A drop of the hard stuff! Now you can drink Viking gin and tonic

After a hard day’s pillaging, the Vikings liked nothing better than putting on their slippers, kicking back in their favourite armchair and sipping a G&T.

Well as every historian knows, that’s complete nonsense. For one thing the Norsemen had left Britain 600 years before the first gin was imported here.

But now we can drink the sort of gin that a Viking might have liked thanks to those booze-loving folk at Jorvik Viking Centre.

They have collaborated with the people behind York Gin to create a tipple that would have appealed to our city’s very first millennials.

A Norse tipple

To create a Viking gin, they used flavours that the Vikings would have been familiar with – according to the archaeological record.

This turned up the unusual flavour combination of bilberries and nettles. Both featured in the Viking diet, as they grew wild around the North.

Jorvik Botanicals Gin are now on sale in Jorvik’s gift shop, in time for York’s new horticultural festival, Bloom!, which runs from July 5-8 July 2018.

A 50cl bottle of Jorvik Botanicals – complete with puches of bilberries and dried nettles – costs £35, and a little 5cl bottle costs a fiver.

And for a limited period gin enthusiasts will be able to sample the unique flavour in York’s Evil Eye on Stonegate, which currently holds the Guinness World Record for having more varieties of gin for sale than any other bar on the planet.