Gin & Tonic — The Ingredients Were in the Same Book. Only the Name Was Missing

A cocktail book from Paris, 1927. Its advertising pages carry tonic water and gin side by side, and its text carries a recipe made with that same gin. And yet the name for the two of them together appears nowhere in it.

1. The Story People Tell

There is a story that is always told about where the Gin & Tonic came from.

That British officers stationed in India came up with it. They took the tonic water available locally and added the gin they had on hand — that is the shape the story takes.

No contemporary record has been found to support it. Specialist writers on cocktail history have each concluded, independently, that there is no source behind the claim. Not one document from the period has surfaced naming who first put the two together, or when, or where.

So far, this is a shape we have seen many times in this series. It happened with the Gimlet, and again with the Bloody Mary.

But this time the question that follows is a little different. Instead of who, we went looking for when the name first existed.

2. We Opened the Books

Throughout this series we have tried to reach the books themselves rather than the articles that summarise them. We did the same here.

From publicly available archives we pulled the full text of the following four books and searched them mechanically for the word “tonic.”

The first. 1862, Jerry Thomas’s guide for bartenders. Generally regarded as the earliest American cocktail book. “Tonic” appears exactly once, in an aside about cocktails in general.

What this book does carry is three entries in a row of the form “Gin and —.” Gin and Pine. Gin and Tansy. Gin and Wormwood. The pine one calls for splitting the heart of a green pine log into splints about the thickness of a pencil and leaving them to soak in gin for two hours.

And after those three, the author adds a line:

The above three drinks are not much used except in small country villages.

So this book took the trouble to write down combinations so marginal they were only made in country villages. And still — no “Gin and Tonic.”

The second. 1887, the same author’s revised edition. The collection has grown considerably. Gin and Pine is still there; so is Gin and Wormwood. “Tonic” appears twice, and in neither case as the name of a drink.

The third. 1930, the cocktail book of the Savoy Hotel in London. “Tonic” appears ten times. Most of those are “Kola Tonic,” a different product of the period, and the remaining one is a figure of speech about wine. There is no Gin & Tonic.

And the fourth book is the centre of this article.

3. The Ingredients Were in the Same Book

Paris, 1927. A cocktail book put out by a man named Harry MacElhone. We have opened this author’s work twice before in this series — for the Sidecar, and for the Gimlet. But what we opened then was a book from the early 1920s; what we opened this time is a separate volume the same author published in 1927.

This book has no Gin & Tonic in it either.

But the word “tonic” does appear once. Not on a recipe page.

It appears toward the back of the book, on an advertising page. An importing house in Paris had taken out an advertisement listing the goods it carried:

SCHWEPPE’S SODA WATER — GINGER ALE SWEET — GINGER ALE DRY — GINGER BEER — TONIC WATER — LITHIA WATER

BOORD’S DRY LONDON GIN — COATES’ PLYMOUTH GIN

Tonic water and gin, side by side on the same sheet of paper. One house, in one city, selling both.

And there is a second coincidence in this book.

The text of the very same volume carries a recipe that names that very same Coates’ Plymouth Gin. The Gimlet. The single line we quoted in the ninth instalment — “A very popular beverage in the Navy.” — sits in this book too. That is simply what was printed on the page in 1927.

So in Paris in 1927, the situation was this:

• That gin is advertised in this book
• That tonic water is advertised in the same book
• A recipe made with that gin is printed in the same book’s text

And still, the name for the two of them together appears nowhere in it.

In earlier instalments we saw several versions of “the record is missing from the place it should be.” This one is a little different. The absence is sitting right next to the presence. The ingredients are both there, one of them has a documented use, and only the other combination has no name.

4. We Opened the Record Said to Be the Oldest

So where is the earliest example of the words “gin and tonic” in print?

There is a record that is always cited for this. An English-language magazine published in India in 1868, in an article about a horse race. The passage quoted describes cries of “gin and tonic” and “brandy and soda” going up at the course.

But line up a few of the articles that carry this quotation and something odd shows up. It is one and the same quotation, yet the racecourse it supposedly happened at is given three different ways. Lucknow. Sialkot. Or simply “the Punjab.”

So we went looking for the magazine itself. A bound volume collecting the 1868 issues turned out to be in a public archive. We opened the full text and searched it for the words.

We could not find them.

Here we want to be careful. This does not mean the passage does not exist. What we opened was a single volume gathering the first half of 1868, and we have not been able to confirm that it covers the whole year. The characters as they were read off the page carry the distortions typical of old printing, and it is entirely possible that a mechanical search missed something.

What we established is only this: we could not find it.

There was one other thing we learned. Follow the articles carrying this quotation back, and most of them arrive at the same single book — a history of tonic water published in 2019. The three different racecourses are, most likely, the result of people who read that book and each rewrote it in their own words.

Which means that what many people read as “a story based on an old record” is not the record itself, but a story that came by way of one book about the record.

Of everything across these twelve instalments, this is what has stayed with us most.

5. One Bottle for the Gin

A Gin & Tonic is built from two elements. This time, we can only fill one of them.

For the gin, we chose a bottle made by Sakurao Brewery and Distillery, in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima.

The company began in 1918. It began making gin exactly a century later. In its hundredth year it built a distillery, and released two gins on the same day as its first products there. The one we are placing here is one of those two.

Fourteen botanicals go into it. Nine of them are grown in Hiroshima Prefecture.

Green lemon, navel orange, summer orange, green yuzu, daidai — five citrus. Alongside them, hinoki cypress, green tea, red shiso and highland ginger. Hiroshima grows more lemons than any other prefecture in Japan.

The distillation is done in a German-made copper still, and the method of steeping the material in liquid and the method of passing vapour through it are carried out at the same time, within a single distillation.

There is something we should state precisely here.

The remaining five botanicals are imported, but only two of them are named publicly. Juniper berry, and coriander seed. What the other three are has not been disclosed.

We do not know either. So we are not going to write it.

6. The Tonic Role Is Not Ours to Fill

And then there is the other half.

BG does not carry tonic water. Not a single bottle. Half of this drink is outside what we can supply.

For eleven instalments we placed bottles into roles — one each into two, or three into three. In the final instalment, that shape breaks. Twelve in, it is the first time.

Come to think of it, this series has spent its whole run saying that we do not decide. With the last drink, it turns out we are not merely declining to decide — half of it was never our part to begin with.

That seems right to us. A drink at a counter belonged to that counter all along.

7. Points to Consider Behind the Counter

This is as far as we can take it. The design from here belongs to whoever is standing behind the counter.

※ What follows is a set of considerations for professional bartenders. It is not guidance for mixing at home.

① We have not given quantities or ratios.

This drink has only two elements. In a form with two elements, once you have the product name and the ratio, what you have is the same thing as a finished recipe. Across this series we have kept those figures out of what we publish. We have done the same here.

② The citrus is already on the alcohol side.

Five kinds of citrus go into this bottle as raw material. Whether to bring citrus in from outside or not; and if you do, whether to layer it over what is already there or reach for another direction. That is where the design divides, we think — and it is not ours to settle.

③ Choosing the tonic water.

As noted, BG does not carry it. This section assumes you will use what is already on your counter. Which one you pair it with changes the character of this drink considerably. We leave it as a question worth working through.

④ Two extraction methods run at once.

Steeping and vapour, two ways of drawing the material out, are used together within a single distillation. What that structure does to the result is something only the counter can establish. We can tell you that this is how it is made, and no further.

How to Begin the First Build

※ This section continues the professional-only framing above. It is a set of considerations for professional bartenders, not guidance for mixing at home.

Hold the tonic water you always use constant, change only the alcohol side, and measure the difference?

Or settle the alcohol side first, and go looking again for a tonic water to match it?

Or get to know what it is like with nothing added, before anything else?

All of these are right. The moment you choose that first move, it has already become your counter’s version.

8. On the Time When It Had No Name

Back to the question we opened with.

We could not find a record to hold the story against.

The story about India has no contemporary support. The record said to be the oldest, we could not reach. We opened four books, and the name was not in them.

But it is not that we learned nothing.

In Paris in 1927, the ingredients were gathered in the same book. And only the name was not yet there.

This is probably not unusual. A name arriving means a combination has gone from being somebody’s drink to being everybody’s. Before that, there must always be a stretch of time in which someone was making it, and someone was served it, with no name attached. That stretch leaves no record.

What we were looking at, inside those four books, may have been exactly that — the time before the name arrived.

9. What We Have Not Answered

This article has been about four books we actually opened, and one we tried to open and could not reach.

What ratio to use, whether to add citrus, which tonic water to choose — we have set out the considerations and decided none of it. This time, we did not even have the standing to decide half of it.

And with this, the series ends.

What we wanted to convey across twelve drinks was never the origin stories themselves. It was that the story being told and the story you can verify are two different things — and that when you set out to verify, you usually cannot get as far as you expected.

What we managed was to open four books, and to report what was written in them and what was not, exactly as we found it.

Thank you for reading this far.