A Spirit of Seasons & Isolate Essences
Within spirit categories, gin is somewhat isolate. Take any other liquor—whiskey, for example—and add peanut butter to the mix. What you’ll get is peanut butter-flavored whiskey. Add blueberry to vodka and you’ll have blueberry-flavored vodka. Pineapples added to rum will yield pineapple-flavored rum. You get the idea. But make a gin distilled with lavender, lilacs, lychees, and limes, and the end product will simply be gin. Not flavored gin—just gin.
It’s because of such creative possibilities that Jake Sherry, founder of Isolation Proof Gin, got into distilling in the first place. His flagship spirit is distilled with an intriguingly balanced blend of botanicals that many newer gin makers lack. Those who find Isolation Proof compelling are not alone. It’s presently the house gin at such acclaimed restaurants as Frenchette in Manhattan, and The Four Horsemen in Brooklyn. And this is just the beginning.
Aside from his proprietary bottling, Sherry has created a line of seasonal gins that highlight far from traditional ingredients: ramps in the spring; tomatoes and watermelon rinds in the summer; mushrooms in the fall. Here, in winter, his batch includes a warming combination of cassia bark, raw honey, Assam tea, pears, and wild apples. Yes, wild. These are sourced from a smattering of local 200-year-old Catskill apple trees, prized for their tart, concentrated fruit. The result is a gin that is effusive with aromatic spice, while maintaining the integrity of the spirit’s spirit.
ISOLATION PROOF
isolationproof.com
Originally featured in our Winter 2022 Issue
