Gin is the most surprising spirit in the bar. Vodka is a solvent that flatters everything it touches. Whiskey is a Sunday-afternoon spirit that takes itself seriously. Gin is a bright, botanical, opinionated liquid that survived four centuries of reinvention — from Dutch medicine cabinet to London slum, from Prohibition speakeasy to modern craft distillery — and still lands in a Negroni like it belongs there.
This is the short version of that saga, with a stop at how we make our own — Nopalera Gin, a prickly-pear-and-California-citrus expression that sits at the end of a four-century line.
Medicine, first (1500s Netherlands)
Gin began as jenever, a Dutch grain spirit flavored with juniper berries and sold in apothecaries. Juniper had a long medieval reputation for treating everything from kidney stones to the plague — usually incorrectly, occasionally not — and jenever was the delivery vehicle. Doctors prescribed it. Soldiers drank it before battle. The phrase "Dutch courage" comes from British troops who noticed their Dutch allies were fortified with something the British quartermasters weren't providing.
English gin and the London Gin Craze (1600s–1700s)
When William of Orange took the English throne in 1688, he brought jenever with him and deregulated distilling. Anyone could turn grain into gin, and everyone did. By the 1730s, one in four buildings in London's poorer parishes was a gin shop. It was cheaper than beer, stronger than wine, and cataclysmic for public health. Hogarth's Gin Lane — the etching of a mother dropping her baby off a wall — is from this era.
Parliament tried and failed to legislate gin out of existence six times before the Gin Act of 1751 stuck. What emerged from the wreckage was a smaller, better-regulated industry that eventually produced the London Dry style — clean, juniper-forward, cocktail-ready.
The cocktail rehabilitation (late 1800s)
Gin got its reputation back in the American cocktail bar. The Martinez in the 1860s. The Martini shortly after. The Negroni in Florence in 1919. The Gimlet on British Navy ships. These were the drinks that made gin respectable again — a cocktail ingredient rather than a public health crisis. Prohibition kept the tradition alive in speakeasies (usually with terrible bathtub gin), and the post-war era brought London Dry back to global dominance.
The craft gin renaissance (2000s onward)
Modern craft gin is what happens when small distillers start asking, "why does gin have to taste like London?" Bombay Sapphire pushed the flavor conversation open in the late 1980s. Hendrick's put cucumber and rose in the bottle in 1999. Now every craft distillery worth its still has a house gin with a distinct regional botanical bill — Japanese yuzu, Australian bush plum, California prickly pear.
Nopalera Gin: California in a bottle
Our gin, Nopalera, is our answer to the same question. Juniper is still there — it has to be, or it isn't gin — but the rest of the botanical bill is Southern California: prickly pear (nopalera means "prickly pear grove"), lemon and grapefruit peel, coriander, and a small handful of desert botanicals. It's brighter and drier than a London Dry, and it makes a Negroni that tastes like the desert.
Come taste it side-by-side with the other three spirits we make on our tour — Thursday through Sunday, sixty minutes, $30.
Where to next
For the six best gin cocktails, see Six Classic Gin Cocktails Everyone Should Know. For the production side, read How Gin Is Made.