The Distillery, Portobello Road
It’s one of my favourite bits of London so I decided to get off the tube early and walk down Portobello Road. I sang the old Cat Stevens (post Steven Demetre Georgios, pre Yusuf Islam) song
Getting hung up all day on smiles
Walking down Portobello Road for miles,
Greeting strangers in Indian boots,
Yellow ties and old brown suits
Portobello Gin was originally distilled at 171 Portobello Road in 2011. Four friends, all former bartenders, wanted to create a gin that had the intensity to flourish in a Negroni, the elegance to sustain a Martini and flavour to shine in a tonic. And so Portobello Gin was born, and such was its popularity that production soon had to be outsourced. The dream was always to bring the process back to Portobello Road; that dream has now been realised
It’s an evocative place Portobello Road, full of what I love about London; rich and poor are cheek by jowl: an expensive deli, a cheap chippy; a designer boutique, a second hand store; the Salvation Army building, a gin hotel. Hang on, I hear you say, a gin hotel? Yes, indeed, the purveyors of Portobello Gin have opened The Distillery. In fact it’s more than an hotel. The four storey building houses three bedrooms, a private dining room, a small museum, two bars, a distillery and the new home of The Ginstitute where you can learn about the history of gin, drink gin and attempt to blend your own perfect recipe.
Mrs. Gin and I were attending the launch party and were very excited about this new chapter in gin’s renaissance. We entered the premises and headed for the ground floor bar, The Resting Room; fashioned in the style of a Victorian gin palace, apparently. We fought our way through a gin-crazed scrum of bearded hipsters and arrived at a copper topped bar and sampled a Portobello Gin (naturally) and tonic, garnished with juniper berries and grapefruit; an excellent drink to kick off the evening. Craft beers, cocktails, wine and gastro-pub style food will also be served here.
We next headed to Gintonica on the first floor. This is a Spanish styled bar serving tapas and more substantial fare and has over 100 gins and at least ten different tonics on offer. This space has another copper-topped bar, high ceilings, big windows and marble-topped tables. We selected a Copperhead gin with Fever Tree Mediterranean tonic. This was garnished with coriander, cardamom and orange, which we agreed was an inspired choice; delicious.
And on to the basement which houses The Ginstitute and the distillery. We chatted with Jake Burger, Master Distiller, who talked us through the distilling process, explained why copper stills are used (acts as a catalyst to remove sulphur and leads to a quicker process among other benefits) and told us about The Ginstitute where the history of gin will be explained, gin sampled, botanicals sniffed and selected, gin sampled and a concoction blended by you, personally, will be created to take away and reordered time and again if you so wish. Oh, and did we say that gin would be sampled….
We loved The Distillery and will be back; it really is a very welcome addition to the craft gin scene in London, or indeed anywhere as you can come from afar and stay in one of the rooms after sampling its many attractions. A true gin joint.
