The venerability of Plymouth Gin bears testimony to the enduring influence of the Royal Navy in a maritime economy. Once it has been established that gin is important as medicine carried on a boat, well, someone must distill and provision all those ships filled with sailors in need of medicine. Or in the case of colonists in India, something to make the quinine go down.
Plymouth Gin is a multinational appendage these days, but the tour was informative, and the use of botanicals in flavoring gin is quite interesting to me overall. The distillery seemed quite small to me, and that's because only the second distillation (infusion of botanicals) takes place at Black Friars. There's no bottling, either. The grainy photos of the distillery result from a weird ban on the use of cameras.
Below is a view of the harbor surrounding a restaurant called the China House, where I enjoyed fish pie for dinner ... but alas, not the sought-after Stargazy pie. It was a mellow and cooler end to a long and enriching day in Plymouth.
(The account of our visit to the UK is being posted piecemeal, backdated to the actual day)
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