Awful Juniper Quality

[SlickFloss]

Hey community,

      Recently we had a load of Juniper come in from our standard supplier that was absolutely atrocious in quality. Everything was cracked, almost woody and mulch in appearance and texture, some of the "berries" seemed way too big to be juniper, actually found some sticks in one lot. Atrocious. We returned botanicals and received a new batch from a different supplier, very reminiscent of the first. Almost no flavor or pop to them.

 

We reached out to a few peers that we know are making Gin in bulk like we are and they've said similar things, wanted to get word out to the community to be very vigilant on QCing ingredients coming in, especially juniper in the current market. Feel free to share anecdotals below : )

 

Cheers, good luck.

Slick

[whiskeytango]

What region was your order from?  I had good luck with the juniper coming out of Albania. 

 

 

[SlickFloss]

Junipers provenance info tells us it is Albanian. I don't want to put suppliers on blast but both separate companies are sources from CA.

 

Lots of very large fry hard wrinkly balls of matter, no real flavor to them. Little normal looking junipers who lack intensity/"punch" fill in the gaps. Probably 65-75% larger and the remaining balance of bags being the sub par quality but better looking smaller berries. None of it meets QC for us in terms of flavor quality [despite appearance]