Jensen Bermondsey Gin : Speciality Brands Ltd

Jensen Bermondsey Gin is the brainchild of Christian Jensen, a Danish IT specialist who fell in love with old-style gins while working in Japan. After trying all the modern gins, Christian started tasting samples of older gins popular around the 1940s and earlier, when gin cocktails were in their heyday. He discovered that they were heavier and more flavoursome, a style he preferred to the more modern London Dry gins.

Christian returned to London determined to accept a challenge from the Japanese bartender friend who had introduced him to the older styles - to make his own gin in the traditional London style. He took a sample of a very old gin that he had been given by his friend to a specialist London distillery to see if they could create something similar.

After a long process during which numerous test batches were tested and rejected, Christian was finally able to approve one of the distiller’s recipes – it had just the combination of intense, pure, aromatic flavours and silky-textured weight on the palate that he was looking for. Since Christian is based in Bermondsey, he named the result Jensen’s London-Distilled Dry Bermondsey Gin.

Jensen Gin

As Jensen’s is made to emulate the old traditional style of gin, it does not contain any of the modern botanicals that many more modern gins rely on. The emphasis is on clean, fresh juniper-led flavours derived from a small number of classic botanicals (including coriander, orris root, angelica and liquorice as well as juniper) to create something as close as possible to the original London Dry gins that Christian was introduced to by his Japanese friend.

Perhaps most importantly, Jensen’s is one of the only small-batch London Dry gins actually produced in London. Bottled at 43%, Jensen’s is a taste of what London Dry used to be.

For all these reasons, Jensen’s is a brilliant mixing gin; after all, it is designed to resemble the gins with which many of the classic gin cocktails were invented. It makes a fabulous Martini and will also work particularly well in a Negroni or a Ramos Gin Fizz. Taste these drinks as they would have tasted in the Golden Age of cocktails.

Jensen Old Tom Gin

Following the success and critical acclaim for Jensen’s London Dry Gin, and the recent revival of interest in older style gins, Christian has turned the clock back even further with his new Jensen London-Distilled Old Tom Gin.

Old Tom was an early nickname for gin, and nowadays it is generally understood to refer to the sweeter style of gin produced in the late 1800s and early 1900s - when sugar was added to gin to recreate the flavours of the original Old Tom gins of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But Old Tom wasn’t always artificially sweetened in this way. Jensen’s Old Tom is a recreation of an original Old Tom recipe from the 1840s, when sugar was more expensive and impurities were usually hidden by the simple expedient of adding greater quantities of botanicals. Jensen’s Old Tom is true to this style, producing an extraordinarily complex, intensely-flavoured gin, with long-lasting herbal spiced notes and a natural residual sweetness on the finish.

Jensen’s Old Tom Gin is an unmissable taste experience, and is perfect for classic gin cocktails like the Tom Collins or Martinez whose original recipes called for Old Tom.