It was a wild and stormy weekend in Cape Town, but that didn’t scare away the hundreds of gin lovers who flocked to Muizenberg’s Gember Distillery on Saturday, April 6, for the Cape Cheers Gin Festival.
And while there was music, food, fun times and plenty of gin, the punters were also there on business: bagging a Guinness World record for drinking gin!
With musicians including Sunset Sweatshop and Sons of Selassie on stage to get the crowd in the swing of things, 12.50 pm saw things take a serious turn as Guinness World Records adjudicator Mbali Nkosi took the stage to start the record attempt.
The rules stated that all participants in the record attempt must taste their gin at precisely the same time.
'No mean feat when you have over 400 people laughing, cheering, sipping and swirling,' said accredited spirits judge Cathy Marston, one of the local independent witnesses and stewards assisting Mbali.
Once the gin had been sipped and the numbers tallied, the results were in: a tie!
Remarkably, the current (or perhaps, previous?) record for the largest gin-tasting event in a single venue was set on October 13, 2018, when 423 participants sipped gin at Bar Plata in Aarhus, Denmark.
And in Cape Town on April 6? Exactly 423 participants were tallied again, giving Two Gingers Gin a Guinness World Record for equalling the existing achievement. Who was the one taster who bailed on attending, I wonder?
‘This was a thrilling attempt because the results came right down to the wire,” says Nkosi. ‘While the participants were very festive and enthusiastic they remained engaged under the expert guidance of Cathy Marston and the team of witnesses and stewards who executed their roles flawlessly. All in all a job well done by the participants and the Two Gingers organising team in equalling the largest gin-tasting world record of 423 people.’
‘We won't juniper coat it; the process was painstaking, the rules rigid and there was no margin for error, but we did it and could not be more proud,’ added Two Gingers’ founders, Simon Cranswick and Wynand de Vries. ‘We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended the event and helped us achieve this remarkable feat – you were ‘officially amazing’ in helping us to become Guinness World record title holders!’
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