Dark, barrel aged gin a new in thing

It's Brown, It's Barrel-Aged, It's ... Gin? : The Salt : NPR:

 "While many know gin for its light, bright and dry characteristics — citrusy, herbal flavors that go so well with tonic water — another gin sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Malty, lightly tannic, and with the subtle sweetness and spice of a young whiskey, dark, barrel-aged gin is pushing the frontiers of this spirit forward.

Dark gins are distilled the usual way, then spend months or even years resting in oak barrels — the same ones used to age whisky, wine and sherry. That final step yields surprisingly complex results. The wood tones down the intensity of the juniper, and adds notes of vanilla, caramel and often baking spices, somewhere between a bourbonlike gin and a ginlike bourbon.

Dark gin appeared in the U.S. in the past five to 10 years, but the marriage of gin and oak is not new. "The Dutch have been doing this with their jenevers (a more neutral-tasting predecessor to gin) for 400 years," says Tad Henry Seestedt. Seestedt founded and owns Ransom Spirits, a distillery and winery in Sheridan, Ore., that helped pioneer barrel-aged gin in America in 2008. The same is true of European Old Tom gin, he notes, a fuller-bodied, long-lost cousin of modern dry gins that was sweeter and spicier, and was popular in the 1800s and 1900s. Historically, both were transported in barrels at full proof, then later cut with water by the bartenders."



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