Plymouth Gin
Sean Harrison Plymouth Gin master distiller
Back in the 1700s, gin enjoyed wild popularity thanks to its affordability, earning it the nickname "mother's ruin" because of the families it destroyed. In London alone there were around 7,000 gin shops at the time.
However, The Gin Act of 1751 put a healthy dampener on the gin craze.
Almost 300 years later, gin is enjoying a renaissance, though, arguably with fewer social problems than the 1700s.
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More than 73 million bottles of the spirit were sold in the UK alone in 2018, according to the Wine and Spirits Trade Association's (WSTA) end of year market report.
The quintessentially British spirit is worth £2.1 billion ($2.6 billion) in domestic sales, and from 2006 to 2016 British gin exports to the US rose by 553%.
One company that has been around through gin's ebbs and flows is Plymouth Gin, which was founded in 1793. For almost two centuries, no Royal Navy ship left port without a bottle of the company's produce.
This month, Plymouth Gin launched a craft ode to one of their 19th-century distillers, called Mr King's 1842, whose recipe they found within the vaults of Plymouth Black Friars distillery. The limited edition spirit is made with just two ingredients: orris root and hand-picked juniper from a single harvest day in the mountains of Frontignano in Italy.
Despite the spirit's popularity, there are still a number of things people don't know about it.
Business Insider spoke to Sean Harrison, Plymouth Gin's current master distiller who reinvented the old recipe, about the biggest mistakes people make when ordering, serving, and drinking gin.