COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: HOW THE COTSWOLDS DISTILLERY IS STICKIN' IT TO THE MAN

Setting up a whisky distillery is a lot of work: finding the right building, sourcing the stills, deciding what type of spirits to make, and so on. Setting up a whisky distillery in England is a little rebellious: Scotch and Irish whiskies are recognized around the world, but English? 

When the staff at the Cotswold Distillery got to naming their wash still they took their inspiration from a timeless classic rock song that embodies both work and rebellion: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary.

Released in January of 1969, Proud Mary recounts the narrator’s story of leaving “a good job in the city workin’ for the man every night and day” for a life with more freedom and less worry when he realizes he “never saw the good side of the city ’til (he) hitched a ride on a river boat queen.” The river in question is never named but the listener can assume that it is North America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, due to references to one of the river’s port cities, Memphis, as well as to New Orleans, which sits at the Mississippi’s mouth where the 3,860 mile beast pours into the Gulf of Mexico. 

The song title refers to the steamboat that “keep(s) on burnin’,” carrying the narrator up and down the river and is another element of the song that supports the river being the Mississippi, which witnessed the highest concentration of steamboats in history during the 1800s. After Robert Fulton’s invention of the steam engine and its subsequent application to powering waterborne vessels in the early years of the century, over 1,200 boats cruised the Mississippi by the 1830s, transporting people and more importantly goods to feed the needs of a rapidly expanding America. 

Steam engines would be considered anything but environmentally friendly by today’s increasingly stringent ecological requirements. But it is not the pollution from the wood burning boilers that gave the steamboats’ host one of it’s more popular nicknames: the Muddy Mississippi. Particularly near the city of St. Louis, where the Missouri River meets the Mississippi, the water color is a muddy brown caused by all the sediment that the two rivers have dragged with them for thousands of miles.

You may even say the sediment gives the rivers along which boats like Proud Mary chug a cloudy appearance just like the hue the non-chill filtered Cotswolds Dry Gin gives the Cotswolds Cloudy Martini. So put on some Creedence, pour yourself an opaque Cotswolds cocktail, and be proud that you’re drinking a true English craft gin from a distillery that’s working hard and stickin’ it to The Man.