Some of the most celebrated Martinis in New York are made with a brand of gin that most people have never heard of.
It’s called Old Raj and there is almost nothing traditional about it. Its alcohol level is a whopping 55 percent. It costs about $50 to $60 — that is, if you can find a bottle; few liquor stores carry it. And it is slightly yellow in color, giving you the first impression that the gin may have gone bad, before you learn that one of the botanicals is saffron.
And yet this odd bird in the gin field has found its way into the popular house Martinis at some of New York’s most respected bar programs, including Maison Premiere in Williamsburg, and Le Rock and Le Veau d’Or in Midtown Manhattan.
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“It is overproof, but it’s extremely soft,” says Sarah Morrissey, bar director at Le Veau d’Or, where the house Martini — cheekily titled “our way” on the menu — calls for 2 and a half ounces of Old Raj to a half-ounce of dry vermouth, and comes with a highball sidecar of vermouth and Vichy water. “It’s very drinkable, it’s very balanced,” Morrissey says. “It makes a very beautiful Martini. This gin is a true workhorse. You can put it in almost any drink and it’s delicious.”
Estelle Bossy, beverage director at Le Rock, first noticed Old Raj when she was at Del Posto in 2010. “It was a deep gin collection,” she recalls. “It’s definitely been a favorite of mine for many years.”
Le Rock’s Super Sec Martini is a freezer Martini made of seven parts Old Raj and one part vermouth. As such, it asserts itself in no uncertain terms. “This is the Martini for someone who worked in Rockefeller Center and has had a rough day,” Bossy says.
If any place can be given credit for Old Raj’s niche popularity in Gotham, it’s Maison Premiere. The bar is where most cocktail bartenders, enthusiasts, and writers (including myself) first became aware of the brand. Their King Cole Martini — which is served tableside with much ceremony — has been made with Old Raj since it debuted in 2015. Three ounces of the gin is paired with just a touch of vermouth and orange bitters.
Bar director William Elliott isn’t sure how Maison settled on Old Raj for the King Cole. When creating the cocktail, he had been to London recently to check off some “bucket list” Martinis there, so that trip may have influenced his choice. Also, at the time, several overproof gins were hitting the U.S. market. “Once we started trying Old Raj against other gins,” he recalls, “we really landed on Old Raj purely on palate.”
Asked about Old Raj since becoming a go-to Martini choice at other places, Elliott is diplomatic. “Anyone I know running heavily on Old Raj in their programs,” he says with a smile, “are either ex-employees or close friends.”
Elliott, Morrissey, and Bossy may be big Old Raj advocates, but that doesn’t mean they know all that much about the brand they love and support. Old Raj is made by Cadenhead’s, a Scottish independent bottler whose history goes back to 1842. Among British spirit producers, Cadenhead’s — which also puts out whiskey, rum, and brandy — is a bit of a dark horse. You won’t see ads for most of their products and it doesn’t sponsor cocktail competitions and profile-boosting things like that. Morrissey has yet to make contact with the company. Elliott has met someone from Cadenhead’s, but has “never developed as strong a relationship as I’d like to,” he says. “It’s a different sort of brand. It’s a heritage brand.”
“He wanted to create a quality gin that he could bottle under the company’s name, so he created Old Raj and it was his recipe of the different botanicals used. Wright added saffron as he believed it added to the flavor of the style he wanted.”
Bossy has been luckiest in her outreach efforts. She has met Cadenhead’s director of sales, Cameron McGeachy, who was able to answer a few questions about the mysterious gin outlier.
Old Raj seems like an old brand. Heck, “old” is in its name. And that label illustration of a British soldier certainly seems of another time, the same “Rule, Britannia!” era that produced the image of Queen Victoria on Bombay Gin and the Yeomen Warder on the Beefeater bottle.
But Old Raj is much younger than those two famous brands of London dry gin. It was dreamed up in 1972 by Hedley Wright, who purchased Cadenhead’s that year. His ancestors had founded the Springbank Distillery in 1828.
“He wanted to create a quality gin that he could bottle under the company’s name,” says McGeachy, “so he created Old Raj and it was his recipe of the different botanicals used.” The bonus botanical of saffron, which is added post-distillation and gives the gin its light golden hue, was Wright’s idea. “Wright added saffron as he believed it added to the flavor of the style he wanted,” McGeachy adds.
Opinions vary on what the saffron brings to the mix beyond color. “I’m a little bit of a sucker for saffron,” says Bossy. “It’s subdued in Old Raj. It adds this earthy, dry quality.”
Morrissey says she wouldn’t necessarily drink Old Raj and cry out, “saffron notes, 100 percent! But it probably brings that balance that some other gins don’t have.”
As for the reasoning behind the gin’s unusually high (for the time) alcohol content, the answers appear to be lost to time.
“Unfortunately, we have no records if this was done from the beginning, but I believe it was,” says McGeachy. “Hedley Wright unfortunately passed away in 2023 and we have no staff still with the company from that era, so I cannot know for certain.”
The overproof version of Old Raj outperforms Cadenhead’s 46 percent ABV version by two to one, with 2,000 cases being sold each year. (Of those, Le Veau d’Or goes through seven cases every two weeks, which adds up to 182 cases per year. Maison uses eight to 10 bottles a week, amounting to roughly 35 to 43 cases per year.)
Old Raj gin is distilled just twice a year, in large batches. It is not made by Cadenhead’s itself, but distilled for them by Hayman’s Gin Distillery in London, another respected maker of traditional London dry gin. While the U.K. buys a significant amount of Old Raj, the U.S. is, rather surprisingly, the brand’s biggest market.
McGeachy admits he is somewhat mystified by Old Raj’s not-inconsiderable foothold in New York.
“I still find it incredible that a gin that was created by a company from a small town in the west coast of Scotland gets into such high-end establishments,” he says. “This shows that it’s the quality of the spirit that is appreciated by the highly experienced bartenders in these bars.”
Old Raj will not be upping its marketing budget anytime soon. So, for the time being, spreading the word of this cult gin is up to the bartenders who love it. The work can be slow-going.
“99.9 percent of customers have never heard of it,” says Morrissey. “A lot of bartenders don’t know it, either.”
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