Ebba Coastal Cornish Dry Gin Review
One of Cornwall’s most stunning sights is St Michael’s Mount, a rocky island in St Michaels’ Bay complete with a mediaeval castle and church. Depending upon tides you can either walk there or back from Marazion or, when the tide is in, travel by boat. Be prepared for a bit of a climb when you get to the island but the terraced gardens, the castle and its art collection are well worth the effort. It also makes an impressive sight, looming up from the coast line.
As well as this famous landmark, Mounts Bay is also the home of Mounts Bay Distillery in nearby Praa Sands. A small family-run operation, the brainchild of Lisa Anglesjo and Ben Roberts, it is making waves with an impressive range of gins and rums, all inspired by their wonderful Cornish setting and featuring many of the county’s botanicals. As is the modern way, they eschew plastics in their products and donate shares of their profits to charities that plant trees and remove plastics from the oceans.
On a recent visit to Constantine Stores, the headquarters of Drinkfinder UK, I picked up a bottle of their Ebba Cornish Dry Gin. One of the ways of trying to make your mark in the crowded market spawned by the ginaissance is to create a bottle which is so stunning that it cannot fail to catch a browser’s attention. Mounts Bay Distillery have managed to pull this off with considerable aplomb. The bottle is stunning, simplicity personified, but elegant and something you will want to keep and cherish, long after the original contents have gone.
The bottle is slim, circular with a medium-sized neck, leading to a wooden top and cork stopper. What marks it out is both the material it is made of – it is ceramic – and its colour, a sort of duck egg green. Labelling is minimalist. A long thin strip near the base of the bottle, giving simply the name of the product, the size of bottle (700ml) and the ABV (40%) in orange and black type on a white background. The continuation to the rear of the bottle of Cornish Gin is marginally more informative. The only other colour used is orange on the security label. If you are looking for minimalist elegance, this is it in a bottle.
The label does tell me that it was “inspired by the ocean and the botanicals picked up along the shoreline”. While they do not give a full line up of the botanicals used, the bottle does reveal that this small batch spirit is distilled in a pot “with fresh citrus tangs from sea berries, heady pine tones from juniper and herbal notes from rock samphire and sea aster”. The sea berries are farmed and harvested by the Cornish Seaberry Company.
The fruits of their labour do not disappoint. There is enough juniper in both the nose and the beautifully clear spirit to keep an old stick-in-the-mud like me satisfied, while the citrus elements are crisp and zesty, and the shoreline botanicals give it a saline freshness which lingers into the aftertaste. A Cornish twist on a London Dry style and with an ABV of 40%, this is so moreish that even if it was served in a tin can, I would buy it. Fortunately, the bottle is an added bonus and will be kept to be used either as a water bottle or a stand for a candle. After all, we all need to do our bit for the environment.
Kind words thanks to Martin at Windowthroughtime
