Created by a pharmacist who bought a Chelsea distillery in 1863, the gin still follows a nine-botanical recipe recorded in 1895
The man in the red coat on the Beefeater label is not a made-up character. He represents the Yeoman Warders, the royal guard that protects the Tower of London and that the English nicknamed beefeaters; the gin is named after them, according to Difford's Guide. As early as the 19th century, that red uniform evoked old London and British pride, notes the entry on the brand in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, written by Aaron Knoll.
James Burrough was born in 1835 in Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and trained as a pharmacist in Exeter. In 1855 he went to Canada, where he opened a pharmacy in Toronto with a partner, and returned to England a few years later. In 1863, he paid 400 pounds for John Taylor & Son, a gin distillery founded in 1820 on Cale Street, in Chelsea. That year, 1820, still appears on the bottle today. Burrough's notebooks show he was already making gin before that: one of them, from 1849, contains the formula for a blackcurrant gin.
The Beefeater name first appears in the company's papers in 1876, alongside other gins from the house. Burrough died in 1897, and his sons took over the business. According to the Oxford Companion, the brand only became a priority in the mid-1920s; until then, the firm mainly sold bulk spirit and whisky.
In the early 20th century, the family moved the distillery to Lambeth and, in 1958, to Kennington, in south London, near the Oval cricket ground, where the gin is still made today. Exports to the United States began in 1917, and the brand really took off after World War II: in the early 1960s, three of every four bottles of gin imported by Americans were Beefeater, according to the Oxford Companion. The family sold the company to Whitbread in 1987, and Pernod Ricard bought the brand in 2005.
The recipe follows an 1895 formula book: juniper, angelica root and seed, coriander, licorice, almond, orris root, and lemon and bitter Seville orange peels, nine botanicals in all. They steep for 24 hours in neutral spirit, inside the stills, before distillation. That step gave its name to Beefeater 24, launched in 2008, which adds grapefruit peel and green teas from Japan and China to the recipe.
Bebidário's catalog also includes the fruit versions Beefeater Pink Strawberry and Beefeater Blackberry.
Sources: Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (2021), Difford's Guide (accessed October 29, 2026).
