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LOUNGE LIZARD - Gin is in

There’s a shift to high quality gin and with it a predilection for gin cocktails

Here we are well into a new year and gin is fashionable again.

There’s a shift to high quality gin and with it a predilection for gin cocktails. The liquor store shelves now host a wide variety and the big brands are being challenged – take that vodka!

There is a booming micro-distillery movement that has swept the world, and since the BC liquor law changes, our province has joined in. Ampersand (Duncan), Phrog (Hornby Island), and many others have recently started up. A new distillery out of Courtenay with the fanciful name of Wayward Distillation House currently has Unruly Vodka on offer but soon they promise its cousin, Unruly Gin, will make an appearance.

What else is coming on strong? An Italian classic – the Negroni, a legendary cocktail created in the 1920s by, yes, Count Negroni who took the soda out of an Americano (Campari, Sweet Vermouth, soda) and replaced it with gin. He later toured America as a rodeo cowboy (this is starting to sound like the plot for a Fellini movie). The Negroni might even make the move on the Old Fashioned particularly now that Mad Men is over and I see a trend toward the bitter – no, not me – the flavour profile.

On a brown note, whiskeys are likely to make their way further into the mainstream, and include interest in single grain rather than single malt. Oh, and while I wish I could say it isn’t so, I think flavoured tequila will become a trend.

Merry drinking in 2015.