Gin class (ugh)

[indyspirits]

My son's school has caught wind that I work/contribute/participate at a distillery and have asked that I donate a "Gin Class" for the annual fundraiser. I'm not even sure what that means. If this were a paying gig I would distill individual botanicals at varying quantities at varying etoh concentrations; conduct an organoleptic evaluation of each and then work toward a recipe and point out the trials & tribulations of scaling up a recipe to production levels.... But it's not. We do have four small 2L lab stills for use which is nice. I'm interested in your thoughts on how to do this.  My ideas are roughly:

• History
• Traditional Botanicals
• How it's made
• Stylistic variations

Any sage advice greatly appreciated

[glisade]

I've done something very similar at a distillery. It was a 1.5 hour private class and we went over:

• History of gin
• Explanation of different types of gin
• Botanicals review with many of them laid out in jars to smell/taste
• How gin is made with a demonstration in a 2L lab still and we had a production batch going at the same time
• How to setup and distill on a small lab still
• Gin Tasting

We gave them a booklet we made that included most of the above along with the GRAS table, water-ethanol equilibrium curve, where to buy a lab still, etc..Both classes we did sold out with 15 people per class.

 

[indyspirits]

That's a fantastic approach. Regarding the botanicals -- had they been individually distilled or were these the actually source herbs / spices / etc?

[glisade]

Dried botanicals in half pint, wide mouth jars of our specific botanicals and other common gin botanicals.

[Foreshot]

The history of Gin & Tonic is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic#History

Nice handout here: http://www.compoundchem.com/2015/04/21/gin/

Will you be able to give them samples? If so samples of very different styles would be cool. I'm not a gin person and I would sign up for that.

[HedgeBird]

19 hours ago, indyspirits said:

Any sage advice greatly appreciated

My advice would be to not give or donate a product/service that you do not currently offer to regular paying customers, or provide regularly.  

But then I am turning into a grumpy old man worn out by the daily request for donations for every imaginable organization under the sun!

[indyspirits]

55 minutes ago, HedgeBird said:

My advice would be to not give or donate a product/service that you do not currently offer to regular paying customers, or provide regularly.

I absolutely wouldn't, except it's my son's school and I believe it to be a good cause (scholarships).   Notwithstanding, your point is very well taken. I can't tell you a week over the past two years where we haven't had at least one request for a donation of one thing or another.

[AC-DC]

Im excited to hear how it ends up going!

 Maybe an opportunity to look at this another way by adding a quarterly Gin Class to your tour/tasting  calendar.