Essential reading: "The Best Gin to Buy on a Budget."

In addition to performing a valuable public service by locating the most cost-effective gins, the author agrees with one of my recent assessments: Why drink Tanqueray when Beefeater's always a few bucks cheaper?

Previously at the PC: "From Gin Lane to the height of sophistication," now with interaction.

The Best Gin to Buy on a Budget, by Michael Dietsch (Serious Eats)

 ... Perhaps it's about making appearances. Cheap gin calls to mind images of disheveled, broken folks shambling to the flophouse. People grimace at the idea of 'bathtub gin' that wasn't poured from a beveled-glass bottle with a shiny label. So while we can happily find a good bottle of bourbon for twelve bucks or ten or even eight on sale, it's startlingly difficult to find good gin for less than $20. I know—this month, I scoured and I searched and I hunted, and I tried 15 of 'em.

Here are the best gins that'll run you less than an Andrew Jackson.

"From Gin Lane to the height of sophistication," now with interaction.

Thanks to B for this link.

When gin was full of sulphuric acid and turpentine, by Finlo Rohrer (BBC News Magazine)

It's 250 years since the death of William Hogarth. His famous work Gin Lane still informs the way people think about the drink.

It's arguably the most potent anti-drug poster ever conceived. A woman, her clothes in disarray, her head thrown back in intoxicated oblivion, allows her baby to slip from her grasp, surely to its death in a stairwell below.

She's the centrepiece in an eye-wateringly grim urban melee - full of death, misery, starvation and fighting.

The year was 1751. The drug in question was gin. And the engraving was a conscious effort by William Hogarth, along with his friend novelist Henry Fielding, to force the government to do something about a drink that was threatening to tear apart the social fabric of England.