About International Gin and Tonic Day
International Gin and Tonic Day is observed on October 19th.
It was founded in honour of gin lover Mary Edith Keyburn, who passed away aged 95 on that date in 2010 with a G&T in a teacup by her bedside in a hospital in the USA.
According to her friends who established the day in her memory, Edith was ‘a remarkable woman who loved to have the occasional tipple of gin and tonic’. Her family smuggled the G&T into the hospital in a water bottle and hid it in plain sight in a teacup.
Starting with family and friends, the International Gin and Tonic Day Facebook page was established in 2012. Over the following years, it then spread from the US East Coast to the rest of the world.
Gin and tonic is the most popular cocktail in the world. This is one of the easiest drinks to make. The idea of mixing bitter tonic with fragrant gin came to the British in the 18th century, when they were fighting on the territory of India. In those days, soldiers treated malaria with a bitter drink. To make it more pleasant to drink, they started mixing tonic with gin. Then it cost a penny and was considered a drink of the poor.
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