper such as beef dripping.
“Then, ingenuity is exhausted in devising attractive titles for the different descriptions of gin; and the dram-drinking portion of the community as they gaze upon the gigantic black and white announcements, which are only to be equalled in size by the figures beneath them, are left in a state of pleasing hesitation between ‘The Cream of the Valley,’ ‘The Out and Out,’ ‘The No Mistake,’ ‘The Good for Mixing,’ ‘The real Knock-me-down,’ ‘The Celebrated Butter Gin,’ ‘The regular Flare-up,’ and a dozen other, equally inviting and wholesome liqueurs.” Charles Dickens – Sketches by Boz.
Our house Gin historian and recipe master Jake Burger describes Celebrated Butter Gin as “like meeting your friend’s twin without knowing they had one, catching you unawares, and befuddling one’s expectations in a thoroughly welcome turn”.
When thinking on how best to use this product – it works perfectly well wherever our signature 171 London Dry might. It makes a great Gin and Tonic, however if you want to really play on the subtle texture and unique character of this expression then Martini style drinks are the way to go. It will help to highlight the viscosity and creaminess of the gin.
PORTOBELLO ROAD GIN DISTILLERY – OLD TOM
£39
This Old Tom Gin pays homage to what we think gin would’ve been before its transformation took place. We take a pot-distilled grain spirit and redistill it with juniper, coriander seed and liquorice root, before adding a little sugar and then ageing in a very old sherry barrel. It perfectly balances the punch of the juniper with the lingering sweetness of the barrel ageing process.
70cl
47.4% ABV
