Friday night is cocktail night!
This Friday a depleted Gin Club composed solely of new member Becky and I went to check out the City of London Distillery (apparently you can distill (see what I did there!) this to ‘COLD’). Well it wasn’t very cold when we went, Friday evening had turned out to be fairly pleasant which meant that the pubs on Fleet Street at the end of Bride Lane were spilling out into the road.
We continued down the stairs into the gloom of the basement. It’s has a faux Victorian feel with lots of clubby chairs set about in a dark green and dark wood space with flounces of dark green velvet. Not the place for a summer evening, but would be lovely and cosy in the Winter.
Being the gin lush that I am (I am my mother’s daughter!) I headed to the bar and asked to sample their gin. They gave me a sample of the London Dry, apparently they also have an Old Tom style and a sloe gin, they kinda missed a trick by not even telling us about the gins… Anyway the London Dry is exactly that – dry London styles, heavy on the juniper with spicy notes – perfectly drinkable!
My first drink of huge day – cheer me up dry martini with grapefruit twist. This went down exceptionally well!
Becky’s Martin Miller G&T with cucumber garnish
So we started with some simple drinks as you can see, then moved to to try a couple of the more complex cocktails on their menu – ones with egg white! I had a grapefruit flavoured one and Becky something that was pink and sweet, but it didn’t make that much of an impression that I can recall it… :s I don’t appreciate egg white cocktails being served with that much ice either – you loose the texture that the egg white adds, much better to shake with ice and serve in a short glass rather than a tall one jammed with ice (could barely get my straw in!).
There was no information given about the distillery – it’s on site and you can arrange tours of the upstairs working part during the day, normally topped off by some tasting in the bar afterwards I’d hope.
These are the gin stills though – named Clarissa and Jennifer in that order
We also tried out their deli board as we sipped. This was a nice collection of cheeses, a Brie like one, a creamier blue and a cheddar, with some Parma ham and 2 types of salami. Apparently these are from Repertoire and are all English – yeay for English produce! Such a shame the staff didn’t know the names of the cheeses and couldn’t be bothered to find out when asked…
Another little quirk was the gin timeline on the wall in the girls loo – very informative, apparently the drinking of gin before going to fight the Dutch in the 30 years war is where the phrase ‘Dutch courage’ came from!
Maybe one to come back to for a tour first and for hiding out in the depths of winter ‘Winter is coming’ but this isn’t going to knock the Oliver Conquest off its number one spot for me!
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