Is this the biggest innovation in gin this century?

Aureus Vita is a first-of-its-kind gin that utilises an entirely new production process invented by chemist turned master distiller John Hall. In an exclusive interview with The Spirits Business, Hall explains how he was inspired by the ‘perfect’ golden ratio to create his new Fibonacci Dry Gin.

“Aureus Vita is the culmination of 12 years of distilling, trial and error, and trying to become a better distiller,” Hall says during a private tasting of his new gin, which debuts today (3 March).

Hall, who has a degree in chemistry, was inspired to become a distiller because of the “romance” of whisky production, and the nostalgic idea of liquids that had been created before he was born. “I was working in food production anyway, on the engineering side, and I just decided one day that I wanted to be a distiller.

“I built a business [The Trevethan Distillery in Cornwall, England] with my business partner at the time and, luckily, we had a bit of cash we could invest in a very small-scale startup business. That’s where we launched our very first London Dry into the market back in 2015, based on a 1929 recipe.”

Aiming for perfection

What Hall has learned – but didn’t realise at first – is that he is a distiller first, and a brand second. “That probably held me back in some ways in the early stages, but it gave me time to focus and, to some extent, the privacy to really develop my skills as a distiller.

“We launched our original London Dry in 2015 and quite quickly got a lot of local attention. But I didn’t just want to launch a brand; I wanted to make the best liquid I could possibly make.”

To do this, Hall called upon the people who knew more about creating gin than he did to tell him what he was doing right and wrong. This meant entering his liquid into tasting competitions, including the International Wine & Spirits Competition (IWSC).

“We got a Silver medal in our first year,” he reveals, “And that was great. But you want to know: how do I get a Gold, and how do I get the trophy? How do I become the best at that? I spent the next six or seven years looking at the comments from the judges, looking at my processes and protocols.

“As I come from a scientific background, I went really methodical – if I change this, this happens, or if I tweak that, the taste goes this way, or gives me an extra-dry finish. I kept copious notes over years and, eventually, in 2021, we got that Gold medal and were named UK Gin Distillery of the Year.”

By 2022, Hall had received his second Gold medal, with a score of 98 out of 100, which, at the time, was an IWSC record for the London Dry category.

By now, Hall had started to produce other spirits such as rum, and had considered laying down his own whisky, which he says was “always my goal”. “I felt like I had unfinished business with gin, but I didn’t know where I could take my London Dry after that.”

It was at this point that Hall, who had been working on product development projects for different brands in the background, was presented with a project to design a liquid around the concept of luck, which is when his analytical, scientific brain kicked back into action.

“I thought: OK, how do you deconstruct luck? Is there a way you can analyse a lucky event and figure out what led to that? Maybe getting 98 out of 100 was luck, but if I could deconstruct what went into that, then I could figure out the key to it.”

The golden ratio

By this stage in his musings, Hall had begun to consider the “luckiest event of all” – the formation of life, “but,” he says, “if you understand that and its fundamentals, it isn’t luck at all. It’s billions of years of iteration and improvement. That’s when I came across the ‘golden ratio’. I’d heard of it before, but I’d never really given it much thought.”

The golden ratio is derived by dividing each number of the Fibonacci series by its immediate predecessor. It is a special number, approximately 1.618, that appears in various places in nature, art, architecture, and mathematics. It occurs when you divide a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the shorter part is the same as the whole line divided by the longer part.

The golden ratio concept is often described as ‘beautiful’ due to it being found in things such as the spiral patterns of shells, flowers, and even the proportions of the Parthenon in Greece. People also use the golden ratio in design and art, because it is believed to create aesthetically pleasing proportions.

“I thought: OK, I’m dealing with ratios and proportions all the time, because that’s how I produce balanced flavours. It’s very easy to make a gin, but very difficult to make a good gin, and it’s even harder to make a brilliant gin on scale repeatedly. You need proportions, and they have to be perfect, and you need to really understand when you change one variable, what that does to the end product. So I started to look at what ratios existed in my process.”

Hall noted when looking at his ratios that he was often seeing numbers around the 1.6 mark, and was already working with a ratio of certain botanicals at 1.6.

“I thought: is that that luck? Am I just seeing that because I’m looking for it? So I decided to do the scientific thing and go: right, let’s try to apply this ratio to every single step of the process and see how it affects the end product – not making all the changes in one go, because you don’t know which ones had the major effect if you’re not doing it one step at a time.

“That gave me this new process, where I could not only produce a really balanced and beautiful expression of gin, but because I had the calculations and knew how to plug it into any still size or any recipe, I could reproduce it. I could change the recipe, but always maintain the balance. I had the ratios to be able to do that.”

Still innovation

Hall started his business on a small budget, using two 300-litre stills that he ran three times a week. His method was to traditionally follow the London Dry process, where the botanicals are added to the liquid and proportions need to be perfect for the final product. However, he didn’t feel this allowed him to experiment enough with other extraction processes, such as vapour extraction and high-temperature vapour extraction, which he wanted to explore to see the impact on flavour profile.

Beforehand, he was using a simple method of steeping all the botanicals together in a bag or basket, but he soon realised this didn’t allow for controlling the contact time between the liquid and individual botanicals, as the liquid would take the path of least resistance through the clump.

To address this, Hall gave each botanical its own space to interact with the liquid, allowing him to maintain the proportions and system established in the recipe, while ensuring each botanical had its own dedicated space to extract its flavours.

This was achieved with the invention of the Fibonacci-Hall still. The still features Fibonacci baskets, which are solid with a perforated middle and sit on top of each other, forcing the vapour to pass through every single botanical individually – comparable, Hall says, to the way vegetable steam baskets sit on top of one another in cooking.

“I was designing the ratio into the still in three dimensions – not just in terms of the total volume of botanicals, but in terms of the individual volumes they sat in, and the masses of the botanicals themselves – in order to treat each botanical individually to get as much from it as I possibly can. That led to – what I’m told by my lawyers – an innovative still design that we’re currently going through a patent process on.”

Creating a ‘masterpiece’

Using the only existing Fibonacci-Hall still in the world, the spirit was diluted to 61.8% ABV, before being re-distilled with the perfectly balanced botanicals.

The finished gin is diluted again to maintain this same ratio between water and alcohol, ensuring a perfectly balanced solution of water, alcohol and oils. This method is said to guarantee harmonious flavours and enables precise adjustments with scientific precision.

Hall notes he didn’t select the final ABV to “arbitrarily apply 1.6 again. It had to have a reason – it had to have a purpose and offer an improvement.

“I tried ABVs from 37.5% up to 61.8% in varying steps. I mean, 38.2 is also a 1.618 ratio between alcohol and water, just the other way around. But I also did 43, 46, 55 – but at 61.8%, the individual flavours came through so vibrantly.”

Hall explains that in a London Dry gin, it is typical to find three to four top notes that pop through. “But I was finding that at 61.8%, we were getting eight, nine, 10 different notes, but they were sitting in real balance. The finish was the longest I’d ever been able to create. I also found the finish didn’t just go dry, then crisp and then stay there;  flavours were coming through during that dry finish as well. I was getting extra interaction from the volatile compounds at this higher ABV.”

While 61.8% ABV gives the gin the ‘perfect ratio’ between alcohol and water, Hall says it also offers more versatility. He explains: “Everyone’s talking about no-and-low. It’s a big discussion point among distillers. Now, I don’t have any issue with non-alcoholic spirits, but sometimes I find it’s not offering the consumer value for money.

“Now you might think: well, how does 61.8% ABV gin solve that problem? Well, we’ve created a high-ABV product that will do a really good G&T at that one-to-four or one-to-three ratio, but if you use 10ml gin with 200ml tonic, you’re still going to get bags of flavour. It becomes a 3.8% ABV drink, which is half a unit of alcohol. You’re giving the consumer the ability to moderate and use the liquid in different ways.”

Hall guides us through a tasting of the spirit, highlighting this versatility first by adding a dash of water to the spirit and bringing the ABV down.

This lower ABV, he says, brings out the floral and fruity notes of the gin. “The lower ABV offers juniper at the start, but it’s quite soft. It’s not that big, earthy hit. It’s almost nutty in flavour,” he notes. “You then get a nice pine, grassy note, with some citrus in the middle. Then it starts to go a little bit away from a standard gin, and you’ll get a bit of a berry flavour. In that dry finish, it starts to get a little bit blackcurranty.”

The finish, as he said, is extremely long, lingering beyond what would be expected from a typical gin. This lengthens even further in the undiluted sample, which ‘dances’ in the mouth for minutes after.

On the palate, the gin becomes even more complex at this higher ABV, with a smooth, oily texture that coats the mouth, with an amplification of the previous tasting notes that remain in harmony. This mouth feel, Hall explains, is on account of the amount of oil drawn out through the three extraction processes, as well as the ABV of the maceration liquid.

Although the liquid is debuting at UK department store Selfridges today, Hall conducted tastings with members of the trade prior to launch. It is during these tastings that the word ‘masterpiece’ has been thrown around.

“I can’t describe it as masterpiece – I can’t say anything of the sort,” Hall says, however he notes that one of the biggest compliments came from Andy Loudon, director of bars at Rosewood London, who said it “challenged what he was expecting from a gin, but took it to a level that he didn’t think it could go to”.

Hall continues: “Coming from someone who has probably sat in front of so many different new gin brands and tried so many different gin and tonic serves – to hear that, it was the point where I went: OK, I think it’s not bad!”

Aureus Vita is available at Selfridges, Scarfes Bar at Rosewood London, and www.aureusvita.co.uk for RRP £175 (US$221) per 700ml bottle.