
+1000 gins • PerfectServes • Tonics • Inspirations


Best enjoyed with Fever-Tree Refreshingly Light Tonic Water, garnished with Raspberry, Blueberry and Blackberry.
See the perfect serveFour days of steeping come before the still. DOA leaves raspberries, blueberries and blackberries in organic alcohol for that long, then distils the result in a copper pot, which is how a London Dry can carry real fruit: nothing may be added once the spirit comes off the still, so everything has to be in the charge beforehand. No sweetening is allowed either, which means any roundness you taste is fruit and alcohol, never sugar.
The three berries are not interchangeable. Raspberry is the sharpest, acid first and sweet second, and the most perfumed of the three. Blackberry sits deeper and darker, closer to a cooked fruit in character although it stays dry here. Blueberry falls between them, softly floral with very little acid of its own. Juniper runs beneath all three, joined by seven further botanicals picked by hand in the Orobie Alps, the range that rises directly above the valley and gives the bottle its name.
The base is organic wheat alcohol, certified from the grain up, and the batches are genuinely small. Stefano Arsuffi founded the distillery at Bracca, in the valleys above Bergamo, and works a 244-litre still, which is closer to a workshop than to a plant. Bottled at 43% in 700 ml, there is enough alcohol to stop the fruit reading as syrup and enough juniper to keep the whole thing recognisable as a dry gin rather than a fruit infusion.
A light tonic suits it better than an Indian one, with less quinine to argue with the fruit. Pour 4 cl of gin, lengthen it with 10 cl of that tonic over hard ice, and drop in a raspberry, a blueberry and a blackberry. Everything should be cold before it meets, and one turn of the spoon is enough. The three fruits answer the three in the recipe, which is what makes the garnish useful rather than decorative.

Raspberry
Blueberry
BlackberryFill the glass with hard ice, add 4 cl of gin and 10 cl of chilled light tonic water.
Put Raspberry and Blueberry and Blackberry inside the glass and repeat the same garnish on a small dish beside it.

