Citadelle No Mistake Old Tom Gin

Citadelle No Mistake Old Tom Gin, An extremely bold Old Tom style gin. It has both an aggressive sweetness and an aggressive aged quality. Citadelle’s Old Tom isn’t a quiet mixing gin. It has a perspective that will take over mixed drinks. Mix up a Tom Collins for a delicious history lesson that tastes nothing like the dry version. It’s sweet and almost rum like.

In 1836, as he loitered in the bars of London, Charles Dickens marveled at “the ingenuity employed to give sobriquets to gin, with one term more seductive than the next, to describe it in multiple ways.” “No Mistake” is one of the nicknames Dickens noted and it seemed appropriate for our Old Tom, which we created in honor of this superb elixir.

Alexandre Gabriel’s challenge was to set it in context by starting from a base of a popular gin of the 19th century. In the course of his frequent travels in the Caribbean, he discovered a marvelous brown sugar, like Demerara, moist and heavy. It was the missing ingredient. This sugar is toasted in copper cauldrons for a first stage of caramelization, then lightly thinned and finally alcoholized.

It is then aged for three to four months in casks. To create his Old Tom, the expertise of the Master Blender consists of supplementing Citadelle Réserve – selected for its floral aspect – with aged sugar, then putting it all back into casks for several months, in order to obtain a perfect blend of all the elements, an ideal integration at 46% alcohol.