Hendrick's: Two Stills, Eleven Botanicals, and Infusions Added After Distillation

Hendrick's is on almost every back bar in the world, which makes it easy to stop noticing. The way it is actually made is stranger than its ubiquity suggests.

Two Stills That Were Bought at Auction

In 1966, Charles Gordon of William Grant & Sons bought two unusual stills at auction. One was a Bennett pot still built in 1860. The other was a Carter-Head, one of only a handful left in the world, built in 1948.

They sat for decades. The gin that was eventually designed around them, by Lesley Gracie, launched in 1999 at Girvan in southwest Scotland.

Here is why two stills matter.

The Bennett still is a traditional pot still. Botanicals steep directly in the spirit and are boiled with it. This is the standard method and it extracts heavily, pulling out the deeper, oilier, more robust botanical character.

The Carter-Head still works by vapor infusion. The botanicals sit in a basket above the liquid, and alcohol vapor passes through them on its way to the condenser. Nothing is boiled. The result is much lighter and more delicate, catching the floral top notes that boiling would destroy.

Almost every gin picks one method. Hendrick's runs both separately and marries the two spirits afterward, which is why it manages to be both full-bodied and floral rather than choosing.

Eleven Botanicals, Plus Two That Are Not Distilled

The distilled botanicals are juniper, coriander, angelica root, orris root, orange peel, lemon peel, caraway, cubeb berries, chamomile, elderflower, and yarrow.

Cubeb and caraway are the unusual ones. Cubeb is a peppery relative of black pepper with a resinous edge. Caraway brings an anise-adjacent, faintly rye-bread note.

Then the signature move: Bulgarian Damask rose and cucumber are added as infusions after distillation, not distilled with the rest.

This is the whole trick. Rose and cucumber are both extremely fragile. Rose's aromatic compounds are delicate enough that boiling flattens them into something closer to soap. Cucumber is mostly water and volatile green notes that vanish under heat. Distilling either one would destroy exactly what you wanted from it.

Adding them afterward preserves both, and it is why Hendrick's smells like rose and cucumber rather than like a gin that has been near them.

What It Tastes Like

Rose and cucumber sit on top, unmistakably. Underneath is a proper gin, juniper-forward with a spiced, earthy structure from the Bennett-distilled portion.

How to Drink It

Hendrick's is the gin that made the cucumber garnish standard, and there is a reason: it reinforces something already in the bottle rather than adding a new flavor.

A gin and tonic with cucumber rather than lime is the house serve, and it is genuinely better than the lime version here. Citrus fights the rose.

Pair It With

Light and clean. Sashimi, white fish, cucumber sunomono, anything delicate that a heavier gin would trample.

Try It at Juraku

Hendrick's is on the gin list at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side, next to the Japanese bottles. Check the current menu or ask the bar what is open.