Dockyard Gin is a grain to glass premium gin from Kent in England. You can even find out where the grain for your own bottle of gin was grown. A premium-priced gin, it’s mainly sold in 50cl or 20cl bottles. It has an ABV of 41.2% and is a highly recommended gin.
Sample botanicals: Juniper; elderflower; cardamom; grains of paradise
The Dockyard
Dockyard Gin is distilled by the Copper Rivet Distillery in Chatham’s historic dockyard. If you’re unfamiliar with this location, look at London and scan to your right and down a little. Chatham is on the River Medway, which is the next river down from the River Thames.
Geography lesson over, it’s worth noting that the distillery is one of the few in the UK that can truly be described as ‘grain to glass.’ This means that they produce their spirits from scratch (rather than buying in a neutral base spirit). It’s a similar approach to that taken by, for example, Arbikie Distilley in Angus, Scotland.
The distillery are rightly proud of their grain to glass approach. So much so, that you can even trace where the grain in your glass of gin came from. Enter the bottle code into their website here and you can find the provenance of your grain.
The batch that we reviewed had come from the entertainingly-named Leysdown-on-Sea on the far east point of the Isle of Sheppy. That’s about 18 miles away from the distillery itself. Actually, all of the grain used is from within 20 miles. That local focus will be an enticing reason for many consumers to try this gin.
Dockyard Gin review
We were interested to note that the Copper Rivet Distillery have a unique approach to distilling gin. Their still (“Janet”) can perform both maceration and vapour distillation at the same time. The claim is that this produces a unified gin. So does it?
Well, certainly on opening the bottle, it’s very promising. The first aroma that we noticed was a beautiful mix of citrus and juniper. The general consensus was of a hint of lime which, as far as we can tell, isn’t actually one of the botanicals! So it must be coming from the Spanish orange and Italian lemon peel. Irrespective, this is a really pleasant smelling gin.
To taste, the gin really opened up. Having a taste neat, the citrus and juniper is still there. However, the botanicals we’ve listed above (the cardamom and grains of paradise) work their way in with the coriander seeds that are also present. They add some spiciness to that citrus. That doesn’t overpower though and, as lovers of a citrusy gin, we were all pleased about that.
There’s a really pleasant linger to Dockyard Gin too. We all agreed it had a very smooth mouthfeel and quite a ‘warming’ sense to it too. In fact, we loved it; it’s beautifully balanced and the claim that it’s a very rounded and coherent gin is one you’ll have no arguments from here!
How to serve Dockyard Gin
The suggested perfect serve for Dockyard Gin is with tonic over ice with a slice of pink grapefruit. That worked really well for us, although any citrus garnish works well with this dry gin. Clearly down to choice, but we found Dockyard Gin worked well with roughly double the tonic to gin (as per our normal recommendation for serving gin and tonic).
Dockyard did work well neat too, but our preference was for a classic gin and tonic.
Overall, we were very taken with this very drinkable gin from Kent and were delighted to get the opportunity to add it to our full gin review list. We applaud the grain to glass approach and can recommend Dockyard as a fantastic classic gin.
Buy Dockyard Gin UK
You can buy Dockyard Gin in the UK from Amazon or Master of Malt.
Disclosure
We were grateful to be gifted Dockyard Gin for review. In line with our policy, we only feature gins on this site that we feel we can recommend. We were delighted to be able to do so.
