Craft Gins Get a Boost From Native Juniper

Cold rain drips down my neck as I bend over an unremarkable brownish shrub, my eyes scanning its needles for a flash of blue-black. It’s early March in far western North Carolina, and I’ve hiked to a protected bald with retired botanist and emeritus executive director Gary Wein from the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust and Debbie Word of Chemist Spirits to search for native Juniperus communis. Word plans to use the berries in a new gin, made in collaboration with local hospitality mainstay Old Edwards Inn, that supports the Trust’s conservation efforts.

There aren’t many berries to be found; Wein explains that this area, the southern most part of the United States where this juniper grows, is a harsh environment with shallow, nutrient-poor soils, cold temperatures, and high annual rainfall. But the plant is hardy, and it has adaptations that help it survive: In years with plenty of nourishment, juniper expresses as female, and fruits. But when conditions are tough, it can change its sex and give off pollen instead. “[These plants are] not very productive, but they’re going to be around for 100 years,” Wein says.

Juniperus communis is the same species as the juniper grown in Europe, used for hundreds of years to make gin there and in most of the world. But in the Appalachian Mountains, the plant is a different variety, one that evolved over a period of 200 million years, after Pangaea broke up into what is now Africa, Europe, and North America. And it’s only one of several types of juniper that American distillers are incorporating into a new class of gins that place terroir front and center.

For Word, who co-founded Chemist with her daughter, Danielle Donaldson, in 2018, this gin—which includes other foraged and farmed native botanicals—has been years in the making, part of a driving passion for the area’s natural resources. “Those mountains are full of amazing plants that just blend in and people don’t know are there,” she says. “What we’re doing is harvesting these things and taking their flavor profiles and turning this into a very localized expression of the area.”

Pursuit of native flavors also drove the creation of Four Corners Gin, a collaboration between the team who founded Glendalough Distillery and House Spirits co-founder and distiller Christian Krogstad—though in this case, the area covered includes all corners of the country. Four Corners uses solely American botanicals, including Juniperus occidentalis sourced from the northwest, and whose growing area stretches from Washington state and Idaho down to Nevada and California.

“There hasn’t been a lot of gin made from American juniper, because it can be challenging.”—Christian Krogstad

“There hasn’t been a lot of gin made from American juniper, because it can be challenging,” Krogstad says. “The reputation it had was that it was really difficult to work with; it could be harsh, astringent, and so forth.” But he discovered that the key to working with Western juniper is using the entire plant, both berries and needles. “The berries themselves have that characteristic juniper flavor, but they also have a real Sauvignon Blanc [aspect]—a little bit of grapefruit,” he explains, noting that the needles add a floral element.

The deserts of the American Southwest are a rich source of native juniper for brands like Sigil, made at Santa Fe’s As Above So Below Distillery (formerly Altar Spirits) with local Juniperus communis, and Arizona-based Suncliffe. At Suncliffe, co-founders Thomas Giddings and Ryan Lawrence stumbled into the local botanical focus by happenstance, as they hiked near Sedona and wondered whether the juniper bushes that surrounded them were any good for making gin. They were a couple of experimental batches in when they realized that it wasn’t just one juniper species they were using but three: alligator (Juniperus deppeana), shaggy bark (Juniperus osteosperma), and single-seed (Juniperus monosperma).

“Single-seed and shaggy bark—the berries themselves are almost impossible to tell apart on their own,” says Lawrence, noting that single-seed is a bit of a misnomer, as the plant can sometimes have two seeds. “The flavor is a lot more earthy, and kind of bready and sweet. It’s less floral, less spiky [than common juniper]; it feels more Arizona. It has a warm depth to it.” The alligator juniper, Giddings adds, is “a little meatier.”

Giddings and Lawrence got a permit from the USDA Forest Service to forage the necessary juniper for Suncliffe from Coconino National Forest, while Four Corners engages a professional wildcrafter to supply its needs. David Matthews, master distiller at Colorado’s Woody Creek, forages local Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) himself each fall for the distillery’s gin. “Copious amounts of juniper trees grow wild in the mountains surrounding Woody Creek Distillers,” he says. Compared to Juniperus communis, “the local juniper has a slightly milder, less piney aroma with more fruit and citrus.”

The necessity of foraging raises the question of sustainability. Luckily for most of these distillers, the juniper they’re using grows in abundance, so they don’t have to worry about plundering a scarce resource. Krogstad even notes that after decades of fire suppression in Oregon, which once kept the Western juniper population in check, the plant now is crowding out its peers. The exception is in North Carolina, where Word is supplementing her locally sourced common juniper with additional berries from Europe. “We don’t want to overharvest,” she says.

These American distillers aren’t alone in pursuing novel juniper in their gins. International brands, like Kenya’s Procera and India’s Hapusā, are doing the same thing, broadening the range of flavor profiles in an already-diverse category. Behind the bar, these gins are getting play in traditional Martinis and G&Ts, as well as in cocktails designed to show off their unique attributes. Maxwell Berlin, mixologist at the Cave at Quartz in Phoenix, showcases Suncliffe in the Dreamtime, which also includes Bosscal Conejo pechuga mezcal, Varnelli dell’Erborista amaro, sour lemon–myrtle tea, tamarillo–blood orange syrup, manuka honey, and eucalyptus honeycomb, sprinkled with a house-made herbal “dream dust.”

As gin makers and drinkers have known for years, the spirit has a vast canvas to express itself. Up to now, most of that expression has come about by incorporating non-juniper botanicals—an important and fruitful trend in recent years, as local-flavored gins have proliferated. But nearly all have relied on European-sourced common juniper for the key botanical. Yet with more than 60 juniper species scattered around the world, and just a handful currently in use, there’s plenty of opportunity for creators to push the boundaries even further—even if it means staying close to home.