Gin in India

Legally, gin is a neutral spirit redistilled or flavoured with botanicals where juniper is the dominant, defining note. Everything else — citrus peel, coriander seed, angelica root, whatever a distillery adds — sits around that requirement.

London Dry is a production method, not a place: all the botanicals go into the still together and nothing is added after distillation except a small amount of water. It's the driest, most juniper-forward style and the one most classic cocktails (a Martini, a Negroni) were designed around.

Distilled gin is redistilled with botanicals but allows flavouring to be added afterward — a looser, more flexible process than London Dry.

Compound gin skips redistillation entirely: neutral spirit with botanical flavouring mixed in directly, closer to infusing than distilling. It's the fastest and cheapest way to make something that's legally gin, and it usually tastes it.

Genever is gin's Dutch ancestor — made from a malted grain base that gives it a whisky-adjacent maltiness underneath the botanicals. Worth trying once specifically because it tastes unlike either gin or whisky.

The wave that started around 2017 (Stranger & Sons, Hapusa, Jaisalmer among the earliest) leaned on botanicals nobody else was using — Nilgiri hill lemongrass, gondhoraj lime, coriander, and other ingredients native to India rather than European juniper-forest cliches. That's a real point of differentiation, not just marketing framing: the botanical bill genuinely changes what's in the bottle.

Most of these are London Dry or distilled gin, not compound — worth checking the label if that distinction matters to you, since "craft" alone doesn't guarantee it.

Three things worth checking on the label: the production method (London Dry vs distilled vs compound, if stated), the ABV (most sit at 40-43%, a handful of "Navy Strength" gins run 57%+), and whether it's flavoured after distillation, which will usually say so explicitly (a pink gin, a citrus gin).

A flavoured gin isn't a lesser gin — it's a different use case, closer to a ready-made cocktail ingredient than a base spirit for a Martini.

Rather than us naming specific bottles as good, here's where to actually look:

Browse the full gin catalogue, or jump straight to it sorted cheapest first if you're picking a first bottle to experiment with. Filtering there shows real, currently-tracked prices — not a fixed list that goes stale.