SPECIAL EDITION GINS
Our limited special edition small batch gins are born of collaboration, the desire to create something unique or seasonal, or merely to indulge ourselves. Often deviating from our core botanicals and processes, these gins are available for a few fleeting months each year, especially our PUD PUD Christmas gin.
To ensure you get your hands on the best artisan gins in Hertfordshire, you’d be wise to sign up to our newsletter for release dates and have our gin delivered direct to your front door.
Box Moor Gin
TOP 10 GIN 2023 as compiled by gin judge, consultant, blogger and gin writer Gin A Ding Ding (Sarah Miller)!
1594 Gin reincarnated as this new special edition gin – Box Moor Gin. Distilled to a London Dry style gin Box Moor Gin uses rare juniper grown on The Box Moor Trust's estate in Hemel Hempstead. We also use fresh lime as one of the five botanicals as a nod to Boxmoor Wharf which was once home to Rose's Lime Juice.
Available with either a burnt orange or brown label the bottle design is inspired by the Belted Galloway cows often seen grazing on The Box Moor Trust land near Boxmoor village. We also reference the gravestone of highwayman James 'Robert' Snooks who in 1801 robbed a postboy travelling from Tring to Hemel Hempstead and was the last person in the UK to be executed for the crime!
£2 from every bottle sold goes to The Box Moor Trust.
Serve as a G&T with Indian tonic and a lime slice or try these tasty cocktails made with Box Moor Gin.
ULTRASONIC Gin
"Summery but pleasingly hearty – it's like being sat in a country pub garden on a sunny day with an elderflower pressé and an apple crumble!" Paul Jackson, The Gin Guide
Inspired by the flight of native bats through the British countryside, this bold gin uses a unique ultrasonic process and pot distillation to extract flavour and aroma from local hedgerow plants including elderflower, along with Bramley apple and mint.
For each bottle sold, we will donate £2 to Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust to support the charity’s work protecting bats and other wildlife across Hertfordshire and Middlesex.
Emma Norrington, the Trust’s Head of Fundraising and Communications said: “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Puddingstone Distillery again to create a one-of-a-kind gin. Hertfordshire is home to some magnificent wild places and species, and we’re always delighted when local businesses are keen to help protect them. This exciting new gin is the perfect way to capture the beauty of our countryside, highlight the amazing natural techniques of our bats and the work we do / need to do for their conservation”.
Bats are the only true flying mammal in the world. There are 17 species of bats in the UK, 12 of which can be found in Hertfordshire. Bats live in a range of habitats and Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust works hard to manage these places so that bats can thrive.
Bats are so-called indicator species, serving as a measurement of how well wildlife is faring and how well conservation efforts are working because they occupy a wide range of habitats and are sensitive to changes in the environment.
The dominant juniper forward profile and deliberate omission of a strong citrus botanical allows you, the consumer, to shape this gin to suit your palate. Our choice is over ice with Franklin & Sons Indian tonic and some slices of apple. We’d also recommend trying it with lime, strawberries and orange peel or why not freeze a few cubes of watermelon and throw them in. Of course it makes an awesome martini too!
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Honey Gin
The George Street Canteen in St Albans has the most amazing view overlooking St Albans Cathedral. Kevin and the team have put great effort into cultivating a warming and inviting space with alfresco dining perfect for brunches, afternoon tea and evening get togethers. At the bottom of the canteen garden are the beehives and it's the honey from these hives that is distilled with elderflower, chamomile, rosehip, juniper, orris root, lime peel, angelica and coriander seed. Herbaceous floral characteristics with a silky smooth mouth feel.
Our honey gin is distilled as a London Dry style and makes a tasty G&T with Fever-Tree Mediterranean Tonic and a sprig of fresh rosemary or lime slice.
WATFORD FC CENTENARY Gin
This limited edition bottling of our multi-award winning Campfire London Dry Gin commemorates Watford Football Club's 100 years at The Vic.
Vicarage Road has been the home of Watford FC since 1922. During 100 years at The Vic, the club has experienced countless historic events and memorable moments which are celebrated with the release of this special centenary collector's edition gin.
Each custom painted matt black with gold print bottle is hand numbered and shipped in plastic free packaging.
Distillery founders, Ben and Kate, both grew up in Watford and at one point lived within earshot of the cheering crowds of Vicarage Road!
Pud Pud Cherry Gin
RETURNS NOVEMBER 2024
Our winter seasonal Christmas gins are released each year to coincide with our distillery launch anniversary (11 November 2016).
During the summer of 2019 we met Vikki from Horwood Cherries – a family run, independent cherry orchard in north Buckinghamshire, just 20 miles from the distillery and we decided to launch a new PUD PUD Gin to celebrate our 3rd anniversary. Since then we receive a fresh delivery of cherries each July to start making PUD PUD Cherry Gin ready for Christmas.
Horwood Cherries grow many varieties but for our PUD PUD Cherry Gin we use the lapin variety – a dark sweet cherry just perfect for infusing into our gin which is distilled using ingredients from our favourite Hertforshire-made Christmas puddings and Macedonian juniper. When the time is right, and only Ben the distiller decides this, do we squeeze the cherries and triple filter the gin ready for bottling.
Soft juniper, spice and cherry notes without any additional sugar. Our preferred serve is neat over ice but for a G&T we favour Indian tonic water or Fever-Tree Aromatic Tonic. You can find more PUD PUD Cherry Gin serving suggestions on our cocktails page.
2023 sees the launch of PUD PUD Cherry Gin in it’s beautiful new bigger bottle. The cherry gin is visible through the chevron pattern printed on the bottle. We carefully fill each bottle individually and they’re labelled by hand with a copper, gold and black foiled cherrywood veneer label. 70cl, 38% ABV.
Gluten free and vegan friendly. We use fresh fruit so a small amount of sediment may appear in the bottle. This is just cherry goodness!
Favourite serves
Generally we prefer our limited edition and seasonal gins to work best as simple serves so you get the full flavour of the spirit. However Box Moor Gin makes an awesome Orange Sour so we just had to include it here. Plus PUD PUD Cherry Christmas Gin is too tasty to not experiment with and find new ways to enjoy it.
The White Herts is our version of a White Russian cocktail – PUD PUD Cherry Gin and Kahlua are stirred over ice with a cream float. Black Forest is like tucking into a slice of Black Forest Gateau, decadent and fruity with an alcohol warmth.
Pud Pud Cask Gin
ALL BOTTLES HAVE GONE TO GOOD HOMES
*PUD PUD Cask Gin was rated 1st place in The Telegraph's Christmas Gins 2019 top 6! 10/10*
*PUD PUD Cask Gin was rated 3rd place in The Telegraph's Christmas Gins 2018 top 6!*
There comes a time when the ex-bourbon casks we use for our award winning Campfire Cask Aged Gin get a little ‘tired’, but as we've discovered they still have life in them. PUD PUD Cask Christmas gin was first launched as an experiment for World Gin Day 2018.
PUD PUD Cask Gin is a blend of distilled Hertfordshire Christmas pudding and compounded juniper, raisin, allspice, cinnamon and fresh orange peel. Before ageing the gin we fill each ex-bourbon barrel with a liberal quantity of ruby port, rotating the barrels daily for a month so it soaks into the wood. The barrels are then refilled with the winter seasonal Christmas gin and rested for a further month.
The aromatic spice and juniper characteristics of PUD PUD are complemented by vanilla, caramel and bourbon notes and the sweet fruitiness of the port. The finished result is a rich golden colour with a touch of pink to the hue.
Our preferred serve is neat over ice but for a G&T we favour Fever-Tree Aromatic tonic water. We like to savour a small piece of 70% dark chocolate as a side garnish.
PUD PUD Cask Gin is distilled and compounded. It is gluten free.
PUD PUD CACAO Gin
ALL BOTTLES HAVE GONE TO GOOD HOMES
PUD PUD Cask Aged Gin was originally launched as a summer limited edition gin in 2018. It's popularity led us to bring it back later that year as part of the PUD PUD Christmas Gin range. We've been wanting to experiment with cacao nibs for a while now so we held back some of our PUD PUD Cask Aged Gin from the 2021 batch and have blended it with distilled organic Peruvian cacao nibs to bring you PUD PUD Cacao Gin.
The combination of the cacao nibs and the lightly spiced gin rested in port washed ex bourbon barrels is simply delicious. Serve as a simple G&T or try the cocktails listed here – Choc Martini (PUD PUD Cacao Gin with Regal Rogue Lively White Vermouth) and Big Kid – our Neopolitan ice cream in cocktail form creation (PUD PUD Cacao Gin, vanilla syrup and strawberries).
Pud Pud Gin
ALL BOTTLES HAVE GONE TO GOOD HOMES
PUD PUD Christmas Gins make the perfect gin gift. Pronounced PUD as in Christmas pudding and referring to a key ingredient as well as our distillery name, Puddingstone. This is our winter seasonal Christmas gin using the finest Macedonian juniper, Spanish orange peel and Hertfordshire-made Christmas puddings, produced by the highly acclaimed Nevie-Pie Cakes based in Berkhamsted.
Using a combination of vapour and pot distillation techniques we are able to balance the extraction of classic gin profiles and the rich spice characteristics of these amazing Christmas puddings.
Serve with Fever-Tree Indian or Light tonic water. If you like an 'in glass' garnish then just add a very thin sliver of fresh orange peel. Alternatively serve with a side garnish of 70% dark chocolate. Yum!
Also makes a delicious aperitif served as a bone dry martini, substitute our Campfire London Dry Gin with the PUD PUD Distilled Christmas gin using this recipe.
The Christmas puddings in PUD PUD Gin are distilled and therefore the gin is gluten free.
Domestique Gin
ALL BOTTLES HAVE GONE TO GOOD HOMES
We love bikes. Fact. Ben a bit more so than Kate (unless the bike has a front basket!) as quantified by the number of misspent hours riding, usually up and down steep woodland trails. When we were approached back in 2017, by ashmei, a local sports clothing brand, to create a themed limited edition cycling gin to be launched at the famed Rouleur cycling event, we could not refuse.
The gin named Domestique, after a cyclist in a road racing team whose role is to help their team leader, evolved to a stage where it truly was steeped in the spirit of cycling by being bottled in a classic stainless steel bidon that fitted in water bottle holders. After all, it should have a life after all the gin has been consumed.
And what about the gin in the bottle? Well, we selected botanicals from host countries of the major cycling tours. Alongside the required juniper, there is British coriander seed, Spanish orange peel, French hops, Belgian angelica root, Italian rosemary, Californian raisins and as a nod to the rural location of our distillery and the fact that the Tour of Britain has passed through Tring and the Chiltern Hills we've also included rosehip.
Domestique Gin was a Finalist in The Gin Guide Awards 2021 and Highly Commended in the Classic Gin category at the Craft Distilling Expo 2018. Judges at the awards included distillers, Gin Guild members, leading gin bloggers, spirit buyers and bartenders.
Since it's initial launch we have produced two small batches of 200 bottles and have been re-filling bidons for those lucky enough to have one but having received many requests for Domestique Gin to be bottled in glass and be a permanent offering to the Puddingstone Distillery small batch gin range, well who are we to argue! So now you can order our cycling themed gin, Domestique Gin, online and have it delivered to the cycling gin lovers in your life!
You might need to find a way of attaching a cocktail shaker and bottle of dry vermouth to your bike as this gin makes a great martini.
Special edition No 1
ALL BOTTLES HAVE GONE TO GOOD HOMES
Special by name and both special and unique by nature… for nature. This was not just another pink gin. This was pink for a purpose.
Early in 2016 we sat down with Herts & Middlesex Wildlife Trust with the aim to create a gin using a botanical taken from the sites they manage. Now we’re not the biggest fans of foraging and HMWT are not farmers so we arrived at an unusual option, Himalayan balsam, a species neither farmed or foraged, but destroyed.
Himalayan balsam is a non native invasive plant species bought to the UK by the Victorians. Balsam is now responsible for the erosion of river banks and for crowding rare chalk streams and native plants, preventing growth and pollination. Unmanaged it will change the ecology forever.
Each year the Trust and teams of volunteers uproot and destroy the balsam before it starts to seed. This is where we stepped in. Himalayan balsam has a pink, orchid-like flower which we removed, air dried and infused into our unique base gin. The resulting gin had a complex mix of juniper, citrus, honey, floral and savoury notes. £2.00 from the sale of every bottle went back to HMWT.
The aim of the balsam gin was to be self destructive. We knew eventually we'd reach a point where we couldn't collect enough flowers because the plants had been cleared and native plants could begin to regrow. This point was reached in 2020 and from summer 2021 we have are launching another exciting gin collaboration with HMWT.
1594 SPIRIT OF BOX MOOR GIN
ALL BOTTLES HAVE GONE TO GOOD HOMES
In 2019 we teamed up with local charity The Box Moor Trust to create a special limited edition gin to celebrate the Trust’s 425th anniversary. Using rare juniper cultivated on the Trust’s land, the commemorative gin takes its name from the year the charity was founded. ‘1594 Spirit of Box Moor’ was launched as part of the Autumn Festival celebrations held on Blackbirds Moor, Boxmoor.
425 bottles each at 42.5% ABV were created, one for each year of the Trust’s history. The self-supporting charity manages nearly 500 acres of grazing and amenity land on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead and Bovingdon, with a remit to maintain the area's natural environment and wildlife on behalf of the local community.
Each of the commemorative bottles featured an individually numbered tag made from paper created from used Campfire Gin botanicals. These were handmade at the nearby Frogmore Paper Mill adding to the local provenance of 1594.
Made to a classic London Dry style the small batch gin combined the Hertfordshire grown juniper with specially selected botanicals including fresh lime peel, a historical nod to the fact that Box Moor Wharf was the home of Roses Lime Cordial from 1946 till 1983.
£2 from every bottle sold was donated to the Trust.
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Serving gin to local gin lovers in London, Tring, Berkhamsted, Hemel Hempstead, St Albans, Aylesbury, Watford, Dunstable, Luton, Bedford, Amersham, Hitchin, Leighton Buzzard and beyond since 2016. Visit our micro distillery for gin gifts and gin tasting experiences or order gin online and have gin delivered direct to your front door.