Quebec Gin Was Having a Moment. Then the SAQ Killed the Buzz

Quebec Gin Was Having a Moment. Then the SAQ Killed the Buzz

Sometime in the seventeenth century, during military operations in the Netherlands, British soldiers came across a particularly strong juniper-flavoured Dutch spirit called genever. When they brought it back to the homeland, it quickly became the drink of the masses—easy to produce and cheap to access. What followed was the “gin craze” of the 1600s and 1700s, an epoch in Britain marked by a boom in gin manufacturing, consumption, and, eventually…