What went into December's amazing Christmas gin?!

Copperfield London Dry Gin A Christmas Carol Edition has kicked off Christmas in the best possible way! This gin really encapsulates the spirit of the festive season and it was created exclusively for Craft Gin Club members for that extra special Christmas touch!

For Chris Smart, the master distiller at The Surry Copper Distillery, it was an honour to handcraft a gin for this incredible time of year. Bottling that feeling of warmth and togetherness was the goal. The result, happily, was the spectacular limited edition gin our members are unwrapping this month.

As he smiles, “Winter in the UK is all about family sitting together in a lovely, warm house or the local pub, by a roaring fire, enjoying each other’s company. Add a superb gin to the mix and you’ve got something wonderful.”

Inspired by a Dickensian classic, capturing the tastes and scents of the festive season and hand-crafted with love by one man (with a little help from his family!), this bottle is truly a gift – and we can’t wait for our members to discover it!

“I’ve always loved gin,” Chris says. “It’s such an easy spirit to drink, and a great G&T is hard to beat on a Friday night after a hard week’s work.”

Along with a passion for gin, Chris and wife Katherine had also harboured a life-long dream of setting out on their own.

With the children all grown up and moved out, to start lives of their own, Chris and Katherine, in their quiet house, looked at one another.

Chris says, “We decided that if we were ever going to start our own distillery it had to be now. So, we left our respective jobs one Friday, and started working on the distillery the next day!”

After all those years of dreaming – and drinking G&Ts, of course! – Chris and Katherine already knew exactly what kind of gin they wanted to make.

“Katherine collects the classics,” Chris explains, “including Dickens novels and old academic brewing and distilling books. We wanted our gin brand to be all about old books.”

Chris and Katherine have always loved Charles Dickens, and his unique ability to walk the line between the traditionalist and the radical reformer was inspiring. It was a balance that they wanted to achieve in the gins they would make.

“Our ethos is traditional,” says Chris. “Our gins to date have been classic London dry gins, made with plenty of juniper – that’s important to us. We also want them to be smooth enough to drink as a sipping gin, but robust enough to stand up to a premium tonic!”

With this goal in mind, Katherine and Chris used all of their combined experience and expertise to craft a gin that met their high standards. But they had a little help from an unexpected source: tucked away in one of Katherine’s old tomes was a recipe for a gin that Dickens himself would have recognised.

“For our first gin we wanted to recreate an old gin recipe,” Chris explains. “Katherine found a book on distilling in a library archive by Ambrose Cooper, who published a book in London in 1757. We based the recipe for our first gin on one of his recipes.”

They called this first volume in their spirit library Copperfield London Dry Gin, after the Dickens novel David Copperfield. Its botanical blend is straight out of Victorian England, with just a few modern additions to add the floral notes which were missing.

With the first volume of their book-inspired gin range done, Katherine and Chris just needed to name their distillery. In the end, they took inspiration from their local pub. As residents of an idyllic Surrey village, the couple had spent a lot of time there as their family grew, including many a Christmas with a mince pie and a pint. They couldn’t help but take in the local lore.

As Chris explains, “The pub has a lot of history, and is said to be where, centuries ago, a local police officer arrested a gang of regulars who also happened to be sheep rustlers. He became known as ‘The Surrey Copper’ and it just seemed to fit with the rest of our thinking.”

The Copperfield London Dry Gin A Christmas Carol Edition that our members have unwrapped this Christmas is a spectacular combination of traditional winter spices like cinnamon and cloves with the subtle sweetness of liquorice and wormwood – the making of a mince pie, elevated immensely by Chris’s incredibly sophisticated selection of citrus botanicals.

In this gin, bitter orange peel – and what could be more Christmassy than orange? – joins lemon peel and the citrus notes of distilled coriander to lift the palate. The traditional gin botanicals of angelica root and orris root bind the flavours together, while piny juniper provides the comforting thrum of tradition, a backbone of familiarity upon which Chris has masterfully spun a ginny story worthy of its Dickensian namesake.

Like the Dickens novel it’s named after, this gin captures the spirit of the season without being limited by it. The sweetness, citrus and spice combine so elegantly that you could enjoy A Christmas Carol Edition G&T at the height of summer very easily – but, when you’re sipping in the light of the Christmas tree, this gin takes on an entirely new dimension.