review

BROKER’S GIN—PART 2!

My Fellow Inebriates,

I received the nicest message today from Julia, the Business Development Manager at BROKER’S GIN, commiserating with me over the absence of that wonderful crystal elixir from my neighborhood booze shop, and reassuring me that Canada has not in fact been cut off.

For those of you who haven’t met Julia Gale, she is the most delightful person. In fact, today she is my very favorite person, because she has injected some hope into my existence.

If you haven’t read my previous lament about BROKER’S GIN, I’ll fill you in on the crisis. About two years ago I purchased it out of curiosity and because I liked the hat/top. A couple of days later, the whole bottle was gone! Where did it go? It just went, because it was that good. Before discovering BROKER’S I’d been loyal to TANQUERAY (the original, not TANQUERAY 10 because it is too clean to be interesting), although honestly I’d try any gin once and many of them repeatedly. Long story short—I’d tried a lot of gin brands before encountering BROKER’S, and BROKER’S held its own against all of them.

So I was abject when I saw it had disappeared from the shelves. I think my fur started falling out.

And today lovely Julia visited my page and lit up my world again by telling me that there is BROKER’S GIN in Ontario.Ontario!

How far away is Ontario?! I immediately wondered.

Turns out it’s pretty freaking far away, my friends. I’d forgotten, because I so rarely leave the house or occupy myself with anything outside of liquor, that geography is very large and complicated. Not only is Ontario very far away; it is also full of polar bears like my friend Glen Bear, and obviously they are getting all the gin.

Now, I do have an aunt in Ontario, but she doesn’t believe in bears, alcohol-consuming or otherwise, and thinks my mum is a space cadet for humoring me by doing my typing. So I doubt very much that she’d do any liquor shopping for me. She certainly couldn’t be expected to send me a bottle, especially if I told her I needed it to take care of some tremors.

I started trying to convince myself that BROKER’S wasn’t all that. I reckoned that if I could find some ho-hum or even negative reviews of it, then maybe I could just gently forget about it and move on. But instead I found nothing but raves. And I had to admit that BROKER’S GIN is too magnificent to forget.

So I’m hoping Julia can tell me where to buy some product in BC. She has been very friendly, so my paws are crossed. Stay tuned, peeps.

HAKUTSURU Excellent Junmai Sake

My Fellow Inebriates,

I’m so happy to have tasters share their liquor faves with me, and I was delighted to receive the following tasting notes from my friend Sophie:

LB, I started early and tasted something called sake. I am told it is a rice wine. I prefer to drink it hot. They pour it in little cups and you slam them down in one gulp. At least I did. Here’s what I’d say: Warms you up going down, makes you happy, tastes like booze. Oh, and you can drink a lot of it.

I love the fact that Sophie started early. Every day I wake up with a big jones for alcohol but sometimes feel a tad constrained by social mores and fail to get drinking early enough for my tastes. I think sake is a superb breakfast accompaniment, or substitute really—there’s something light about it that suggests morning.

I don’t know if Sophie started with HAKUTSURU Excellent Junmai Sake but it’s my first choice among the Japanese wines. It’s inexpensive and boasts a quite sufficient 15.5% alcohol content. But how does it taste?

Sake’s a tricky drink because preference is so individual about correct temperature. For Sophie it’s “hot” and for me it’s “very warm.” This is because I am so terrified of overheating it and accidentally burning off some of its valuable alcohol. But let’s say you have your little cup at the perfect temperature. Well, it’s going to cool down pretty fast, so you have a small window of time to drink it in its ideal state. So you slam it like my friend Sophie, and next thing you know, you need a refill. This can go on for quite a while, especially if you buy your HAKUTSURU in the 18L cubic container.

This rice wine is full-bodied but tastes deceptively light and dry. Whether you drink it warm or cold, it warms you as it goes down. Oh yeah, and it tastes like booze. As Sophie says, you can drink a lot of it, precisely because it is so subtle and inoffensive.

A lot of people recommend pairing sake with food, particularly spicy and savory food, and if you do so you’ll be able to get away with drinking more of it. But it’s a lovely beverage on its own.

Of course, overindulging in sake can lead to all sorts of inappropriate situations, so be careful, and make sure, when you go on a sake bender, that you’re with someone you like.

BROKER’S GIN

My Fellow Inebriates,

I need to score some BROKER’S GIN. I just realized my local liquor store no longer carries it—OMG!! I took it for granted; I thought it would always be there. Even when I wasn’t thinking about it, somewhere inside I had the comforting notion that it would be there when I decided it was gin-and-tonic time.

Yes, I did rhapsodize the other day about BEEFEATER, an awesome gin and the definitive choice for juniper fans. I love BEEFEATER, my peeps, but there’s a time and a place for it. BEEFEATER is for lurching around with older relatives at weddings and wakes. It’s great for sipping in a martini while you listen to loud, loud music. It’s fantastic at an airport when it could be 7:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. for all you know because you lost your watch in the toilet. I totally love the stuff.

But I have to tell you about BROKER’S. Compared to BEEFEATER, it is a cheeky upstart—but an upstart with a mission to create an unapologetically old-fashioned gin bespeaking London and its heritage. Using quadruple distillation, the fourth pass going through a copper pot still, brothers Andy and Martin Dawson combined their solid business acumen, their creativity, and some funny hats in 1998, to create a memorably dry, full-bodied gin.

SO WHY THE HELL CAN’T I FIND IT IN MY LIQUOR STORE ANY MORE? Seriously, I want to ask Andy and Martin what’s going on…why BROKER’S was in my liquor store and isn’t any more. Are they okay? OMG, is BROKER’S okay? Are they still making it? Are they doing great but have cut Canada off? Do they think Canadians are hooligans? OMG!

BROKER’S has captured dozens of international awards for its fresh, dry and slightly floral gin. I know we swill a lot of Molson Canadian here in the Great White North, but there must be animals and humans besides yours truly with a bad-ass jones for this crystal-clear elixir.

Did I mention it was cheap compared to other premium gins? Given the labor-intensive production methods the brothers use to make the stuff, this didn’t even compute when I first bought it, but it didn’t matter, because I had my heavenly gin. Where, oh where, can I get a bottle of BROKER’S? Dear followers, please help me.