The Batch That Tasted Like a Swimming Pool, and Why I Stopped Blaming Myself

I make gin. Small batches, in a converted outbuilding behind our house on a smallholding outside the city, with a little copper still my partner and I saved for over two years. It started as a hobby that got out of hand in the best way. People liked it. A couple of local restaurants took bottles. For about eighteen months everything I made came out tasting the way I meant it to, bright and clean with a long juniper finish and a bit of fynbos I forage myself, and I walked around feeling quietly, insufferably proud of my own palate.

Then one autumn the gin turned on me, and I nearly lost my nerve, my recipe, and a fair amount of money trying to work out why.

The first bad batch

I noticed it in the cut, the stage where you taste and taste and decide which part of the run to keep. There was something underneath the botanicals that should not have been there. A faint chemical sharpness, cold and flat, the exact taste of the air near an over-chlorinated pool. I told myself I was imagining it. I bottled a few, gave one to my partner without saying anything, and watched his face. He took a sip, paused, and said, what is that, it tastes like the municipal pool smells.

So I was not imagining it.

I dumped the batch. That hurt, because a batch is days of work and a not-small pile of botanicals, but you cannot sell gin that tastes like a swimming pool, not if you want to be able to look a restaurant owner in the eye.

Blaming everything I could reach

Here is where my pride became a problem. I was so certain my process was clean that I went looking for the fault everywhere except the obvious place.

I blamed the juniper, and bought new juniper from a different supplier. I blamed my botanicals and re-dried everything. I scrubbed the still until the copper shone like a trophy. I replaced the seals. I watched a dozen videos about off-flavours and convinced myself I had a fermentation problem even though I do not ferment, I redistill a neutral base, which tells you how far gone my reasoning was. I made a second batch with military care, changing half a dozen things at once, which any scientist will tell you is the way to learn nothing. It came out tasting of the pool again. Maybe worse.

By the third ruined run I was genuinely questioning whether I had simply lost whatever knack I had ever had. I sat on an upturned crate in the outbuilding at eleven at night, surrounded by equipment I had cleaned to a hospital standard, and felt like a fraud. Everything I could control I had controlled. And still the pool.

The thing I had never thought to question

It was my partner, who is an engineer and therefore annoyingly systematic, who asked the question that unlocked it. He did not ask about the still or the botanicals. He asked, what are you cutting the spirit with. And I said, water, obviously. And he said, which water. And I said, our water, from the borehole, same as always.

Same as always. That was the phrase that stopped me. Gin is, by volume, mostly water. You distil your spirit high and then you bring it down to drinking strength with water, a lot of water, and I had never once in two years thought of that water as an ingredient. It was just the thing that came out of our tap, free and invisible and beneath suspicion. But something had changed on our smallholding that autumn, we had had the borehole worked on, and the water that came up after was, as far as my eye could tell, exactly the same as before.

My palate had been screaming at me for three batches and I had been interrogating everything except the single largest component of the bottle.

Learning to treat water as an ingredient

I did not actually know, at that point, what was in our water. That was the embarrassing realisation. I knew the precise origin and flavour profile of every botanical I used, I could tell you where the juniper was grown, but I could not tell you the first thing about the water that made up the bulk of what I sold. So I did the thing I should have done the day I installed the still, which was to send a sample off for proper water testing rather than keep guessing in the dark.

The results were a small education. The borehole work had shifted things. There was a cocktail of stuff in there, perfectly within the range that is fine to drink and shower in and never think about, but not fine, it turns out, to redistil and concentrate and then taste against a delicate botanical. Chlorine compounds and a mineral load that my tongue was reading as that cold pool-side flatness. When you cut a spirit down with water, you are not diluting the water away, you are tasting it, undisguised, at the front of every sip.

I learned more in that one report than in three weeks of scrubbing copper. I had assumed, the way I think most people assume, that clear and drinkable meant neutral and flavourless, and that is simply not true, there is a whole world of difference between water that is safe and water that is right for a specific job.

The fix was almost boring

The solution, once I understood the problem, was not dramatic. I changed what water I used and how I treated it before it ever touched the spirit, guided by what the report had actually found rather than by my panic. The next batch came out clean. Bright, clean, long juniper finish, the fynbos sitting exactly where I wanted it. I tasted it and then made my partner taste it without warning again, our little ritual, and he smiled and said, there you are. There you are. As if I had been away.

I had been away, in a sense. I had spent three batches convinced the fault was in my hands or my recipe or my nose, and the whole time the answer was in a part of the process I had never thought to examine because it was free and it came out of the ground.

What I tell other makers now

A few other small producers have found their way to me since, mostly through the restaurants, people making their own things on their own smallholdings, and almost every time someone describes a mystery off-flavour they cannot pin down, I ask them the question my partner asked me. Which water. And almost every time they look at me the way I must have looked, as if the water is too obvious and too innocent to be the culprit.

I tell them to get it checked properly, not to eyeball it, because the eye is useless here, clear water can be the problem and cloudy water can be fine. I point them toward the sort of water laboratories that will give you an actual breakdown rather than a reassuring shrug, because knowing exactly what is in it is the only thing that let me fix it rather than flail at it. One fellow who makes a small-batch vermouth nearby had chased a bitterness through six recipe changes before he finally sent a sample off, and it was his water all along, the same blind spot, the same relief when he found it.

I think about it more broadly now, too. Anyone whose product is mostly water, and there are more of us than you would think, the brewers and the distillers and the people bottling cold brew and kombucha out of their garages, is building on a foundation they have usually never inspected. The good water labs exist precisely because the stuff coming out of a borehole or a municipal pipe is not a constant, it drifts, it changes when the ground is disturbed, and your tongue will know before your pride lets you admit it.

I keep a bottle from that first clean batch after the fix on the shelf in the outbuilding. I do not drink it. It is there as a reminder that for two happy years I got lucky with an ingredient I never understood, and that the day my luck changed was the day I actually started to know what I was making. The pool taste is long gone. But I never cut a drop of gin now without knowing, precisely, what the water is bringing to the glass.