Jamie Baddour pours a cocktail in the tasting room of Half Moon Bay Distillery, its lower door opened toward frayed beach bungalows and sailboats that glide across sparkling water in the distance. Baddour understands that Half Moon Bay is a storybook version of California’s coast, a town cradled between hills swept in coyote brush, old redwoods, and shaggy eucalyptus trees. She commissioned a local artist to capture the surfing serenity at dusk here for her bottle labels, and she is also leaning into the town’s identity by using wild botanicals from its countryside in her gin.
Half Moon Bay Distillery’s gin is, in fact, one of only three products that it sells. Baddour is betting a lot on her conviction that gins from the American West are starting to have a moment.
But like many distillers who’ve cast their lot with gin, she understands the category has a checkered track record in the United States. Research from writers like Chris McMillian, Elizabeth M. Williams, and Jeffrey Miller suggests that gin started gaining national popularity during Prohibition: It was quick and easy to make for underground operations, not to mention it usually came out better than backyard whiskey. Gin was big in America for decades, but then something changed in the zeitgeist of the drinking culture during the late 1960s, and gin’s prominence took a back seat to other spirits. Many feel it still hasn’t regained its gravitas.
According to The Gin Guild, sales for premium and above category gins have recently grown by 4.5%, while super premium gins have grown by nearly 18% over the last six years. Yet the country where drinkers imbibe the most high-quality gins is Spain. The U.S. isn’t really close. Figures from Statista Consumer Market Outlook indicate we are not even in the top six nations for gin consumption. Similar to Spain, people in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom outpace Americans with gin-drinking by orders of magnitude (the Irish and Canadians are purchasing more, too, even if their habits are closer to those of Americans).
From what Baddour’s seen since taking over Half Moon Bay Distillery in 2021, there are opportunities to get new gin converts, especially through innovative formulas, finding new marketing strategies, getting creative with signature cocktails, and taking every chance to educate the public in tasting rooms and at events. She knows it will take all that and more to deal with the psychologically scarred “I’ll-never-drink-gin-again” proclaimers who are out there. Baddour thinks communication between craft gin producers about what works and what doesn’t is vital.
“With craft distillers, we’re really passionate about making the best spirits possible,” Baddour says. “We bring heart to what we’re doing. We want anyone who tastes our product to say, ‘Wow!’ We don’t have the money, the means or the power to mass-market our gins on the level where we’re now an icon…. With small distilleries that make gin, the community as a whole has members that are really supportive of each other.”
On the opposite side of the country, in North Carolina, Melissa Green Katrincic stresses that same need for communication and camaraderie. Katrincic started building her dream of Durham Distillery almost exclusively on gin a decade ago. She ultimately became the first female U.S. distiller to be inducted into The Gin Guild, an international body dedicated to preserving and elevating gin as a category.
“We have to take an approach of rising waters will lift all ships,” Katrincic points out. “If we’re going to be able to get to the tipping point as a country, we have to answer the ‘nos’ on why someone doesn’t want to try gin — we have to figure that out. But this is one of the first times in 10 years when I really am hopeful about that.”
Pop Culture and Bad College Nights
Katrincic grew up in a proud gin-drinking family. She smiles at the memory of stealing the olives from her grandfather’s martinis when she was three years old. Then she married a man who loved to try gin everywhere they traveled. For Katrincic and her husband, Lee, it became a shared interest. The couple eventually decided to bring their professional backgrounds in physics, chemistry, and marketing to bear on opening Durham Distillery. They wanted to be gin giants.
Though Katrincic has achieved many accomplishments since, she admits that creating a distillery’s identity around gin was more challenging than she expected.
“There are layers to the U.S.’s belief that gin is an unapproachable spirit,” she says. “It really shifted in a couple of key, critical moments in the last 50 or 60 years.”
By Katrincic’s estimation, the problems started in the 1960s when Smirnoff Vodka launched a devastatingly effective ad campaign around switching gin martinis to a vodka-based cocktail. Around the same time, the first James Bond film starring Sean Connery hit theaters. Connery was cool incarnate, and it wasn’t lost on audiences that his style in Dr. No included vodka martinis. Connery’s debonair direction to bartenders, “shaken, not stirred,” shook the gin market in the same way that, 42 years later, Paul Giamatti’s crack about not drinking merlot in Sideways uprooted vineyards around the world.
The power of pop culture’s winds kept pushing against gin in the 1990s, especially after HBO’s Sex in the City showcased cosmos as the cocktail of choice for independent, adventurous women.
“It just became seen as more sophisticated,” Katrincic notes of vodka, “and, I’ll say, along gender lines, more sophisticated for women…. And that’s even more so after the rise, popularity, and takeover of Tito’s Vodka. I think, as distillers, we totally underestimated this history when we started a gin distillery.”
Gin producers also couldn’t foresee the rise of celebrity-endorsed spirits in a star-struck nation and how that trend would largely sideline gin. Tequila, vodka, and whiskey all have numerous celebrity-affiliated brands, but so far, the lone celebrity face of gin has been Ryan Reynolds with Aviation. While Katrincic likes the self-effacing actor, she doesn’t think his approach has been enough.
“I think the disappointment I’ve had personally for Aviation taking the helm of American gin in the last three years is that Ryan Reynolds has not brought many reasons to consumers about why they should try the gin category. It’s still been sort of focused on the tongue-in-cheek Ryan Reynolds personality,” she says.
But craft distillers could use a celebrity boost, because most of them are still running into customers who have sworn off gin for life.
Molly Troupe, the master distiller at Freeland Spirits in Portland, Oregon, has met those kinds of drinkers plenty of times since helping the company take off in 2017. Similar to Katrincic’s operation and Half Moon Bay Distillery, Freeland Spirits is a woman-owned and -operated business with an artisanal focus on gin.
“When we started, I think it was only 1% of the world’s distilleries that were owned by women,” Troupe recalls. “Now we’re at a whopping 2%. So, progress is being made.”
Progress is being made on converting reluctant gin-bashers, too. But it’s not easy.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it’s just bad experiences, people who were drinking something that was affordable at that time in their life, like college, where they’re over-imbibing and then it became something they can’t go back to,” says Troupe. “I’ve actually heard it from two separate people, ‘Oh, I won’t drink gin because, when I did at one time, I got so inebriated that I fell through a glass shower door.’”
Cuts, bruises, and gut-rot are not the only misadventures haunting the gin category. Erica Steller, whose family owns Dry Diggings Distillery in California’s Capital Region, observes that when gin comes out bad, it can be really bad. Steller is the hostess for Dry Diggings’ tasting room and has heard many testimonials about a revolting taste that’s now bio-chemically branded on someone’s palate.
“I’ll meet visitors here who assure me they’ll never go back to gin,” Steller sayst. “It’s not surprising if you think about it: If they tried something where the producer started off with a not-so-great neutral spirit and then tried to cover up that punch-you-in-the-face taste by pumping it full of juniper and botanicals, all they really did was come up with something that tastes like rubbing alcohol and potpourri.”
Katrincic has even heard similar tales when meeting her own girlfriends at their favorite cocktail bar.
“One of my friends admitted that she had a bad gin experience in college, and she had not had a sip of gin since,” Katrincic remembers. “She’s sitting with me, and it was almost like she was having a confession with a priest.”
The Women Driving Gin’s Comeback
Katrincic, Steller, Troupe, and Baddour all agree that having a unique approach to making gin — and an interesting story to tell about it — is an ideal way to tempt a whiskey, vodka, rum, or tequila connoisseur into trying it again.
For Katrincic, cold distillation is that unique selling point. She likes to go into detail about how rotary evaporators can save flavor profiles that would otherwise be destroyed.
“There’s a specific reason Conniption doesn’t taste like what they remembered,” Katrincic stresses.
Troupe also uses rotary evaporators when working on Freeland’s straight gin, which the distillery’s fans refer to as its “blue bottle gin” because it is bottled in a large glass teardrop colored like the waters of Bimini.
“One of the things that inspires me most is the terroir of Oregon,” Troupe says. “We wanted that sense of place while being garden-forward.” Using the rotovap for ingredients like cucumbers, rosemary, and thyme helps create those garden-fresh flavors.
Freeland’s gin features fresh, tropical aromas that hit the nose first, while the rich, pluming vanilla that it swings across the palate is quite distinct from a London Dry. That’s a taste that Troupe can discuss with gin skeptics. For traditionalists, she offers a classic dry gin as well as a Forest Gin that features botanicals sourced from Forest Park, five blocks from Troupe’s urban distillery.
Area botanicals have always been a good conversation starter for Baddour at Half Moon Bay Distillery, too. Some people visiting her tasting room are gin grumps who mainly want to try her lavender vodka. But when Baddour starts talking about the coastal rose hips that go into her gin, that can pique their curiosity. Sometimes they will even taste for themselves how gentile the spirit’s juniper contours are within an icy cleanness that has little pings of coconut cream.
“There’s thirteen different botanicals and herbs in it,” Baddour remarks, “and while I don’t give the whole recipe away, I do talk to visitors about some things that are from the hills surrounding us, like rose hips.”
A New Gin Gospel
“I want you to just try something, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.”
Whenever Steller finds herself saying those words inside her family’s tasting room, she is always talking to a gin basher — and she’s always coyly pouring a gin made by her brother Kendric. These days, Steller’s weapon of choice is Dry Diggings’ Engine 49 Gin. It’s an elegant citrus gin that combines fresh oranges with the vapor-path infusion process. The result is simply beautiful, with a delicate mandarin-marshmallow zest that feels crisp on the tongue.
“People can be reluctant to taste something when you won’t tell them what it is,” Steller acknowledges. “But when they try this, they find it’s almost like a complex limoncello, and they usually love it because it’s so well-rounded. With this little trick, I’m also finding that a lot of IPA beer drinkers are closet gin drinkers and don’t know it.”
Troupe believes that American producers should emphasize to the public that there’s a vast versatility within the gin category.
“I think gin is probably one of the most creative products a distiller can make,” Troupe reflects. “There is just a never-ending supply of botanicals to choose from, and all the different ratios and combinations are almost endless, too.”
Troupe adds, “I think that work has been happening, especially in the last five years: We may not be in a gin boom, but we’re in an easier place when it comes to introducing consumers to gin as a concept, as well as the idea that it’s okay for us to tell them, ‘You might not like my gin, and that’s fine, but I think there is a gin out there that you will love.’”
