The Ginstitute

The Ginstitute began in 2011 as a tiny, improvised museum located in a cramped apartment above a nineteenth-century pub called the Portobello Star. Three bartenders, driven by a personal obsession with the spirit, cleared out their own living space to house their growing collection of gin-related artifacts and a small thirty-liter copper still named Copernicus the Second. This diminutive machine became the heart of the operation, where they spent nine months experimenting with dozens of botanicals to develop their signature recipe. By keeping their blending process manual and intimate, they turned a simple upstairs flat into what was arguably the second-smallest museum in London, dedicated entirely to the checkered history of the city's most famous spirit.