Gin began as monks' medicine in Salerno, not as a Dutch invention
Holland usually gets the credit, but a juniper-laced tonic wine appears in a Salerno medical compendium from around 1055, brewed by Benedictine monks as a remedy. Six centuries later the drink swept England so completely that over half of London's 15,000 drinking dens were gin shops.
The monks of Salerno learned distilling through knowledge that reached Europe via Moorish Sicily, and used alcohol to preserve medicinal plants such as the juniper that grew on nearby hills. The direct ancestor of modern gin came later in the Low Countries: genever, which Belgium's jenever museum traces to thirteenth-century Flanders and which first appears in print in a sixteenth-century Antwerp distilling book. Dutch and Flemish distillers sold juniper spirits through pharmacies for kidney and stomach complaints. The oft-repeated claim that the physician Franciscus Sylvius invented gin is false; the drink was taxed in 1606, eight years before his birth.
Politics made gin English. After William of Orange took the throne in 1689, taxes on home-distilled spirits fell while imports like French brandy were hit with heavy duties, a move aimed at France. The historian Angela McShane has called gin a Protestant drink. Cheap and unlicensed, it became the tipple of the poor during the Gin Craze of 1695 to 1735, when some 1,500 stills operated in London homes in 1726 alone and cheap batches were often flavoured with turpentine. William Hogarth's print Gin Lane (1751) contrasted it with wholesome Beer Street.
Regulation took several attempts. The Gin Act of 1736 raised retail taxes so high that riots broke out, and its duty was scrapped by 1742; the 1751 Act, which forced sales through licensed retailers under local magistrates, worked better. Sweet Old Tom gin was an eighteenth-century favourite, and the column still of 1826 and 1831 made possible the cleaner London dry style.
Empire added the mixer. In tropical British colonies, gin masked the bitterness of quinine, then the only effective drug against malaria, dissolved in soda to make tonic water. Since 2013 gin has boomed again worldwide, with flavoured versions from rhubarb to blood orange blurring what the word means.
Source: Gin
