There are those who collect t-shirts when they travel—or shot glasses or books. I once met a woman who told me she has 62 silk scarves, one from every country she’s visited. Jared Brown collects botanicals and spices.

Once a year he goes to the souk in Marrakech and visits his favorite spice shop, the one whose owner was born in the back of the store, as was his grandfather.

“His English isn’t great, but his son is a good translator. I show up, they invite me into the back and we sit with mint tea,” said Jared, an owner and the master distiller at Sipsmith Distillery, located in an old garage in Chiswick, a posh residential street in West London.

“There are walls of jars and the conversation begins with me picking a jar containing something I don’t recognize. And he’ll teach me that botanical. And then another,” he said.

There was also the time he was in Mexico discovered the secret to the intensity of te de Limon, a piquant Mexican lemongrass tea: it’s brewed with the plant’s delicate green leaf, not the tough stalk that’s common in kitchens around the world. So that’s why he uses the leaves in his gin. In fact, the botanical recipe is perhaps best thought of as a liquid scrapbook of his travels with his wife, Anistatia.

It was a Monday afternoon in June and Jared was sharing these Marco Polo-esque tales as he swirled a glass of gin in a glass at the bar at the distillery. Gin’s history in London runs deep, but it became static once Beefeater started distilling here in 1820. In 2009, after two years navigating a thorny bureaucratic maze, Brown obtained the first distilling license in London since Beefeater. He developed a London dry formula, a tribute to the traditional style, which requires at least 51% juniper in the botanical mix. No flavors can be added after distillation.

Perhaps more significantly, it signaled the future. Sipsmith laid the groundwork for a distilling renaissance in London. And the local spirit is showing up in both traditional and avant garde ways on Cocktail menus throughout the city.

Writing an article about drinking gin in London might be seen as a fool’s errand by some. Like an attempt to write about sports bars in Boston or pubs in Dublin, the only way to create a comprehensive record is to spend weeks pounding the pavement, which would certainly yield enough words for a book. So it’s with full awareness—and a preemptive appeal for forgiveness if your favorite bar isn’t included—that I approach this as a mere teaser to reveal just how deeply woven the spirit is in the social history and contemporary culture of the iconic capital.

I started my expedition at an equally historic cornerstone of London life history: a pub. Mr. Fogg’s Tavern, in Covent Garden, has all the trappings of a traditional pub—a lengthy mahogany bar, wood-paneled walls and floors, taxidermy. The Victorian vibe intensifies upstairs in the Gin Parlor, an ornate salon with tufted chaise lounges and chairs, sumptuous drapes and intricately patterned wallpaper. And over 200 gins on the bar, made everywhere from Brooklyn to Italy to Japan. But there’s a way for the gin-curious to chip away at the overwhelming selection. I ordered a flight of citrus-leaning gins, which was delivered with a tray of garnishes—lemon peel, dehydrated blood orange, grapefruit slices, lemon thyme. Ioana Florea, a manager, explained they’re chosen to accentuate one of each gin’s leading botanical. D.I.Y. drinking on demand, the old-timey way.

Gin took root in England after Dutch king William of Orange invaded England in 1688. Traders brought large shipments of genever, a Dutch spirit named for juniper and distilled from malted grain, like whisky. It’s distilled a second time with botanicals, including the namesake berries. The result is a malty drink that bears a slight resemblance to Irish whiskey. But in England, which was plagued with severe urban poverty, distillers cut down the process (and cost) and simply infused neutral spirit botanicals. It was often also flavored with turpentine and sulfuric acid, making it a rotgut commodity and earning it the sobriquet “Mother’s Ruin.” In the early 1700s, an estimated one in four homes was distilling gin. The Gin Craze was a time of depravity, destitution, and social collapse, a seedy urban hellscape depicted in William Hogarth’s well-known etching “Gin Lane.” An original is on view at the Tate Britain, by appointment. (Another is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.) In 1751, Parliament passed the Gin Act, requiring distillers only sell to licensed merchants. More regulations followed.

I stopped by the Museum of London, where the evolution of 18th century poverty is chronicled in detail. But my gin education came by accident when I asked a docent for directions. Her name was Bridget Daly and she once led gin-themed tours around London. She enthusiastically delivered a litany of trivia: There were over 40 nicknames for gin: Cuckhold’s Comfort, Kill Grief, Ladies’ Delight. Novelist Henry Fielding was a magistrate in 1749 and lobbied to end the Gin Craze. Drury Lane resident Johann Schweppe, of tonic water fame, opened his first factory on the street. She recommended I walk over to St. Giles, the neighborhood that inspired Hogarth. It’s unrecognizable today. Thankfully.

That history took shape as a full sensory—and cerebral—activity at the Ginstitute, a complete gin immersion at the Portobello Road Gin Distillery. In a dim, vintage-style drawing room, where antique bottles of gin and genever line the shelves, a host delivered a crash course charting the rise of juniper spirits, then guided the group through a small distillery space and into a bright white lab-like room to blend our own gin. My fellow classmates included tourists from Germany, Latvia, and San Diego, and a food historian from Western Massachusetts. Phil, one of the distillers, presented us with bottles of individual botanical distillates divided into four categories: Dry, Citrus, Spice, and Bold. For the next two hours, we took an aromatic tour, hitting the pillars of gin (orris root, angelica, juniper), familiar scents (grapefruit, nutmeg, licorice root), and fragrant surprises (asparagus, smoky lapsang souchong). Then we mixed our own. I left with an herbaceous Italian-accented blend: green olive, basil, pink peppercorn for a kick, and fennel for good measure.

Armed with this history and a passable scientific understanding of the stuff, I hit the streets again. There was recent buzz in cocktail circles about Seed Library, a moody cocktail den in the basement of One Hundred Shoreditch, a stylish hotel that opened in March. The menu is the handiwork of Ryan “Mr. Lyan” Chetiyawardana, who has a knack for opening bars with ultra-modern, if not futuristic, drink menus. Lyaness, his London bar, clinched the World’s Best Bar and Best International Hotel Bar awards at this summer’s Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards, the industry’s equivalent of the Grammys. Drinks there revolve around culinary-minded “bespoke” ingredients, like oyster honey and green sauce liqueur. Seed Library is the opposite. A cross between a moody jazz bar and a Midcentury Modern living room, its stated focus is “stripped back analogue forms – embracing natural variance and a maker’s touch.” The drinks might be stripped back, but minimalism hardly means without intrigue. To whit: the Coriander Gimlet is composed of Beefeater London Dry and coriander seed cordial, an earthy spiced sweetener.

Gin is nothing if not polarizing. People who love gin can get quite fanatical about it and go to great lengths to try exotic products—gin made with seaweed, Darjeeling green tea or Tasmanian pepper berries, hand-foraged dandelion and heather. Or ants. People who don’t love it tell of unfortunate encounters with the drink, or “gincidents,” as one bartender friend of mine calls them.

But what makes it such an engaging spirit—and eventually wins over nonbelievers— is that the sheer variety of herbs, botanicals, fruits, flowers and barks offer ferocious versatility. From savory to sweet, and sour to herbaceous, there’s a gin drink for anyone.

Take, for instance, Silver Leaf, a glammy yet playful bar in the luxe Pan Pacific London. Whisky is the specialty here, and bartender Megan Klosterman, who’s from Kentucky, is a dependable guide through the lengthy menu. We chatted about our shared love of whiskies, but I was bound to gin by duty this night. The menu offers minimalist symbols to describe each cocktail. The gin-based option, a heady mix with a traditional piney Greek liqueur called Mastiha, olive oil and lemon verbena, is designated as dry, floral, fruit and mineral. It masterfully delivered on each, as the more piney juniper held it all down, like a baseline.

There was more intrigue at the Victorian-salon-esque Natural Philosopher, and I’m not talking about the fact that to get there, you need to walk through Macsmiths, a computer repair shop that looks like a gallery of antique Apple computers. Nor am I talking about how the bartender works in a sunken space, so when you sit at the bar, you watch him from on high. The bartender the night I visited was owner Josh Powell, who explained that each cocktail was developed around an unfamiliar ingredient, often foraged. In the Mulberry, his gin offering, the zippy botanicals of Hendrick’s Lunar Gin samba with grassy cachaca, dry merlot grappa, a sour cocktail mixer called Supasawa, and mulberry. Soda gives it sparkle.

Few places in London sparkle quite like Artesian, the bar in the 19th-century Langham Hotel that’s been named Best Bar in the World more than once. The thematic menu changes annually and this year’s theme is “duality.” My gin journey took a fascinating turn with the Amo, the brighter “love” to the shadowy, umami-laced Scotch cocktail, Odi, Latin root for hate. Amo is a jumble of disparate ingredients that work together with bewildering ease: Tanqueray London Dry, VSOP Calvados, “discarded banana peel rum,” a zesty cinchona liqueur, watermelon soy yogurt, and green tea.

Bartenders like Josh, Mr. Lyan’s team, and the maestros at Artesian are the Ornette Coleman’s and Sun Ra’s—London’s avant garde practitioners of varying degrees. The classic artists, the drink-makers that hold the standards in the palm of their hands and craft them into something nearly flawless and soulful, like Duke Ellington or Sonny Rollins do, are bountiful, too.

The Connaught Bar at the very ritzy Connaught Hotel, another World’s Best Bar title-holder, is known for the custom-designed martinis, prepared tableside. The barman will drop various bitters on a perfumier’s card—lavender, coriander, tonka, cardamom, and the house Dr. Ago, a bergamot/ginger concoction named for the bar’s Director of Mixology Agostino Perrone. I opted for that signature and the show began: The bartender dropped beads of bitters around the inner edge of the V-shaped glass, and nimbly stirred gin and vermouth in a mixing glass. Then with his left hand he poured it, raising his arm high. With his other hand, he squeezed a lemon peel and the oils spritzed the stream as it cascaded into the glass, a mesmerizing choreography.

A gin tour that doesn’t include a visit to Dukes Bar is no gin tour at all. Located in a glamorous, antique-y hotel at the end of a cul-de-sac in St. James, Dukes was famously frequented by James Bond creator Ian Fleming, but Alessandro Palazzi is the star here today. Soft spoken and white-jacketed, he is as efficient as he is graceful. He estimates he makes upwards of 300 martinis in a night. They are crisp, bracingly cold and so stiff that there is a two-drink limit.

He wheels a creaky century-old wood cart to each table, asking “Wet or dry?” Dry, please. With surgeon-like focus, he pours a custom amber vermouth and gin into the glass. The key, he says, is temperature. The bottles are straight from the freezer. The glasses, too. The softball-size organic lemons are from Amalfi. Always. There is no stirring and no shaking. That would be too undignified for these quarters. This martini is “built.” Cold makes the alcohol molecules fatter, so when he spritzes lemon peel on top, the citrus oil floats. It’s so fragrant, but like a sunset, it’s fleeting. The gin will warm, the night will pass, the memory of London will endure.