After being awarded World’s Best Gin four times, the British spirit brand has collaborated with NUDE glassware in pursuit of the perfect martini glass…
The road to martini perfection is paved with pedants and purists. It may be ‘just a cocktail’, but there are perhaps more hard opinions and intoxicating instructions swirling around this particular drink than any other. You’ll find countless conflicting recipes out there — each one brimming with inconsistent ingredients, spilling over with shaken-or-stirred advice and overflowing with either olive, onion or lemon twist garnishes.
It’s a contentious cocktail. But, whether you like your martinis dry, dirty, mixed with vodka or gin (always gin, naturally), there’s one constant that all discerning drinkers should agree on: a martini should be served as cold as is practically possible.
And that’s where No.3 Gin comes in. Not content with creating an award-winning spirit (four times World’s Best Gin at the International Spirits Challenge), the Berry Bros. & Rudd brand has partnered with Istanbul-based NUDE glassware to create an exclusively released martini glass. Hand-blown from crystal and finished with both a fine-rimmed bowl and slender stem, it’ll keep your cocktail cooler for almost twice as long as a classic glass. And that’s a perk even the most pedantic purist can’t ignore.
So how did this new, superior design come to be? Because, while the glass is undoubtedly a beautiful bit of barware, No.3 Gin ensured it didn’t skimp on the science, either. In fact, the British brand enlisted Dr. Junfeng Yang — a lecturer at the University of Leeds and specialist in thermodynamics — to bring his considerable expertise to the project.
Between them, the team studied the transference of heat in both plain and thick-based martini glasses. A range of options were tested using computational fluid dynamics, which saw several martinis stirred down over ice until chilled — before being strained into frozen glasses and tested at room temperature. “The thick-based glass,” Dr. Yang tells Gentleman’s Journal, “keeps the martini colder longer than a regular martini glass, because the pre-chilled thick bottom retains temperature and delays the warm-up of the liquid”.
The figures showed that martini in the plain-based glass held its temperature for 3.4 hours — but the cocktail in the thick-based glass held its temperature for 5.4 hours (approximately 50% longer). These developments were passed onto the designers at NUDE glassware, where a dozen different versions were tested until — after ten long months — the perfect piece of martini-maintaining glassware was finalised.
The Goring
The Aubrey
The Donovan Bar
Each of the No.3 Gin x NUDE martini glasses, made to these exact specifications, will be hand-blown — and will take up to six hours to heat, work and cool. The exclusive release has also got a subtle turquoise hue, inspired by the No.3 bottle itself, which will set the glasses apart from any others on your home bar. This delicate colour will also remind you, every time you stir a martini, that you should only be using the very best gin.
And No.3 Gin is the best. Not only has Berry Bros. & Rudd’s celebrated spirit garnered over 30 awards for excellence since 2010, it is also the first gin ever to have won the prestigious ‘Supreme Champion Spirit’ award at the International Spirits Challenge, in 2019.
The brand worked with master distillers, top mixologists and Dr. David Clutton (the only person in the world to have a PhD in gin) to create the spirit, spending months selecting the very best botanicals to create a truly classic London Dry Gin. It’s distilled in a century-old, brick-encased copper pot still in Holland, sings with notes of orange zest, cardamom and white pepper, and mixes the perfect martini — granted you use the right glassware, of course…
To that end, the No.3 Gin x NUDE limited-edition martini glass is available as a set of two, exclusively via NUDE from World Martini Day on the 19th June. But, while only 200 glasses will be released initially, don’t despair if you miss out. On the same day, these glasses will be exclusively available at Scarfe’s Bar at the Rosewood Hotel, The Donovan Bar at Browns Hotel, The Goring Cocktail Bar and the Aubrey at the Mandarin Oriental.
Want more of the best martinis? These are the best bars in Britain for martini enthusiasts…
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