As Jensen’s Bermondsey Gin 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.

Jensen’s 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.

Perhaps most importantly, Jensen’s is the only small-batch gin that is actually produced in London in the original London Dry style. 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.