Gin Archives - Aromatica Poetica

Hoby animatedly describes wine to his blindfolded taster on the TED stage in Sonoma.

A Conversation with Dr. Hoby Wedler, Blind Chemist, About Wine Tasting, Sensory Literacy, and the Glorious Smell of Wet Pavement

aromatica poetica June 7, 2018

A nice metaphor brought to us from the world of wine is that happy grapes don’t make for good wines. Grapes need to work hard under stressful conditions in order to produce their deliciousness. Hoby Wedler, an organic chemist turned entrepreneur selected as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Food & Drink, who also happens to be blind since birth, offers as an example the happy Cabernet grapes grown in the Central Valley of California. They are watered, get …

Hogarth's Gin Lane, featuring 18th century drunk and dead people, at the center of which stands a large cucumber budding roses, with a spigot and jug, and juniper trees going down the lane.

Hendrick’s Cucumber: A Hydrosol gin cocktail experiment

aromatica poetica April 30, 2018

I’ve been obsessed with gin on the one hand and hydrosols on the other for a little while now, and mixing them together seemed only natural, though they may strike the uninitiated as strange bedfellows. Hydrosols and alcohols (as well as essential oils) are all distilled. So what is distillation? Simply put–which is about all I can manage since I’m no scientist, distillation is the heating of a liquid to create steam in order to separate out substances. Different substances …

The Thistles and Fairies of The Botanist Gin

aromatica poetica October 23, 2017

I’ll admit upfront that I loved The Botanist before I ever tasted it. When my boyfriend Alabaster told me about a gin, which , in addition to nine traditional botanicals, features 22 others that grow wild on the Scottish island of Islay, I was immediately smitten. I asked him to nab the last bottle in the shop where he works and hide it till payday. Meanwhile, I would look into these botanicals… The Botanist Gin’s website is a rabbit hole …