Every day is Gin Day at The Bear, and every week we will be featuring a different ‘Gin of the Week’ from our menu of 20 Welsh, exotic, botanical and aromatic gins from around the world. Each featured Gin will be garnished to complement its unique taste and matched with a flavoured Fever-Tree tonic water.
The Gin of the Week feature is being introduced by our Assistant Manager, Williams Garcia, who has recently returned from a spell working for Tom Kerridge at the Hand and Flowers in Marlow, which is the only pub in the UK with two Michelin Stars.
While there, Williams picked up a taste for Gin and learned which garnishes go with which drink. “I would start at one end of the Gins and had to recite, in order, which garnish went with which Gin,” he said. “If I forgot, I had to start again, at the beginning. That made me learn them pretty quickly! “
Before Williams went there, he said he didn’t like Gin. “But now it is my favourite drink.” Gin is such a flexible drink, and there are so many aromatics which can flavour them. The main one is juniper berry, but after that, you can use anything you please. You can use lemon, lime, orange, coriander, cucumber, cloves, cinnamon and many more flavours.”
Three of Williams’ favourite garnishes are dehydrated fruits, frozen fruits in ice cubes and cinnamon sticks, complimented by Fever-Tree tonic and finished with The Bear’s signature, a sprig of Rosemary.
“The garnish is to enhance the flavour, not alter it too much, but also to enhance the experience. Before you drink a drink, you want to feast your eyes on it, then you smell the garnishes, and then you drink it, the garnishes give you such a whole wonderful experience.”
