PINK GIN! Q&A with Beefeater's master distiller
Adam McDowell talks with Desmond Payne about the rosy picture for berry-flavoured gin
Perhaps you’ve marvelled at that recent video of Mick Jagger cuttin’ a rug at 75, but if you’re a gin lover or bartender, Desmond Payne is the quintessentially English rock star for you. When word got around that the longtime master distiller for Beefeater would be speaking at an edition of the Toplack Sessions in Toronto this week, the Drake Hotel had to move the event to its larger Commissary venue just to accommodate the hordes of expected fans — mostly bartenders.
Payne, MBE, has been making gin for some 50 years (he worked at Plymouth Gin before Beefeater) — but, as if to prove he’s no stickler for tradition, he’s touring Canada for the first time in eight years to promote what is evidently the next big thing: pink gin, as in rosy-hued, berry-flavoured, sweetened gin (no, cocktail history fans, there isn’t a craze for that other kind of pink gin).
For the past few years, Spaniards have been pinking up their beloved gin-tonics with alacrity. (The distillery Puerto de Indias, of Seville, claims to have instigated the trend circa 2014.) That has prompted the bigger players to jump on the strawberry wagon — Gordon’s and Beefeater both have pink gins on the market in Canada, and judging by how quickly they’re vanishing from liquor stores in Toronto, consumers are game to take it for a whirl as deck season warms up.
Strawberry gin with Fever Tree Aromatic Tonic. It’s arguably not for purists, but it is tasty.
Here’s what Desmond Payne had to say about it when we caught up with him this week.
Adam McDowell, Moose Milk: Was it your idea to do a strawberry version of Beefeater?
Desmond Payne: It wasn’t my idea. It was a developing trend, and I was a bit sniffy about it [at first], to be honest. But then I sat and thought, “It’s what people want. It’s what people are drinking.” And the fact that it’s been phenomenally successful has been a big added bonus.
MM: And you were looking to the Spanish market for inspiration?
DP: Initially, yes.
MM: They’ve been doing pink gin there for a few years …
DP: Yes, and I was tasting them, wondering, thinking, “I think we can do better than this.” Well, of course I think that. But I think we have, and I think it comes down to the DNA of Beefeater coming through and giving it this extra dimension.
MM: How long has Beefeater Pink been out in its main markets, like the UK and Spain?
DP: Two years, maximum.
MM: And in that time, how important has pink gin become to Beefeater’s whole sales picture? Has it become a gateway drug of sorts for new gin drinkers?
DP: Yeah, that’s why we did it. New generations are coming through and they are not traditional gin drinkers. They’re probably not drinkers at all, actually. Pink, globally, is [verging on] something like 10 per cent of our sales volume this year, and we’re a three-million-case brand. It took off like we didn’t expect it to. It was one of our most successful product launches we’ve ever done.
MM: Looking at the per capita numbers, Canada has not traditionally been a big gin-drinking country (and the exception, maybe ironically, is Quebec). Have you been seeing any signs that we’re finally changing?
DP: I think so. I’m not a marketer, I’m a distiller, so I don’t see all the facts and figures, but Canada has always been a good market for Beefeater. We’re number three in Canada with 140,000 cases [sold last year].
MM: A few years ago I visited you at the Beefeater distillery in London and you showed me something that was new then — the super-premium Burrough’s Reserve. Are you surprised it’s still around five years later, at such a high price point?
DP: No, because it’s tiny volume, it’s specialist, and a lot of people love having something that everybody else hasn’t got. Honestly, I was reluctant to do a cask-aged gin because that’s not what gin’s about, but I had an aged negroni somewhere and thought, “Wow, that’s good.”
I must have taken some serious pictures at the Beefeater Distillery in ‘14, but I couldn’t find them on my hard drive.
MM: The gin category has really moved to high price points. There are just so many new, pricey (let’s say $45) gins that it’s impossible to keep up. How does Beefeater, at $29 a bottle, plan to stay relevant in a gin marketplace that keeps going to the higher end?
DP: I think, generally speaking, to start up a gin distillery right now [between] the investment you need to get [distilling] and the investment you need to get behind the bar — because that doesn’t just happen — you need to charge a lot of money not because the value of your botanicals or whatever else warrants that, nor the quality of the gin. You’ve just got to [charge a lot] to get it out there.
But for bartenders, Beefeater’s in every well because they know it works and you don’t have to pay a lot for it. The purpose of gin is to be flexible and versatile and work in whatever you do with it. This generation of bartenders are at the top of their game, and entrepreneurial and creative and all these other things.
MM: When I visited you in 2014, I think we talked about how you’re better able than the little guys to source the best botanicals.
DP: Well, you can do that if you’re clever enough. But I was talking about “craft” last night, how the word has been hijacked and people now believe small is beautiful. The benefit of a big brand is that you’re able to be consistent.
Then I was down in South Africa … and a [local distillery] asked me, “Can you help us? Can you tell us how long juniper keeps?” Underneath the bench where the still was, there were two bags of juniper. Well, if you keep them for long in the heat, they’re going to go bad — they’ll rot or ferment. We actually use the same juniper supplier, but they buy two bags. I bought, last year, 65 tons of juniper berries, and I looked at 200 samples and assessed them and chose four.
The chances of them matching [the flavour] of those two bags next year, well, I wouldn’t like to do it. But I can [compensate for inconsistent botanicals] by blending. We’ve got five big stills and we blend the distillations for a week. We can do that. We have the luxury of scale. And that’s why the bigger brands can be more successful at being consistent.