‘I taste drinks any time from 4pm – driving plans permitting!’: the secrets of testing alcohol for the Filter | Life and style

‘I’ve got another parcel for 86. It’s booze again,” No 6 posts on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group. My neighbours believing I have an insatiable appetite for alcohol is an occupational hazard of testing gin, spritzes and cans for the Filter. On any given weekday during the recent heatwaves, I could be spotted knee deep in bottles at my patio table, which probably raised a few eyebrows too.

I’ve been writing about drinks for a decade, so of course, I have to drink them. This can be tricky during normal working hours with a 10-mile school run to negotiate, so I do a lot of background research first. I make notes on the nose, any interesting ingredients or production methods, look into recommended serves and read tasting notes before getting into the sampling.

I’ll taste drinks any time from about 4pm (driving plans permitting) and make extensive notes so that I have everything I need when it comes to writing without having to drink again. Depending on what I’m testing, I’ll mix up the full drink and just take a sip; if it’s something like wine – or something I don’t like, such as an overly harsh spirit – I will spit it out. It usually takes me a few weeks to get through everything, as I won’t test every day (I do try not to drink every day), and then I will test the shortlists a few times.

To try to whittle a long list down to a shorter one, I sip everything neat, earmarking my favourites. For the gin test, I tried them in different serves – with different tonics, over ice for sipping, in any suggested cocktails or with different recommended botanical garnishes – and against similar gins to make sure they really were the best. I fell in love with the Hernö gins that I tried (Old Tom, Six Rivers and Juniper Cask). When testing things that aren’t easy to compare like for like – such as spritzes – I try to compile a wide range of unexpected styles to hopefully float as many people’s boats as possible. Italicus was a standout example in my spritz testing, as was Bellamie; high-quality ingredients, light and summery and extremely drinkable.

My drinks collection is hefty, as I often return to drinks when compiling my lists, and while I prefer to receive miniatures of samples from a practical point of view, there are inevitably products that I need to rehome. The bottle tombola at my kids’ school is a frequent recipient of weird and wonderful (unopened!) things, and the lucky residents of my part of north London will often find barely used bottles of booze on the waste-busting donation site Olio.

What do I drink when I’m not testing them? Usually whatever white wine is my current flavour of the month, but I’ve got very into cremant, vodka martinis, scotch and old fashioneds. One of the things about testing is that it always galvanises my love of the category; I was a bit over gin before my recent test, but move over chicken wine, I’m now all about G&Ts this summer.

This week’s picks

Editor’s pick