A brief history of barrel-aged spirits

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all spirits were stored in barrels.

But gin, Britain’s most popular spirit, was never stored for long. Gin was barrelled, but not aged. Gin was sweetened, but only to make this badly distilled “bootleg” gin palatable. It was served like this to rabble-rousers of the 1800s as 'Old Tom,' the forbidden nectar of prohibition times.

This very particular spirit got its name from the practice of dispensing the gin through a pipe disguised in the mouth of an Old Tom cat wooden plaque on the wall. Clear gin (masquerading as water in these times of gin prohibition) came pouring from the cat’s mouth. So this might have been the world’s first drink dispensing machine, which is awesome.

And as primitive as it sounds today, this not-very-barrel-aged, slightly soft, slightly sweet style of gin rode a wave of popularity until the start of the 1900s, when London Dry styles really took off. Poor Old Tom was no longer the cat’s pyjamas in the gin game – London Dry then took and held that honour for more than a century.

More recently, craft gin distilleries have been experimenting with ageing gin in barrels, to make a softer, sweeter gin. In fact, we started ageing one of our first batches of Rare Dry Gin in old Chardonnay Barrels at the end of 2013, and now we have a whole collection of gins in our Barrel Aged series (just keep reading).

THE ORIGIN OF FOUR PILLARS BARREL AGED SERIES

Our Co-founder, Cam Mackenzie first filled French oak barrels (on Christmas Eve!) in 2013 with Rare Dry Gin after he and our other Co-founder Stu Gregor returned from a US trip and saw several gins aged in American oak. Some of these gins were a little hit and miss. American oak can be very dominant with huge vanilla/coconut characters. Some of the gins looked like Bourbon. However, one gin stood out – Ransom Old Tom. Made in Oregon by a winemaker using seasoned French Oak Barrels. This was a cracking gin and the original inspiration for our first barrel-aged gin, Chardonnay Barrel Gin. And so, we set about creating a solera of ex-Chardonnay barrels in early 2014.

STARTING OUR OWN SOLERA SYSTEM

The older and bigger the system, the more profoundly aged the resultant fortified wine. And we decided that we wanted to create a similarly complex, barrel-aged product with our original Barrel Aged Gin series. But we wanted this to be a modified solera system at Four Pillars, because (as with fortified wines) it is not always the case that older is better and it would be easy to over-age the gin. The art comes from blending the right combinations of the new with the old.

The difference between using old and new became obvious in February 2014 when we purchased a brand new barrique from Mercurey, one of the great coopers of France. Within a mere two weeks the gin in the new barrel had gained a golden colour and taken on some sweet vanillin oak characters. A terrific blending option, but we wanted our barrel-aged product to taste of gin, not wood.

In March 2014 we purchased three five-year-old former Chardonnay barriques from Dargue & Jaegle. D&J barrels are famous in the world of wine as the staves are steamed rather than toasted. Thus they lend very subtle, fine oak characters without overt toastiness.