A small site about gin and the spirits it shares a shelf with.

Gincave is a journal of craft gin and small-batch spirits. It exists because the spirits world deserves coverage that is more careful, more selective, and more honest than most of what's currently online, and because writing notes on what you drink turns drinking into an education.

The site is independent. There is no parent publisher. There is no sponsorship arrangement that controls what gets reviewed. Some links to merchants earn a small affiliate commission if you buy, which is the only revenue this site generates. Reviews are written based on the bottle, not on what the brand might prefer to read.

What you'll find here

Five sections, each doing a slightly different job:

• Reviews are tasting notes on individual gins and spirits, scored on a five-point scale, with food pairings and serve suggestions.
• Cocktails are recipes and technique, leaning on actual measurements and on the spirits they were tested with.
• Distilleries are profiles of the houses worth knowing - both the famous and the small.
• World is country-by-country coverage. The atlas of where interesting spirits are being made and the cultures that surround them.
• Guides are the longer reads: history, style definitions, how to choose, what navy strength actually means.

Gin first, but not gin only

The site's centre of gravity is gin, because gin is what I know best and because the contemporary gin scene is producing more interesting work right now than at any point in the last fifty years. But spirits don't sit in isolation. A serious gin drinker eventually develops an interest in mezcal, in Italian amaro, in Japanese whisky, in agricole rum. So Gincave covers the wider shelf, framed through the gin drinker's perspective: what does this spirit do, why might you like it, and how does it relate to what you already know.

Who writes this

Gincave is an independent editorial publication covering craft gin and small-batch spirits. We document what we taste, profile the distillers worth knowing, and write the cocktail technique that comes from years behind a working bar.

Gincave is written by a small editorial team obsessed with tasting notes, small distillers, and the cocktail technique that makes a bottle worth owning. We're independent, we pay attention, and we don't review bottles we haven't actually tasted.

How reviews work

Bottles reviewed here are either purchased at retail or, occasionally, sent as samples by distillers. Sample bottles are noted in the review and do not change the scoring approach. A poor sample bottle gets a poor review. The five-point scale is calibrated against what the bottle ought to be at its price point: a £25 London Dry is judged against the £25 London Dry shelf, not against £80 craft gin. Anything below 3.0 is not worth your money. Anything above 4.5 is exceptional.

What this site won't do

Gincave will not run sponsored reviews disguised as editorial. It will not run affiliate links to merchants we wouldn't actually use. It will not pretend to have tasted bottles that weren't tasted. And it will not publish AI-generated drivel masquerading as tasting notes, because the whole point of writing about spirits is to pay attention.

Drink as you would have written about you.