In an Edinburgh laboratory in the second half of 2023, four chemists armed with a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer took on the unregulated Wild West of the gin industry.
A total of 16 samples of gin endured the spectrometer’s powerful magnetic field to create a “fingerprint”—in the form of peaks along an x-axis—which researchers David Ellis and Ruaraidh McIntosh then put together like “a jigsaw puzzle”; when complete, the puzzle revealed exactly which compounds were responsible for a certain gin’s flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. The graphical marks could impart even the physical origin of the juniper berries used in a gin, offering a level of accuracy beyond traditional sensory analysis. The team published its results in a paper late last year.
It’s a study that could bring order to a near-lawless industry: Gin is a famously gray area in the alcoholic beverages sector. Unlike tightly regulated Scotch whisky or location-specific cognac, gin needs only to demonstrate a minimum 37.5 percent ABV and a prominent juniper taste to qualify for its name—and that’s pretty much it.
“As with any spirit category, there are often conversations around protecting gin by tightening the regulations,” says Pal Gleed, director general at The Gin Guild, a trade body of global gin distillers, brand owners, and industry figures. “However, to do this without stifling innovation is not easy.”
Unregulated as the gin sector might be, it is also unfettered, creating a space for considerable innovation within the alcoholic beverages sector. Coming behind only vodka in variety, the spirit's recent commercial releases include gin made from peas—the byproduct of which can be used as animal feed, resulting in a spirit with a negative carbon footprint.
The imaginative approach of gin distillers isn’t new: Indeed, fruit gins are mentioned in The Distiller of London, published as early as 1639. Packed with various recipes for gins and requiring ingredients ranging from aniseed and coriander to poppy flowers and nutmeg, the book reflects a Stuart-period England already getting a taste for creativity with its spirits.
The attitude of innovation has continued since. Tom Warner, cofounder of Warner’s Distillery, calls such creativity the “lifeblood” of the business. And while he admits that it has “probably blurred the lines on what is and isn’t a gin,” he notes that without it, the “category wouldn’t have exploded the way that it did.”
So could NMR spectroscopy and its ability to unlock the exact elements behind top-quality gin mark the death of innovation for the spirit? Unlikely. McIntosh believes that a clearer understanding of what defines a gin “shouldn’t be seen as being restrictive to the industry.”
In fact, it could be an opportunity to prune out counterfeits while giving space for a richer gin industry to flourish. Jared Brown, master distiller at luxury gin brand Sipsmith, tells WIRED that he is on board: “Will tighter regulations force new gin producers to work a bit harder, to learn a bit more gin history and tradition before releasing a spirit and calling it gin? Will more dodgy distillates be excluded from the category? I’m for that.” Ellis also believes that “it’s possible this kind of fingerprinting approach could lead to some kind of framework to define what is actually meant by ‘gin’ in a much more rigorous way than there is at the moment.”
While the fingerprinting method is similar to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), NMR preceded its better-known cousin by 30 years; the first NMR machine was developed by Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell in 1945. MRI, in turn, was developed from NMR in the 1970s and made commercially available in the 1980s.
Where MRI uses a magnetic field and radio waves to assemble anatomical images, NMR uses a magnetic field to measure nuclear spins, which are affected by electromagnetic radiation. The spectrometer presents the absorbed frequencies as a series of peaks on a graph, which reveal the chemical environment of atoms in the sample. When Ellis and McIntosh interpret the results, they match these peaks to their gin spectra to “build” the structure of molecules present.
“The spectrum is a lot more complicated than it would be if you had a simple organic molecule as pure compound, and identifying the fingerprints of all of those different molecules is really the main challenge. But we’ve shown it works,” says Ellis. “It’s now quite a well-accepted technique for looking at complex mixtures, including food and drink.”
The researchers can even distinguish between molecules with the same atomic makeup. Terpenes, the chemical characterizers of gin, have the same generic chemical formula (C5H8) but offer entirely different flavors, aromas, and textures. Limonene tastes of orange, for example, while myrcene is sweet and spicy.
Knowing exactly what’s in a gin matters more now, as the industry continues to grow and counterfeits and copies look to cash in. The premium sector is set to be worth around $1.4 billion by 2030, and establishing provenance and authentication will be essential to distillers hoping to protect their products and prove to well-heeled customers that they’ve used those rare and expensive ingredients.
The thriving market has also translated into a rapidly increasing demand for juniper berries, just as traditional juniper suppliers are struggling with a changing climate. As distilleries look to source juniper berries from new suppliers, they will face inevitable variation in chemical composition and subsequent variation in flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. “The various compounds present in the juniper varies depending on where the juniper comes from,” McIntosh explains, “so NMR could help to look at the natural ingredients and what they’re providing for the gin.”
But introducing NMR spectroscopy might not be straightforward. Gleed points out that “very few gin distillers have access to anything more than their noses and a hydrometer,” and NMR equipment is expensive, making it unrealistic for most distillers and possibly lending an advantage to higher-end brands with more funding.
Its use might also mark a shift away from an artistic understanding of gin, in which variety is respected as an unavoidable result of genuine creativity. Indeed, Brown says he “will always prefer organoleptic analysis as, at the end of the day, I’m making gin for people, not computers.”
Meanwhile, Warner’s Distillery employs scientific analysis already—namely gas chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography—and the company says it is satisfied with its methodology as is. “We know our molecular fingerprints,” it notes.
However, the new gin fingerprint research, published in the Journal of Brewing and Distilling in December 2023, addresses the use of gas chromatography combined with mass spectrometry (GC/MS) in analyzing gin, compared to NMR spectroscopy. It points out that unlike GC/MS, NMR doesn’t require the prior separation of samples, and offers the advantage of speed.
The question remains as to whether NMR spectroscopy is a blessing or a curse for gin distilleries. Will a tighter definition of gin separate the wheat from the chaff—or the weed from the juniper—and preserve the sector’s rich heritage? Or will it quash a colorful and innovative industry in which imagination is the name of the game?
At The Gin Guild, Gleed is, somewhat unsurprisingly, confident that the imaginative attitude of distillers isn’t going anywhere: “The beauty of the gin industry is that it is innovative, and that this innovation is driven by brands of all sizes. This passion for creativity won’t be affected.”
Certainly, the industry doesn’t appear to be struggling. Last year, some 9 million 9-liter cases of gin were sold in the US, generating more than $1 billion in revenue for distillers, with the superpremium category surging by 16 percent to surpass 700,000 9-liter cases. Meanwhile, the UK saw the introduction of 110 new distilleries between 2020 and 2022, as the pandemic drove consumers’ appetites for the luxury experience.
The hope, then, is that NMR will provide what Brown terms “guardrails of respect for heritage” for a sector in danger of becoming drunk on its own success.
