Gin styles compared: London dry, Old Tom, Plymouth, navy strength and genever

A gin label can say London Dry, Old Tom, Plymouth, navy strength or genever, and the five words are not the same kind of word. One is a legal grade. One is a habit. One is a trade mark. One is a number. One is a protected name for a spirit that is not gin. What is gin sets out the law behind them; the table sets the five side by side.

The right style is the one the recipe was written for. A drink balanced on Old Tom’s sugar turns sharp with a London Dry; a Martini built for London Dry goes soft and malty on genever. Where a swap is sound, the sections below say what to change.

London Dry is category 22 of the spirit drinks regulation: a distilled gin whose every flavour came through the still with all the botanicals present, with nothing added afterwards but water, more pure spirit and at most 0.1 grams of sugar a litre, and no colour. Dry is the word the regulation lets it add. London names a method rather than a place, and a London Dry can be made in Devon, Scotland or Spain.

It is the grade most bottles are made to and the gin most recipes assume: juniper first, citrus and coriander behind it, unsweetened, usually 40% to 47% ABV. Recipe lines that simply say gin are written for a London Dry at about 40%, so the Martini, the Negroni, the Tom Collins and the Gin and Tonic all start here.

Old Tom is gin with some sugar in it, softer and rounder than London Dry. Wikipedia’s history of gin, a secondary source, calls it the style of eighteenth-century England, when gin came off pot stills, and says it faded in the early twentieth century. Wikipedia’s article on Old Tom traces the name, purportedly, to a black cat sign on gin shops, with a slot for a coin and a pipe for the gin; the story is told everywhere and proved nowhere.

In Great Britain the name has no definition. A bottle labelled Old Tom is sold as gin or distilled gin, and because it is sweetened past 0.1 grams a litre it cannot call itself dry. The United States is different: its standards of identity list Old Tom beside dry and London as a term a distilled gin may carry. How sweet an Old Tom is depends on the maker, so taste a new bottle before you mix with it.

The old recipes assume it. Jerry Thomas’s guide, in the 1887 edition, builds the Martinez on Old Tom, and Harry Johnson’s manual of 1882 puts Old Tom in the first printed Tom Collins. The International Bartenders Association still says a Tom Collins takes Old Tom. The house Casino, the Tuxedo, the Turf Club and the Ford Cocktail are written for it, and none of them needs syrup because the gin brings the sugar.

Wikipedia’s article on Old Tom records that Hayman’s relaunched one from an original recipe.

Plymouth gin is a brand, and Wikipedia’s article on it, a secondary source, says it has been distilled on the same premises on the Barbican in Plymouth since 1793, and gives the standard bottling as 41.2% ABV and the navy strength as 57%. Its botanicals lean on roots, so the juniper sits back and the gin tastes softer and earthier than a typical London Dry.

For years the name was also a geographical indication under the EU spirit drinks regulation, which meant only gin made in Plymouth could use it. The 2008 regulation required a technical file for every protected name by 20 February 2015. Pernod Ricard, the owner, announced in November 2014 that it would not support the indication, judging that a protected name should cover a group of brands rather than one, and the Commission regulation of 2016 that rewrote the list of protected spirit names does not include Plymouth Gin. The GB register of protected spirit drink names, checked on 12 October 2026, has no entry for it; the four gins it lists are Gin de Mahón, Vilnius Gin, Gin chileno and Dovey Native Botanical Gin, the last registered on 31 March 2025.

What that changes for a drinker is nothing: Wikipedia’s article says there is only one brand of Plymouth-style gin. What it changes for the category is that Plymouth is a brand, not a style a second distillery could join. The Pink Gin and the Gimlet are written for it; Wikipedia gives the Pink Gin as Plymouth and Angostura, and its article on the rickey quotes a Gin Rickey of 1903, in Tim Daly’s manual, that called for Plymouth too.

Navy strength is a strength, not a recipe. It means the maker’s gin bottled at about 57% ABV instead of the usual 40%, with the same botanicals and the same legal grade. The figure comes from the old British proof scale, on which 100 proof was about 57.15% ABV. The regulation sets a floor of 37.5% for gin and no ceiling, and does not mention navy strength at all.

Wikipedia’s article on Plymouth Gin, a secondary source, calls 57% ABV the traditional strength demanded by the Royal Navy, and gives Plymouth’s own navy strength at that figure.

More alcohol carries more of the aromatic oils, so a navy strength gin smells bigger and holds its own in a long drink. It is also 40% stronger at the same measure. For a recipe written for 40% gin, cut the measure by about 30%, or pour it full and know the drink is stronger. In a Gin and Tonic it takes an Indian tonic at the long end of the ratio.

Genever is the juniper spirit of the Netherlands and Belgium, and the ancestor of gin. The difference is in the base: genever carries malt wine, a low-strength distillate of fermented grain that keeps the taste of the grain, blended with neutral spirit and juniper. It smells of bread and malt as much as of juniper, and bottles usually run 35% to 42% ABV.

In law it is not gin. It sits in category 19, juniper-flavoured spirit drinks, with a floor of 30% ABV, and the name is a geographical indication. The GB register lists Genièvre, Jenever and Genever for Belgium, the Netherlands and parts of France and Germany, and oude and jonge jenever separately for the Netherlands and Belgium, all registered on 31 December 2020 when the EU list was carried over. A malt-wine juniper spirit made anywhere else cannot use the name.

Oude and jonge describe the recipe, not the age. Wikipedia’s article on jenever, a secondary source, says oude genever must have at least 15% malt wine and no more than 20 grams of sugar a litre, and jonge no more than 15% malt wine and 10 grams. By the same account, jonge arose after about 1900, when a near-neutral spirit became possible to distil, and by 2021 an estimated 98% of genever sold was jonge.

The John Collins is the gin drink written for it: Harry Johnson’s 1882 manual builds the John Collins on Holland gin, which is genever, and the Tom Collins on Old Tom. Oude genever makes a gin recipe heavier and maltier, closer to a whisky drink, and usually wants a little less sugar. Keep it away from drinks that depend on crisp juniper, such as the Martini.

Read the recipe before the shelf. Where a line says gin, it means a London Dry at about 40% ABV. Where it names Old Tom, Plymouth or genever, the style is doing a job the others cannot, usually balancing sugar against vermouth or lemon. Navy strength is never named; it replaces a 40% gin at about 70% of the measure.

If one bottle has to do everything, it is a London Dry. It makes every drink above except the four written for Old Tom, and those it makes with a bar spoon of syrup. What spirits to stock at home makes the same choice.

The categories and their rules are Regulation (EC) No 110/2008, Annex II, categories 19 to 22, as retained in UK law and read on legislation.gov.uk on 12 October 2026. Annex III of that regulation, which listed the protected names, was omitted from the UK text on 31 December 2020 and the names moved to the GB register on GOV.UK, searched for gin and for genever on 12 October 2026. The 2015 deadline and the 87 removed names are in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/1067; Pernod Ricard’s decision was reported by The Spirits Business on 17 November 2014. The United States terms are 27 CFR 5.144.