Gin & Tonic
Earth's most-ordered
The perfect aperitif: crisp juniper, botanical gin softened by quinine bitterness and bright lime. A drink that tastes like its own reward.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 oz Gin
- 4 oz Tonic Water
- squeeze Fresh Lime Juice
Method
Fill a highball with ice. Pour gin. Top with tonic water. Squeeze lime wheel over the drink and drop it in.
Documented as emerging gradually in 19th-century British India, combining gin with the era’s quinine tonic water, without a single identified creator. Per Difford’s Guide #835. The earliest known reference to "gin and tonic" is an 1868 Anglo-Indian Oriental Sporting Magazine account of racegoers at Lucknow, documented in Walker & Nesbitt, Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water (Kew); Country Life ("Curious Questions: Who invented the gin and tonic?"); and Simonetti, Contini & Martini, Infez Med 2022. Notes: evolved as a practical adaptation by British colonists, not a deliberate invention; no specific creator is documented; Erasmus Bond patented quinine tonic water in 1858, Schweppes commercialized Indian Tonic Water by 1870.