Flora Watkins has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and tonic in the drinks holder, while my sons are at cricket practice. It’s an inclement evening, but were it a sunny summer’s day, the Yummy Mummies would be sprawled around the boundary in their Veja trainers and prairie dresses, pastel-coloured tins in hand, cackling and catching up like some Gen X version of Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’.
Gins in tins are the acceptable form of ‘mother’s ruin’. First came Gordon’s G&T in a tin, followed by its pink gin, and now the chiller aisle contains more temptation than the Haribo shelves do for my children.
Bombay Sapphire, Tanqueray, Sipsmith and multiple artisan brands have got in on the act. They’re usually on offer at your preferred supermarket, with three for the price of four. That is, unless you plump for supermarket-brand gin tins, which come in at about 99p each.
Gins in tins are part of the fastest-growing drinks markets, that of ‘RTDs’ (ready-to-drink cocktails). Post-pandemic, volume sales have outperformed white spirits, with the market estimated to have reached£884 million last year, according to Alice Baker, a senior research analyst at Mintel. And usage of RTDs is highest among the under-45s, she confirms. Perma-stressed working mothers like me now think little of cracking open a Sipsmith’s canned G&T or Grey Goose vodka spritzer instead of putting the kettle on when they get in from the school run. One friend says: ‘Gins in tins at 4 p.m. on a Friday was basically why I signed my son up for cricket. It’s rude not to there.’
My grandparents’ generation had the gin tray, brought out at 6 p.m.: cut-glass tumblers, vicious measures of Gordon’s, half a bottle of flat Schweppes tonic water and some little dishes of salted crisps and Opies cocktail onions. Some older people, like my great friend Roger, an antiques dealer, continue this tradition – but after one of his tinctures I need to lie down. And that isn’t the point of gins in tins: I don’t want to get wasted (I’ve got some half-arsed parenting to do and possibly need to drive). What gins in tins provide is more akin to a socially acceptable form of Xanax or the Valium doled out to 1950s housewives: they just take the edge off endlessly bickering siblings and battles over homework.
The late Shirley Conran said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. In the post-Brexit, post-pandemic era when the fantastic au pairs we once employed are a distant dream, frankly who has time to locate ice, the gin bottle and a can of Fever-Tree, only to find you’ve run out of lemons? A tin of chilled Bombay Collins (my current favourite: it tastes just like a piquant lemon barley water) consumed at a family flashpoint is one of the best life hacks I know.
RTDs are targeted at women. Portobello Road gin and tonic ‘looks seriously swanky – you’ll be the envy of the train with this in your hand!’, reads a recent blind testing on the BBC Good Food website. One of the few male aficionados I know is my godfather, though he is fond of declaiming, ‘a can of Gordon’s gin and tonic is the perfect mixer for… a large measure of Gordon’s’.
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