Leslie Gracie was sitting in her garden one night, in summer, as the light began to fade, and she noticed something different from the smell that would occur during the day in her juicy, Scottish garden.
"I was sitting there one night, and I thought, wow, I can actually smell those flowers," she says. "The more light it seemed to replace, the more complexity evolved. At night, you pick up more complexity because it's not working your eyesight. Also, some plants smell differently at night."
While she was working late at Hendrick's Gin Palace, she posed one night at the Tropical Hothouse. That experience has inspired Hendrick's latest release of Gin, Lunar.
"It was one of those things that made me go, hmm, and so I played with it quite a bit." "I started with deep, spicy kind of flowers and green kind."
"When you're in the tropical house at night, there is an inherent spice, but a kind of green aroma, and sitting at the tip with all the different floral characters," she continues. “It was a lot of fun trying to get that all together and pulling everyone together in the balance. It is clearly still in Hendrick's style, but it is in a completely different direction. "
Gracie, who is the master distiller and creator of Hendrick's Gin, sat on the zoom call at the beginning of Women's History Month, to discuss her latest, special edition of Hendrick. "I started working on Lunar in 2019," she says. "We had some warm evenings, then I was sitting outside in my garden with my dog, and it was just nice."
Following the inspiration that evening, Gracie started playing with things growing up in a tropical hothouse. "There are all kinds of things, bananas, coffee, cocoa, coconut, pineapple," she says. "" All kinds of things are growing there, and now there are many fish in the ponds. We put four small fish, and now we got about 30 fish there, so what are those fish doing. "
Gracie wrapped the final formula for Lunar. "We did it more or less before we shut things down," says Gracie.
Although the distillery is never closed, only a limited number of people are allowed at a time, and Gracie cannot gather with her team, as if she used ideas.
She says, "Some things are more difficult because we can't get together so I have to send samples to brand ambassadors and teams. '"" It's completely different, and it's as much fun as when you don't have everyone around the table trying things, but we're there at the moment. "
Gracie states that she and the palace staff (which Hendrick calls his main distillery, and that it is actually as grand a place as a palace) are tested once a week, and they Check on arrival onsite. "I think it's a shame for the bartenders and everybody," she says. "Going to a bar and collecting something is not the same as standing where the bartender is seen making something. You miss all the theater making a cocktail. It is not the same to get cocktails without theater. "
Gracie says she is still working on new projects. "We still have a lot of things we're working on and things that we talk about, but it's a bit more difficult at the moment," she says.
Meanwhile, she looks forward to going back to her garden, when it is hot to relax with a lunar cocktail. "There's a pair that our bartenders have developed that I really like," she says. “One is called Cosmic Cooler, mixed with lime, sugar and soda, and it gives you good freshness. Lime actually works well with gin. Another is called Moonlight Delight with apple juice, lime juice and ginger beer. Ginger's effect actually comes through that. But it is also good with tonic.
