One day recently, Toby Cecchini received a text message from a spirits industry friend of his. It was a photo of a bottle of Beefeater Gin sitting on a shelf at a Maryland liquor store, showing an ABV of 40 percent.
“I was gobsmacked,” says Cecchini, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar. He went down to his liquor storage room and looked at his Beefeater bottles. Older ones still showed a proof of 44 percent ABV, while a case of newer ones indeed listed 40 percent.
“They’d done it again! Unbelievable!” he told himself. “The cynical cheek of these people. How is this not being decried industrywide?”
Indeed, without so much as a press release, Beefeater has quietly — some might say sneakily — lowered the proof of its flagship gin in the U.S. from 44 percent to 40 percent ABV, the legal minimum for any spirit sold in the country. This would perhaps not be the biggest deal in the world, except for the fact that just three years earlier, in late 2020, Beefeater changed its packaging and lowered the proof of its London Dry from 47 percent to 44 percent ABV. Despite seemingly doing this under the diversion of a pandemic, that change immediately elicited a lot of anger among cocktail enthusiasts and industry pros, as these changes always do.
“It had been a marvelous gin at 47 percent. Maybe it was still a great gin at 44 percent but I just found the sneaky way they did
