Crisp, juniper-forward and gently bitter, it drinks tall and bracing, the tonic's quinine edge and lively bubbles lifting the gin's botanicals over plenty of ice. A squeeze of fresh lime brightens the whole glass, and the strength is endlessly adjustable — more tonic for a lighter, thirst-quenching pour, less for one where the gin speaks up.
Garnish: Lime Wedge
Built · Highball · On the Rocks
build
Fill a highball glass with ice cubes.
add
Pour the gin over the ice.
top
Top with chilled tonic water and give a gentle stir to combine.
garnish
Garnish with a lime wedge, squeezed over the drink if desired.
No single inventor is on record; the drink is traced to British officers stationed in 19th-century India, who stirred gin — sometimes with sugar and lime — into their bitter quinine tonic so the daily antimalarial dose went down more easily. Tonic water became a commercial product in 1858, and the mixture surfaced in print a decade later in the Oriental Sporting Magazine of 1868. What started as a medicinal habit shared across a colonial population has since become a fully generic highball, mixed everywhere with no one claiming credit for it.