How Do Distillers Create New Gin Recipes?

New gin recipes are built through iterative small-batch testing — starting with a concept, testing botanicals individually and in combination, and refining ratios over many trial runs.

Creating a new gin recipe is closer to perfumery than most people expect — it's a slow, iterative process of testing individual ingredients and then testing how they interact.

1. Start with a concept

Most recipes start with an idea rather than a random list of botanicals — a flavour direction (citrus-forward, floral, spicy), a story (showcasing a specific native ingredient or local landscape), or a gap the distiller wants to fill in their range.

2. Test botanicals individually

Distillers often make small single-botanical test distillations or tinctures first, to understand exactly what character each ingredient brings on its own — its intensity, how it behaves in alcohol, and how it changes with heat during distillation versus simple cold infusion.

3. Build and test combinations

Botanicals are then combined in small test batches, adjusting ratios and testing how ingredients interact — some botanicals amplify or clash with others, and a botanical that tastes great alone can disappear or turn unpleasant in combination with certain others.

4. Test the distillation method

The same botanical bill can taste different depending on whether it's steeped before distillation, vapour-infused, added post-distillation, or some combination — so distillers often test the same recipe through multiple methods before settling on one.

5. Scale up carefully

Once a recipe is locked at small-batch scale, distillers need to test that it scales predictably to full production size, since the ratio of surface area, heat distribution and contact time inside a still can behave differently at larger volumes.

6. Taste, tweak, repeat

Most new gin recipes go through many iterations — sometimes dozens — before a distiller is satisfied enough to release it commercially.