Photo via Flickr user Ginny and John Woods
Gin may have once have been the "mother's ruin" of Victorian drinking dens but fast forward a few centuries, and you'll find "double G&T, please" rolling off the tongues of drinkers across the UK, as bartenders frantically slice lemons and dole out endless Gordon's and Slimline Schweppes.A new report has just revealed exactly how much gin Britain has knocked back in the past year. Spoiler alert: there must have been a lot of sore heads in 2016.
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Released yesterday by the UK's Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA), the findings revealed that Brits drank 283,000 hectolitres—the equivalent of 40 million bottles—of gin over the last 12 months.Well, we've had a lot of sorrows to drown in 2016.In fact, the WSTA found that Britain drank record amounts this year, with annual gin sales up 16 percent on 2015. They estimate that the amount consumed equals 1.12 billion gin and tonics across the country, or 28 per every person of legal drinking age.Many in the drinks industry will see Brits' newfound obsession with G&T as unsurprising. Last year, market research company Mintel predicted that the UK gin industry would surpass the £1 billion mark due to growing Millennial interest in the drink. They found that 42 percent of Brits aged 18 to 34 drank the spirit, compared to 27 percent of over-45s.READ MORE: How a Gin Craze Nearly Destroyed 18th-Century London
At the rate that Brits are getting through the spirit, let's hope that hangover-free gin is here sooner rather than later.READ MORE: Brighton's First Distillery Is Trying to Make Hangover-Free Gin