Tonic Gin: The History of One of the Most Popular Cocktails in the World

For over a century, tonic gin has been one of the most popular cocktails in the world. A 2016 study by the Wine and Spirit Trade Association found that in the UK alone, gin sales were 40 million bottles a year, or enough to make 1.12 billion tonics a year.

The fame of the drink can be surprising, considering its history. Legend has it that the drink was created to help British soldiers and officials consume bitter antimalarial quinine during the empire's occupation of the Indian subcontinent.

The story goes that the British mixed their daily quinine supplement with sugar and water to make it more palatable, creating what Schweppes eventually labeled "Indian Tonic Water."

With a daily ration of gin, these amateur mixologists used to add alcohol to the preparation, because gin makes everything better.

However, the quinine and the bark of the cinchona plant from which it comes have been used for medicinal purposes for centuries, especially by indigenous Peruvians.

According to Kal Raustiala, "before the discovery of the cinchona tree, European remedies for malaria included throwing the patient's head into a bush, in the hope that he would come out soon enough to leave his fever behind."

In 1846, French producers also began to capitalize on this anti-malarial trend, and chemist and wine merchant Joseph Dubonnet created a "tonic wine" appetizer that contained red wine fortified with quinine, herbs, and spices.

Similar to the British stories about the origin of tonic gin, Dubonnet's drink was created in an attempt to persuade members of the French Foreign Legion to take their medicines.

Most likely, the creation of quinine drinks has simply taken place organically over a longer period, due to the recurring theme of humanity introducing medicinal ingredients into the drink to market and using them as tonics...

And yet, why does the gin & tonic combination continue to work today? Apart from the medicinal reasons, the mixture reflects one of the fundamental balanced tastes, one that is found in many cocktails, from Old Fashioned to Manhattan and Negroni: spirits, sugar, and a bitter.

"Gin & bitters" was already known as a popular cocktail since the 18th century. "The bitter side consists of ingredients such as gentian, calamus, angelica, ginger, bitter orange and sometimes cinchona bark," write Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt in Just the Tonic: a Natural History of Tonic Water. Recipes were available for homemade versions and their blends, such as Angostura or Stoughton bitters, and the latter was known as a tonic for "all energetic and warm climates".

Pink gin, flavored with a few drops of Angostura bitter, was the favorite drink of naval officers. "

Gin tonic could simply be a mixture of two existing drinks: gin & bitters, which were generally not diluted, and gin sling, which was gin diluted with soda and sugar but did not contain any bitter agents. Like many classic cocktails, tonic gin took the best of two existing drinks and put them together.

Today, tonics have been redesigned to be less medicinal (don't expect a tonic gin to protect you from malaria). However, the combination of the botanical substances of the gin and the slightly bitter profile of the tonic, together with a squeezing of the lemon, remains a perfect example of a balanced cocktail.

Although it is easy to get lost in the vast world of gin, remember that the tonic is essentially the bulk of the drink. If your opinion on tonic gin comes from those made with soda, you owe it to your taste buds to try a gin with a quality tonic.

In addition, because they are much less expensive than gin, it is easier to try several types of tonic and find one that best suits your tastes.