Few spirits have a history as chaotic as gin’s. What started as a Dutch medicinal drink somehow became the drink that nearly broke London — one so cheap and so strong that, for a stretch of the 18th century, the city’s death rate actually outpaced its birth rate. Parliament passed law after law trying to rein it in, and each one backfired in its own spectacular way, from black-market cat-shaped vending machines to riots in the streets.
It took nearly a century, five failed Gin Acts, and one final, brutally effective sixth, before gin’s reputation began to turn around. From there, it transformed twice over: first into Old Tom, a sweeter style built to hide gin’s rough edges, and later into the clean, dry gin we know today, made possible by a 19th-century Scottish invention that changed distilling forever.
This is the story of how gin went from “Mother’s Ruin” to the backbone of the modern cocktail — and how two very different styles, dry gin and Old Tom, both survived the journey.
Genever
Genever, the precursor to gin, was born in what is now the Netherlands and Belgium. Originally created as a medicinal drink, it caught on for the refreshing aroma of juniper berries, and before long it had worked its way deep into Dutch daily life.
From there, gin crossed over to England, where it found enormous popularity of its own. By the 18th century, gin consumption in Britain hit an all-time high, boosting tax revenue for the government — but it also fueled a surge in addiction and crime. Things got so severe that, for a time, London’s death rate actually outpaced its birth rate. This dark chapter later came to be known as the “Gin Craze.”
By the 19th century, the invention of the continuous still changed everything. Distillers no longer needed to mask harsh, impure flavors with sugar and a heavy load of botanicals — they could now produce a cleaner, higher-quality spirit. This is the era when the modern production method for dry gin as we know it today was established.
Eventually, gin crossed the Atlantic to America, where it found fresh popularity all over again — this time as the base for cocktails, cementing its place as a spirit beloved around the world.
Out of this long history came a saying that’s often repeated: gin was born in Holland, raised in England, and reached its full glory in America.
The History of Dry Gin: Its Arrival in England
Photo｜A painting of the Battle of White Mountain, fought near Prague
Genever, the ancestor of gin, made its way to England during the Thirty Years’ War, the sprawling European conflict that raged from 1618 to 1648.
At the time, Genever was treated much like the small-batch medicinal spirits already being produced in England — far from the beloved national drink it would later become.
After the war ended, England was rocked by upheaval of its own: in 1649, King Charles I was executed, and the country came under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, a follower of Calvinist Puritanism — a movement that had broken with the Roman church in pursuit of a purer, Bible-based faith. Puritan teaching held that drinking corrupted the soul, and under this rule, the distilling trade stagnated.
Cromwell died in 1658, and two years later, in 1660, Charles II restored the monarchy. Distilling picked up somewhat under his reign, but it still had yet to see any major growth.
From Genever to Gin
Photo｜William III
The Glorious Revolution
Between 1688 and 1689, gin’s fortunes took a dramatic turn.
At the time, a deep rift had formed between the strongly Protestant Parliament and public on one side, and the Catholic King James II on the other. Matters came to a head when James II, in an effort to further entrench Catholic influence, dismissed several Protestant ministers. This was the last straw for Parliament’s Protestant majority, who moved to overthrow him.
The result: James II’s eldest daughter Mary, raised Protestant, was installed as queen, and her husband — William of Orange, at the time the Dutch stadtholder — was brought over to rule jointly as William III of England while retaining his position in the Netherlands. This became known as the Glorious Revolution.
William III’s accession brought sweeping change to the distilling trade. Genever, gin’s precursor and William’s own national drink, spread rapidly through England and quickly won over the public.
That surge in popularity wasn’t just about William’s own Dutch roots — it also came down to economics. The French wine and brandy the English had been drinking were subject to steep tariffs, putting them out of reach for ordinary people and leaving them the exclusive province of the upper class.
Distilling then got another push in its favor. William III, a devout Protestant, regarded the Catholic French king Louis XIV as an adversary, and in 1689 he banned the import of French brandy and wine altogether.
Imports resumed in 1692, but this time with even steeper tariffs — pricing the drink out of reach for all but a small circle of the wealthiest aristocrats. William III, meanwhile, pushed policies to raise domestic tax revenue, building up funds in preparation for the wars with France still to come.
The Rise of Gin Under the New National Government
For fifty years, a single livery company had held a monopoly over English distilling. In 1690, that monopoly was revoked, and for the first time, any citizen could buy a still and casks and produce distilled spirits of their own. At the same time, taxes on spirits made from domestic grain were cut.
This opened up a convenient outlet for low-grade grain unfit for baking bread — a way to put “waste grain” to profitable use. Landowners, who stood to benefit, backed the change wholeheartedly.
But there was a catch. Much of that grain was poor quality, and the spirit it produced tasted just as rough. England’s distilling tradition was still young, and its techniques were nowhere near as refined as Dutch Genever.
To mask the harsh flavor, distillers loaded their spirits with spices and herbs — a workaround, not a fix, and it never produced anything of real quality. Even so, this rough spirit was cheaper than beer thanks to its low tax rate, packed a stronger punch, and got you drunk fast. It spread like wildfire, especially among the poor.
Over time, distillers kept experimenting with juniper berries and other botanicals, refining the flavor further. But the reliance on poor-quality grain only deepened, and quality never really improved.
To tell the rough English version apart from the refined Dutch original, the names began to diverge. The Dutch spirit kept its name, “Genever,” while the English version came to be called “Geneva.” Eventually, “Geneva” was shortened to something easier to say — “Gin” — and that’s the name that stuck.
The Gin Craze and the Dawn of Gin Regulation
Photo｜”The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in ‘Change Alley in 1720″ by Edward Matthew Ward
In the early 1700s, England was developing faster than almost anywhere else in the world.
Rather than stay in the countryside working low-paid farm jobs, many people flocked to London, chasing dreams of a better life, a shot at upward mobility, or a chance encounter with the nobility and wealthy merchants.
Only a lucky few actually found that opportunity. Most ended up in low-paying city jobs, barely able to afford food or a roof over their heads. The result was sprawling slums — filthy, overcrowded districts with no proper system for handling industrial or household waste, sitting right next door to the elegant streets where the aristocracy lived. The gap between rich and poor had never been starker.
Around 1710, England’s finances fell into crisis, and the government created the South Sea Company to help manage the nation’s trade and debt. A speculative frenzy swept through the nobility and other wealthy investors — until it all came crashing down in 1720, in what became known as the South Sea Bubble.
The collapse devastated nobles, the wealthy, and ordinary citizens alike. But one industry came through largely unscathed: distilling.
Domestic grain, low taxes, a rise in drinking driven by hard economic times, and a price low enough for even the poor to afford — all of it converged to push gin consumption higher. That growth, in turn, lifted both the distilling and farming industries, and this was around the time gin began developing its own signature techniques, like steeping botanicals for flavor.
A strange kind of cycle took hold: the more gin people drank, the more the economy seemed to recover. For ordinary people, entertainment, production, and the economy itself had all become tangled up with gin.
The Gin Craze and the First Gin Act
Photo｜Portrait of King George II of Great Britain, painted circa 1755 onward
Gin Consumption Explodes
Gin production and consumption created a self-reinforcing cycle that helped stabilize the economy after the South Sea Bubble collapse — and nobody stepped in to stop it. This was the beginning of the Gin Craze.
Back in the 1690s, when William III first legalized distilling, England produced only a modest amount of spirits, most of it used medicinally. By the 1720s, that output had grown many times over, and by 1723, production had climbed even higher still, with the overwhelming majority consumed as gin within London itself. By 1726, gin was no longer being made for medicinal use but as a recreational drink, and it had become part of everyday life for the poor — men, women, and even children drank it, and carried it with them constantly.
Starting around 1723, though, this began surfacing as a genuine social crisis. Poor-quality spirits damaged drinkers’ health, deepened addiction, and fueled a wave of crime committed to fund the habit.
Mortality among the poor grew so severe that, for a time, the death rate actually exceeded the birth rate. In the worst cases, impoverished mothers spent what little money they had on gin instead of milk for their babies, and gave them the harsh spirit to drink instead.
Gin’s high proof and poor quality also began taking a toll on people’s ability to work, creating a vicious cycle: the more gin someone drank, the deeper into poverty they sank.
Taking this crisis seriously, King George II — who had ascended the throne in 1727 — introduced England’s first Gin Act in 1729.
The First Gin Act
- A tax was imposed on gin.
- Selling spirits required a license.
- Obtaining that license came with a cost.
The idea behind the Gin Act was straightforward: make gin harder to get, shrink the number of producers, and improve quality in the process. In practice, it backfired.
Producing gin now cost more, so distillers swapped in even cheaper, lower-quality ingredients than before. At the same time, underground production and sales exploded.
As a result, the poor increasingly turned to unlicensed black-market sellers, leaving legitimate retailers with no profit and the treasury with a sharp drop in tax revenue. The lawless slums ended up consuming even more gin than before — production roughly doubled, from about 15 million liters in 1727 to some 30 million liters by 1735.
Addiction deepened further still, and the toll on people’s work and health only grew more severe.
The Second Gin Act
With the first Gin Act a failure, Parliament tried again in 1733 with a second version.
This time, the law・・・
- Scrapped the tax on gin from the first Act
- Scrapped the licensing requirement for gin sales
- Banned selling spirits on the street
- Fined any shop caught selling spirits on the street
Like its predecessor, this second Act also failed — for two main reasons.
First, enforcement relied on tip-offs from neighbors, with informants paid a reward. The system worked like this: violators paid a fine, and that fine funded the informant’s payout. But if a violator had no money to pay, the informant got nothing — so most ordinary people had little incentive to inform on anyone. Add in the tangled web of neighborly ties and family relationships, and the whole system barely produced any results.
The real failure, though, came down to one detail buried in the law: the fine applied only to “shops.” Ordinary residents fell entirely outside its scope.
People quickly turned this loophole to their advantage. They brought stills into their own homes and invited distillers over to make gin cheaply on-site. With the tax and license requirements gone, and no shopfront to fine, they slipped past the law entirely. The poor found it easier than ever to get their hands on cheap gin — and consumption, far from falling, kept right on climbing.
The Third Gin Act and Further Legislation
Photo｜Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister
The Third Gin Act and the Informants
By 1736, a disturbing pattern had become impossible to ignore: babies born to women who drank gin habitually were arriving sickly and wizened. Parliament took the problem seriously and, breaking from its earlier half-measures, passed a far stricter “Third Gin Act.”
This time, the law targeted every kind of distilled spirit — gin, rum, brandy, and Genever alike.
- All distilled spirits — gin, rum, brandy, Genever, and more — fell under the new rules.
- Adulterating spirits with additives no longer got you around the law.
- Selling spirits required a license.
- That license had to be renewed, at a cost, every year.
- Breaking the law meant a steep fine.
- Retailers had to sell in units of at least two gallons, with tax due on every sale.
Under this Act, gin — once the only pleasure the poor could afford — became something only the wealthy could enjoy. Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister, opposed the bill. His reasoning: poor retailers had no way to pay steep fines, so the penalties would achieve nothing, and stripping gin away from the poor so abruptly risked sparking riots.
Walpole’s fears soon came true, and riots broke out. They died down quickly enough, and the city’s usual bustle returned. But the public hadn’t forgotten gin — they’d simply found new ways around the law.
Wine, at the time, carried no steep tax, so people got creative: they tinted gin to look like wine and sold it as such, or mixed a splash of real wine into illegally distilled gin and passed the whole batch off as “wine.”
Parliament caught on quickly and moved to close the gap. In 1737, it cut the tax on sweet wine, lowering its price in hopes that a milder, less intoxicating drink would take gin’s place. At the same time, it guaranteed rewards for anyone who informed on illegal distilleries.
Informants did multiply — but this backfired too. Every tip that shut down an illegal still left the public with one less place to buy gin. Their anger turned on the informants themselves — their own neighbors — and attacks became common, escalating to the point that troops had to be called in. Eventually, informants found it too dangerous to keep operating at all.
The Cat Sign
Photo｜Old Tom Cat (the cat sign)
The public didn’t just resort to violence. One informant, weighing the mortal risk of turning people in, made a dramatic pivot: he stopped informing and started selling gin himself.
He bought a wall-mounted cat sculpture from a furniture shop and mounted it facing the street. He rigged a pipe to run gin out through the cat’s paw, connecting the other end to a funnel inside the building. Then he hired someone to spread word that gin could be bought wherever this cat sign appeared. Customers who heard the rumor simply dropped coins into the cat’s mouth, and gin would flow out from its paw in the matching amount.
Copycats sprang up everywhere, and before long these “cat gin machines” had spread across the city. But the gin of that era bore little resemblance to what we drink today — it was routinely cut with toxic substances, most commonly sulfuric acid and turpentine, said to be added not just for the alcoholic buzz but for the dizzying, disorienting “kick” they produced. The health of the poor only deteriorated further as a result.
Worse still, giving gin to a crying baby became a normalized way to quiet it down, and infant mortality climbed to alarming levels.
In the end, none of this stopped the illegal production and consumption of gin — and the Third Gin Act, too, ended in failure.
The Fourth Gin Act and the War of the Austrian Succession
Photo｜The Battle of Fontenoy
By 1743, the government had tried repeatedly to curb gin consumption, none of it working. Around this time, England was distilling something on the order of 40 million liters of gin a year.
Then the War of the Austrian Succession broke out, drawing in nearly all of Europe, and Britain joined the fight. What the war effort needed most was money — tax revenue.
Of that roughly 40 million liters being produced, the vast majority was made illegally; only a small fraction, perhaps around 2 million liters, was actually being taxed as it should have been.
To secure funding for the war, the government passed yet another Gin Act, this one with a very different approach:
- Gin’s tax rate was cut sharply.
- The cost of a retail license was slashed.
- Distillers themselves were barred from holding a retail license.
With the license now priced within reach of ordinary people, there was no longer any need to risk selling illegally — gin could be sold entirely above board. The lower tax also brought prices down, putting gin within easy reach for practically everyone. And just as the government had hoped, the war chest filled up.
The health concerns that had long worried critics, especially the toll on newborns, went unaddressed, and medical professionals in particular pushed back hard against the new law. Yet against their expectations, the Act actually delivered real results: by around 1744, gin consumption had dropped sharply, illegal production fell along with it, and tax revenue rose. Even so, addiction among the poor remained a deep, unresolved problem.
On top of that, the distillers who’d been shut out of the retail license system were left deeply frustrated — an issue that would carry forward unresolved.
The Fifth Gin Act and the End of the War
Facing pressure from distillers shut out of retail sales by the previous Act, and still needing funds to keep the war going, the government passed a fifth Gin Act in 1747.
Its main provisions were:
- Gin’s tax rate went up.
- Distillers themselves could now obtain a retail license.
That said, the tax increase wasn’t nearly as steep as in earlier crackdowns — it stayed within a range ordinary people could still manage. So the law caused little disruption overall. If anything, opening up retail licenses to distillers proved a success on its own terms: hundreds of distilleries took out licenses in the very first year, and the government secured the tax revenue it had been after.
That didn’t mean the underlying problems went away. Gin consumption among the public, and especially the poor, carried on much as before, and the toll it took — on health, alongside prostitution, crime, high mortality, and infant deaths — remained just as severe.
Then, in 1748, the War of the Austrian Succession finally came to an end. Ironically, peace made England’s domestic troubles even worse.
Roughly 70,000 soldiers came home from the war, but the government had no real plan for reintegrating them, and many found themselves out of work. Ex-soldiers flooded into the slums in growing numbers, and crime surged right along with them. Conditions in these neighborhoods remained almost exactly as they’d been back around 1720, when gin consumption first exploded.
Photo｜Beer Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth
The illustration above is one of the most famous records of that era. On the left, “Beer Street” shows tradesmen and working people enjoying life over a mug of beer, prosperous and well-fed. On the right, in stark contrast, “Gin Lane” depicts the slums — people consumed by gin, their lives falling apart around them.
Let’s take a closer look at just how disturbing this second image really is.
Let’s start with “Gin Lane.” We’ve numbered the key details below, with a close-up image for each.
1・In front of the pawnbroker’s shop, a carpenter offers up his saw — his own livelihood — in exchange for gin money, while the man with the hat haggles over its worth. Beside him, a woman is doing the same with a kettle and cooking pots, everyday household essentials.
2・Just below the pawnbroker’s shop, a starving man fights a stray dog over a scrap of bone, unable to afford food of his own.
3・This woman, drunk on gin and reaching for a pinch of snuff, doesn’t even notice her baby slipping from her arms. The sores on her legs mark her as a sex worker suffering from syphilis.
4・A former soldier, home from the war, still clutches a pamphlet reading “Don’t Drink Gin” even as he drinks it himself — starving, on the brink of death, or already dead.
5・A woman who drank herself to death is being crammed into a coffin far too small for her, leaving behind the child at her side. Most children orphaned this way had no one to take them in, and many simply starved.
6・This man, driven into a frenzy, marches forward triumphantly with his dead child impaled on a spike, using a pair of bellows as a mock hat, while the child’s mother comes running from the right in horror, desperate to save him.
7・A mother who spent her baby’s milk money on gin instead gives the crying infant a taste of gin to quiet it down.
8・A man, unable to bear his circumstances any longer, has hanged himself.
9・Unlike Gin Lane, the people here look genuinely happy, drinking their beer with a smile. They work hard, drink beer, and live healthy, contented lives. Even the pawnbroker’s shop — thriving back in Gin Lane — sits here with no customers at all, its sign hanging crooked, business clearly in decline.
10・In the upper left, a man is cheerfully painting a picture. Of the two signs above him, one shows a happy scene of people dancing — but the other looks suspiciously like a bottle of gin, and the bottle hanging beside it as his model matches the exact shape of the bottle the soldier was clutching back in Gin Lane. For all that Beer Street celebrates a life of plenty built on beer, it turns out gin hadn’t entirely disappeared from the picture. At this rate, how long before Beer Street ends up looking a lot like its neighbor?
It’s honestly hard to believe a painting like this depicted real, lived events.
The Final Gin Act
Photo｜A scene of transportation (exile)
In 1751, with the war now over, Parliament passed a sixth and final Gin Act — the strictest yet.
Its key provisions were:
- Selling gin in prisons or workhouses was banned outright.
- General stores selling everyday goods could no longer sell gin.
- Distillers themselves were barred from retail sales.
- Gin retailers had to pay for a license.
- Anyone breaking the law, or helping someone else break it, faced seven years’ transportation.
Stripping distillers of the retail rights they’d only recently been granted, on top of the steep new costs, raised real fears of another public backlash. But this time, the harsh new penalty — transportation, rather than a fine — seems to have made the difference, and conditions gradually began to improve.
When this final Gin Act took effect, gin shops in England numbered in the thousands, split between licensed and unlicensed operations. By the late 18th century, around 1790, unlicensed shops had all but vanished, and even licensed ones had thinned out considerably. As the number of gin shops fell and consumption declined, the population grew steadily — a telling sign of just how much damage poor-quality gin had been doing to public health all along.
Even so, gin never disappeared from London entirely. It simply changed shape.
The End of the Gin Craze — and What Came After
Photo｜The Coffey still (continuous distillation)
Gin as a Business, and the Rise of the Continuous Still
About 30 years after the final Gin Act, gin began shedding its old reputation as a cheap, low-quality driver of crime. It slowly transformed into something different: no longer a drink anyone could throw together, but a respectable spirit crafted by skilled distillers.
In 1780, leading figures from distilleries and retailers came together to form a “Distillers’ Club,” aimed at keeping gin prices stable and sharing production knowledge across the trade. From here, gin began its shift into a serious business, trade included.
By 1820, growing demand from Londoners pushed the gin trade even further, and this period also saw the birth of fruit-based gin liqueurs still enjoyed today — sloe gin, flavored with sloe berries, chief among them.
Even so, poor-quality gin hadn’t vanished entirely; it still existed alongside the better stuff. Then, in 1826, something happened that would reshape the entire spirits industry: Robert Stein, a distiller from central Scotland, invented a new kind of still — the continuous still.
This still ran distillation as an uninterrupted process, stripping out impurities far more thoroughly and yielding a much purer form of ethanol, and with it, higher-quality spirits. The invention let gin break free from its rough, impure base spirit. Distillers could now take this purer base, redistill it with botanicals, and craft high-quality gin that reflected each distillery’s own character.
Gin’s New Rival
Around 1830, the British government took steps to avoid repeating past mistakes. Rather than push gin’s high-proof spirits, it began steering the public toward beer instead — comparatively milder in strength.
By cutting the cost of a beer license and scrapping the beer tax, the government succeeded in pushing beer consumption ahead of gin. But just as beer looked set for lasting dominance, another drink rose up to challenge it: coffee. Once a luxury reserved for the aristocracy, coffee had, by this era, become affordable enough for ordinary people to enjoy.
Just as gin seemed destined to fade quietly into the background, it staged a comeback — this time in a form that was the polar opposite of the old Gin Craze. Beer sellers started turning their attention to gin as well.
Establishments grew increasingly lavish, offering a standard of service to match, and gin’s image transformed into something polished and elegant — a world away from the squalor of its earlier era.
That said, the poor-quality gin of the Gin Craze days never fully disappeared. Cases of people drinking rough gin until dawn and turning to crime remained fairly common.
The 19th and 20th Centuries
Photo｜Image courtesy of SUNTORY
By the 19th century, sweetened styles of gin were gradually falling out of favor, giving way to an era — much like with wine — where dry flavors were prized. In 1876, Beefeater found success with its own signature recipe, and dry gin began edging out genever and Old Tom gin as the spirit of choice in hotels and bars. By 1930, dry gin had earned its place as the recommended standard in The Savoy Cocktail Book.
Today, dry gin has become so deeply established as the world’s gin standard that it’s hardly an exaggeration to call it gin’s default form, showing up in countless classic cocktails.
The History of Old Tom Gin
By 1736, gin dependency among the public had grown so severe that it was even affecting unborn children. Taking this seriously, the government passed the Third Gin Act.
Its provisions included:
- All distilled spirits — gin, rum, brandy, Genever — fell under the new regulations.
- Adulterating spirits with additives didn’t get around the law.
- Selling spirits required a license.
- That license had to be renewed annually, at a cost.
- Violations carried steep fines.
- Retailers had to sell in units of at least two gallons, with tax due on every sale.
This harsh law triggered riots and a wave of crime, but as the unrest eventually settled, the public’s anger gave way to cooler heads — and cleverer schemes. One trick that spread widely: mounting a cat sign outside a shop, so that dropping coins into the cat’s mouth would dispense gin from its paw.
The “Tom” in “Old Tom Gin” is often traced back to this tomcat sign, though the story isn’t fully settled — some drinks historians instead trace the name to a real distiller nicknamed “Old Tom.” Gin at the time was rough stuff, its harsh edges masked with sugar, sweeteners, and spices. Later, once dry gin emerged as a distinct style, the name “Old Tom Gin” came into use to set the two apart.
By the 19th century, dry gin had overtaken Old Tom as gin’s most popular form, and Old Tom production dropped off sharply. Even so, this period gave rise to a cocktail that kept the Old Tom name alive: the Tom Collins, said to trace back to John Collins, the celebrated headwaiter at Limmer’s Old House in London, active in the mid-19th century.
Also known as the “John Collins,” this cocktail is often made with dry gin and sugar today, but its original recipe called for Old Tom gin specifically. Despite giving rise to a cocktail that would go on to global fame, Old Tom gin couldn’t compete with dry gin’s momentum, and for a stretch of time production in London stopped entirely.
Thanks to demand from bartenders who wanted it back, though, Old Tom gin was eventually revived — brought back to life by England’s Hayman’s distillery, using an original 1800s recipe, and it remains in production today.
Conclusion
Gin crossed the sea from Holland to England and was reborn in London. It lined the pockets of politicians, funded wars, and won the hearts of the public — all while wreaking havoc on the nation’s health. For better and for worse, it became something Londoners simply couldn’t live without.
Through this long cycle of crisis and reinvention, gin gradually transformed into the clean, aromatic spirit beloved around the world today.
