Bombay Sapphire London Dry gin. With Negroni Week coming up next week, coming atcha with this classic! Everyone knows this famous blue bottle, and for many of us – it may have been the first quality gin we loved.

Gin was surprisingly the first liquor of any type I liked, even when I was only drinking questionable bottles only a college student would buy. When I could finally afford Bombay, well, that was a milestone.

The definition of gin is essentially just a strong clear spirit with the primary flavor of juniper. Kinda like flavored vodka yeah? Yep, and it’s sometimes referred to as such. Bombay Sapphire proudly notes the “vapour infusion” for their gins – let’s talk!

You can flavor things in many ways, and a wide variety of techniques are employed to infuse the juniper (+other botanicals) flavor into the usually tasteless base white spirit.

Most at-home infusions involve just putting some fruit/herb/whatever in a jar and covering with alcohol to pull out the flavor. That works, but you also end up with more than just the flavor, as other molecules also combine with the alcohol. Filtering can help slightly but physical filters are still much more porous than many compounds.

A stronger method for filtering is via distillation (separating compounds by heating). Re-distilling a spirit after infusing will leave you with a cleaner separation of pure flavor (ie any sugars, fats, etc will not pass through distillation). This is done for some gins as well as some naturally flavored vodkas.

Another way to avoid extracting unwanted compounds and add the juniper flavor is through vapor infusion. Instead of traditional infusions by steeping ingredients in alcohol, “vapor infusion” is a fancy term to describe the process of extracting flavor by setting a basket of botanicals above a heated still and letting the evaporating alcohol pick up flavor as it passes through the herb basket.