Booth's is one of the great ancestral names in London Dry gin — a house whose roots stretch back to the eighteenth century, when the spirit was still finding its modern identity. To encounter a 1960s bottling is to hold a piece of that history in your hands, and at 40% ABV this Finest Dry Gin represents the style as it was understood in its mid-century heyday: clean, composed, and unapologetically traditional.
A Window Into Mid-Century London Dry
What makes vintage Booth's so compelling is context. The 1960s were a golden age for gin consumption in Britain, and Booth's sat comfortably among the most respected names on any back bar. This was a house that prized restraint and balance — hallmarks of the London Dry category at its most disciplined. At this age, the spirit will have evolved in the bottle, softening ever so slightly, though the juniper-forward backbone that defined the era's benchmark expressions should remain firmly intact.
I approach a bottle of this vintage with genuine respect. The London Dry classification tells us the distillation was clean, the botanical charge added entirely during redistillation, and no sweetening applied after the fact. These were the rules Booth's helped to define. At 40% ABV it sits at the category's entry point for strength, which for a gin of this period would have been the standard — built for the long mixed drink rather than the cocktail renaissance that came decades later.
At £299, this is a collector's bottle as much as a drinking one, and the price reflects its scarcity rather than any contemporary production cost. I would rate this 7.9 out of 10 — a historically significant bottling from a house that shaped the London Dry tradition, though the lack of confirmed botanical detail and the inevitable uncertainty of aged spirits storage temper a higher mark.
Best Served
If you do choose to open it, a simple G&T with Fever-Tree Indian Tonic and a twist of lemon peel would honour the era in which it was made. Nothing fussy — Booth's never was.
