Between the rich maltiness of Dutch genever and the crisp, bone-dry London gin we know today sits Old Tom — a softer, gently sweetened style of gin that dominated the 18th and 19th centuries, all but vanished in the 20th, and has been quietly winning back bartenders ever since.
A gin for rougher times
Old Tom emerged in the 1700s, when distilling was a cruder art than it is now. Early column stills and pot stills produced spirit with plenty of rough edges, and distillers learned to smooth them over — first with heavier botanicals like liquorice, later with sugar. The result was a rounder, sweeter gin that sat somewhere between genever and what would eventually become the London Dry style once distillation technology improved enough to make sweetening unnecessary.
For more than a century, if you ordered gin in Britain, this is broadly what you got. Many of the classic cocktails of the golden age — the Tom Collins most famously, and the Martinez, the drink often credited as the Martini's ancestor — were built around Old Tom's gentle sweetness, not around a dry gin at all. Make a Tom Collins with the gin it was named for and you'll taste why.
The cat on the sign
The name comes with a legend, and like most gin legends it should be enjoyed with a pinch of salt. The story goes that some London public houses mounted a wooden plaque of a black tom cat on the wall. Drop a penny in the slot, and the barman inside would pour a measure of gin through a tube beneath the cat's paw — an early, unofficial vending machine, and a discreet one during the era when gin sales were heavily restricted. Whether or not the plumbing ever worked quite that neatly, the black cat stuck as the style's emblem, and you'll still find one on many Old Tom labels today.
What makes an Old Tom taste like an Old Tom
There's no legal definition of the style, but the character is consistent: softer and rounder than a London Dry, with a light sweetness that lifts the botanicals rather than sugaring them over. Done well, the sweetness works the way a pinch of salt works in cooking — you don't taste it so much as notice everything else tasting fuller. Juniper is still present, but it shares the stage with a smoother, more approachable palate that makes Old Tom the gin many people who "don't like gin" turn out to like enormously.
Our take on the style
Our Biggar Old Tom Gin is a modern Scottish reading of the tradition — lightly sweetened, rich and smooth, distilled in the same small batches as everything else at The Stillhouse, no more than 140 bottles at a time. We use it as the base of the French Martini in our cocktail range, where its roundness carries raspberry and pineapple beautifully, and it's the gin we reach for when someone on a distillery tour tells us dry gin isn't their thing. It rarely stays not-their-thing for long.
How to drink it
Tom Collins. The classic: 50ml Old Tom, 25ml lemon juice, 15ml sugar syrup, topped with soda over ice. Because the gin brings its own sweetness, ease back on the syrup compared to a dry-gin Collins.
Martinez. Old Tom, sweet vermouth, a bar spoon of maraschino and a dash of bitters, stirred. The missing link between the Manhattan and the Martini, and a drink that only makes sense with this style of gin.
With tonic. Old Tom and tonic is a gentler, rounder G&T — try a light or Mediterranean tonic so the gin's softness isn't buried, and garnish with orange rather than lime.
Neat or over ice. Unlike most dry gins, a good Old Tom genuinely works as a slow sipper.
Old Tom at a glance
- Era: the dominant English gin style of the 1700s and 1800s
- Character: softly sweetened, rounder and smoother than London Dry
- The name: traditionally linked to black-cat plaques dispensing gin in Georgian London
- Made for: the Tom Collins, the Martinez, and anyone easing into gin
If navy strength is gin with the volume turned up — we've written about that style too — Old Tom is gin with the warmth turned up. Between them and a classic London Dry, you have the whole family tree in three bottles.
