Boomerville Gin Tasting!

Tuesday, January 21, 2020 was Gin Tasting Tuesday!  At least at Whiskeytown in Boomerville.  (For those who are not Unusual Suspects (a Facebook group), "Whiskeytown" is the name for the circle-up of Unusual Suspects that we arrange each year at Boomerville in Quartzsite in January.)

It has become a tradition for our friends Leslie and Dave, and our friends Duane and Jean, and us, to join each other for a gin tasting at Boomerville.  This year, we scheduled it at our RV in Whiskeytown.  Since we were in the circle-up, it was natural to invite all the Unusual Suspects to join in the fun.

And join they did!

One condition of participation was that, if you want to taste the gins, you have to contribute a gin.  Sort of like a ginny potluck (forgive us the reference, Virginie).  As a consequence, we had lots of gins to sample.  From left to right in the photo below, they were:  Uncle Fred's 30-year old Gordon's Gin (contributed by Tony), Seagrams Gin (contributed by Eric and Ginny), New Amsterdam Gin (contributed by Kathy), Tanqueray Gin (contributed by our newest Boomer friend Terri, introduced to us by Leslie and Dave), Bombay Sapphire (contributed by Leslie), three very tasty and unique Vancouver Island gins (contributed by Judy), a wonderful pink gin (donated by Leslie), Ungava Gin (contributed by Kathy and David), and Genever Gin (contributed by David):

We had one late entrant.  Tony and Dee Dee finally fessed up that they were holding back their most treasured gin, Empress.  They brought it out with appropriate fanfare and it joined the tasting in a (just in) timely fashion.  However, it was too late to join the photo shoot.

It was a casual affair.  Note the rigorous approach the group used to pass the gins around for tasting:

The highlight of the evening was, no doubt, Uncle Fred's Gordon's Gin, which Tony presented to the group:

Tony insists that this is a truly antique gin, judging by its old label and its ancient seal:

In fact, the seal was so old that none of us had seen one like this before.  Eventually, some pliers helped us open it.  But, back in the day, there must have been a more straightforward way of breaking that seal:

Judy's Sheringham Gins from Vancouver Island were a big hit for their unusual herbal flavors -- to the point that we have to give them their own feature in this blog entry:

All agreed that the gin tasting was a great success!  We don't know whether any opinions were formed or changed, but we do know that everyone pushed beyond their personal gin frontiers and found gins that they never knew existed.

Cheers!  Gambei!  Prost! Salut! Na Zdrovya!