Warner's
Rhubarb
- Warner's Distillery Ltd
- Falls Farm
- 40% ABV
- 700 ml
- Freshly pressed rhubarb juice, juniper, coriander seed, elderflower, cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, angelica root, orange peel, lemon peel
Orchard fruit
Rhubarb leads — tart, green-stalked, with the cooked-fruit sweetness of a crumble rather than raw acid. Juniper sits under it, dry and piney, with citrus peel and a light peppery finish. Pink in the glass, sharper on the tongue than the colour suggests.
Serve
1:2 — enough quinine bitterness to keep the rhubarb tart
Garnish — A thin ribbon of orange peel
Cocktails
Gin Sour
Lemon leads and sugar follows close enough to keep it drinkable, while egg white thickens the texture and rounds off the acid. The foam is cool and near-tasteless; the sour underneath is bright and sharp. Juniper has to push through all that citrus, so a dry, assertive gin holds its shape best.
The rhubarb in Warner's already brings the tartness, so lemon and egg white round it into something soft without burying the juniper.
Gin & Tonic
Long, dry and bitter-edged, the tonic's quinine pulling against the gin's botanicals while the lime wedge sharpens both. Refreshing rather than contemplative. The gin has to hold its shape against all that dilution: juniper and citrus carry through, where delicate florals tend to vanish.
The pressed rhubarb and orange-and-lemon peel are built for quinine — tart pink fruit against the bitterness, with the black pepper finish surviving the ice and dilution that would flatten a gentler bottle.
Bee's Knees
Honey rounds off the citrus edges, so the sour never bites, and the orange juice softens the lemon while giving the drink weight. That ease is the problem the gin has to solve: juniper and pepper keep it from collapsing into breakfast, and a floral bottle finds room to speak inside the honey.
Rhubarb's crumble-sweet acidity does what honey wants and the elderflower blooms inside it, while the cardamom and black pepper stop the whole thing sliding into jam on toast.
