City of London Old Tom

Old Tom, New Times

The City of London Distillery (COLT for short) is as much a bar as it is a producer of quality adult beverages. Actually, to be accurate, they opened a distillery “in” a bar on December 20th, 2012. Johnathan Clark’s cocktail bar on Bride Street, London, to be precise. As you may imagine, if you open a distillery literally “inside” an operating cocktail bar, you do NOT have 30,000-gallon tanks. These guys are a micro-distillery from the get-go.

Don’t get us wrong, these guys bought top-end equipment — professional-grade copper pot-stills from Germany. But they hold about 50 liters at a crack, so it will be quite a while before you find bottles of their quality hooch at the MegaMart. And with a name like “The City of London,” you better represent! And REPRESENT they do, producing five signature Gins in all of their classic juniper-licious glory.

City of London Old Tom Gin is — as you might expect — a spot-on, faithful reproduction of a classic Old Tom style recipe. Lightly sweetened and botanically intense, it combines a hint of warm spice flavor with lingering zesty citrus notes. Authenticity starts at the heart. The core three botanicals here are juniper, coriander seeds and angelica root. And this Gin has plenty of heart.

The juniper-based Spirit is making a great comeback in recent years. It has once again become the staple of the younger drinker, bartenders are reviving long lost recipes. But many vintage cocktails require just the right fundamentals. Old Tom was the lynchpin of countless classic cocktails and the go-to Spirit of the titans of classic mixology back in the day. We tip the hat to COLT for reviving an old favorite and show us exactly what we’ve been missing all these years. Cheers.