Whitley Neill Rhubarb & Ginger Gin (700 ml)

Whitley Neill was founded in 2005 by Johnny Neill, a fourth-generation distiller whose great-great-grandfather ran the Greenall Whitley distillery — a lineage that informs the brand's insistence on hand-crafted small-batch production in Birmingham before the London branding took hold. The Rhubarb & Ginger expression sits outside the original London Dry range by design: it carries added natural flavouring post-distillation, which legally disqualifies it from the London Dry designation and gives the distillery freedom to push fruit intensity far beyond what a traditional botanical basket allows.

The base is a neutral grain spirit redistilled with juniper and a supporting botanical framework, then blended with natural rhubarb and ginger extracts — the rhubarb delivering sharp oxalic tartness and the ginger contributing a dry, resinous heat rather than sweetness. The result sits at 43% ABV, unchill-filtered in the standard bottling, preserving the faint blush-pink colour derived from the rhubarb. What separates this from category peers is the deliberate tartness-first architecture: the ginger heat arrives on the finish rather than upfront, inverting the usual spice-leads-fruit structure common in flavoured gins.