Not so long ago the only things that came in a bottle of alcohol (beside the alcohol itself) were the occasional odds and ends that fell in as it was being made, or some fruit that was deliberately shoehorned in to make it look decorative. Today there seems to be a craze for all sorts of objects jammed into bottles of spirit – scorpions, worms, and other creepy crawlies being particularly common. Actually distilling the essence of an insect to make an alcoholic beverage rather than just pickling it in a bottle, however, is a different prospect altogether. But now a company in the UK has done just that, by using an extract from ants to create a special type of gin. 

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To enhance the flavor a little more, other ingredients are added, including Bulgarian juniper berries, wood avens (a perennial forest herb), common nettle (Urtica dioica), and alexanders seed (a biennial wild relative of celery), along with a 100 percent organically-grown English wheat as the base for the spirit. Each distillation is also asserted to be done one single liter at a time.

The contents of the bottle, the makers claim, is all foraged by hand – from the ants to all of the wild plant ingredients – each ingredient is manually caught, picked, and blended. This anti-machinery bent gives way, but only slightly, when the bottle is labelled. Using a 1924 typewriter, each label is typed up one at a time.