Exclusive: James May on petrol-scented gin, UK pub culture and the best British bar snacks

Car-man-turned-booze-baron, former Top Gear presenter James May knows his way around a glass just as well as he does a gear stick.

After years on our screens showcasing the world’s finest drives — whether on the BBC’s Top Gear or Amazon’s The Grand Tour alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond — the self-confessed shed man has taken up a new pursuit in his man cave: distilling gin.

May’s award-winning James Gin (made with his mixology partner Hugh Anderson, distiller at Downton Distillery in Wiltshire) is that rare thing in celeb-branded booze — both very good, and actually made with hands-on input from James.

As a result, his Asian Parsnip picked up the gold award at the 2023 World Gin Awards among other accolades, while the London Drizzle bottle was a Gin Guide 2024 Award winner, too. This week James Gin unveiled California Dreamgin’, a mushroom-flavoured expression with an umami kick — so fresh from the still that we hadn’t had a chance to taste it when we sat down with May for a recent chat.

From James Gin’s inspiration to the best locations to booze around the world — as well as a run down of his top bar snacks — grab a glass and settle in for a session with James May.

Shortlist: Thanks very much for making the time today. I hear you’ve been filming this week?

James May: I was supposed to be, but we got fogged off.

SL: Literally fogged off?

JM: Yeah, it involved an aeroplane… So I ended up in my pub tasting my gins with some aficionados, and it got a bit out of hand, inevitably. So I'm slightly fragile.

SL: It sounds like an interesting week. If nothing else?

JM: It was… unpredictable.

SL: You have our sympathies. So why have you turned your attention to gin? Why not a wine, a whiskey, a vodka, a lager?

JM: Well, whiskey takes far too long because it has to stay in the barrel, and I didn't have patience for that, or indeed, possibly enough life left.

Vodka I can sort of take it or leave it because it has no meaning to me. It is just an alcoholic liquid. Lager, there’s a lot of that. But gin is interesting. I had a go at making gin many years ago when I did the series with Oz Clarke, when we were at the Plymouth distillery, and I found it quite fascinating. And then when we had our slight hiatus post-lockdown, we thought, what should we do? We made a gin with a local distiller as a bit of a laugh, really, to make a YouTube video and sell it, but it sold out in a couple of days.

SL: How did you start working with Hugh Anderson and his distillery?

JM: Hugh’s distillery is local to my little cottage in Wiltshire. He's just a few miles down the road. He already made gins, he seemed suitably mad and worked in a freezing cold shed. It was Hugh who said if you come up with a recipe idea, we can make 1000 litres, and that he can sell it for you over time at drinks festivals and pubs and things. “Don't worry about having to put a few thousand quid in, because you'll get it back eventually.” But then, as I say, we put it online, and it sold out in a few days. So we thought we better make some more and now, it's out of control.

SL: How’s the reception been around the world?

JM: It's not everywhere yet, but, you know, we're in quite a few European countries. You can buy it in Australia, and we're looking at possibly making it in Australia, too. The Californians are the biggest buyers, which sort of surprised me a bit, because I've spent a fair bit of time in California, and I always thought of it as more of a beer and wine type place. But it turns out that even though the Americans aren't particularly keen on gin and tonics, which is what I think of when I think of gin, they're very keen on cocktails. We did a little tour of California a few months ago to promote James Gin with some potential distributors and stockists. And it turned out to be really popular. We were quite surprised. So cheers to the Californians.

SL: I can imagine whichever side of the political divide you're on in America at the moment, you're having a good drink.

JM: Yesterday, it's probably a good time to have a dirty martini.

SL: So, Asian Parsnip. That's an unusual flavour profile. How did you get to that?

JM: I was trying to think of something that was sort of British, but not the usual hackneyed stuff. So I thought of parsnips, which I like, and I thought they might be an interesting flavour in the gin. I mean, let's be honest, you can put pretty much anything in the gin, but you can make some quite disgusting things if you're not careful.

Parsnip has sort of a slightly nutty quality, slightly sweet, but it's also very dowdy, and it's quite… British and… restrained? You know, it's a vegetable that we roast with our meats on Sundays. But I thought, well, the British people also really like Asian food, and they like spices. That's been the massive food revolution of my lifetime. So I just wondered if we could combine the dowdyness of English parsnip with the thrill we get from eating a good Indian or Thai meal. And that's what resulted in the working title Asian Parsnip. But then we decided, “well, that's quite a good name anyway, so we'll stick with it.”

SL: Were there any experiments that didn't make the cut? Anything that you thought, “Ah, that's going to be a great pairing for a gin”, and that just didn't work out when you actually came to taste tasting?

JM: We… I had this idea, and I'm still quite wedded to it, of a gin that smelled of freshly pumped petrol — but not the taste of it, because if you’ve ever syphoned the tank and got it in your mouth you’ll know petrol tastes disgusting. But as we supposedly enter the era of the electric car and the era of electric garden machinery, we know from various surveys that the thing people will miss most about petrol engine cars is the smell of petrol when they're filling them up — it's quite nice. It's sort of sweet and a bit overripe, fruity. But it turns out, all the things that make it smell like that are deeply poisonous. It's almost impossible to replicate with botanicals. We experimented for weeks and weeks with it, but we couldn't quite do it, so we've put it to one side for now.

SL: Maybe a gin that smells like huffing glue instead?

JM: Yes, there's probably lots of things that we could invoke, but that may not be entirely ethical — polystyrene cement from AirFix model making, that was a great smell. Or cellulose paint. Magic markers, there’s one.

SL: Have you seen the viral trend where people were smelling the exhaust vents from gaming handhelds?

JM: Can you actually do that?

SL: I mean, you shouldn't, but you can, because they've all got fans, like any computer. But some people go wild for that. So maybe there's a gin that smells like a Nintendo Switch, or Steam Deck?

JM: Possibly! I mean, it is true. I've always enjoyed when you buy new things, like, a new iPad, something like that, and you unwrap it — new electronic goods have a very distinctive, quite exciting smell.

I don't know what it is about the connection between smelling things and tasting them — going back to the petrol gin, you'd want it to smell a bit like petrol, but you would want it to taste of fruit in some way. I mean, the Magic Marker felt tip pen smell is fabulous, but it's not immediately associated with a taste. So I don't think you could do that. And likewise, glue, it'd be quite good fun as you lifted it to your nose, but then what would you expect as you actually put it down your throat? I mean, you certainly wouldn't want it to taste like glue.

SL: Nail it, though, and that's bottled gold, right?

JM: I think so, yeah. Smell has a great deal to do with it, and it's probably the most evocative of all our senses. I think if you're wandering through town and you smell something like someone's perfume, or something like that that you haven't smelled for a long time, it instantly takes you back to a former time in your life, a little bit like, you know, old pop songs, and so on. But that connection between that and the flavour of things is, is a bit trickier, and you have to be a bit careful with it.

SL: So what's your favourite of your line of gins?

JM: Yesterday, ill-advisedly, I tried them all in some quantity, and I was trying to make my mind up. I am very attached to the original Asian Parsnip, because it felt like such a triumph. But that's probably a personal thing. I think it depends. The other day, I was definitely in a London Drizzle mood, but yesterday, I was in more of an Asian Parsnip mood. I don't know. I wouldn't like to pick a favourite. They're all brilliant. How about that?

SL: I'll accept that. So how do you like your gin? Do you like a particular cocktail? Neat? Do you take it with a tonic? A particular tonic?

JM: Generally I just have it with tonic. To be honest, I like the light tonics, because I think the full fat ones can make things taste too sugary. But I'm not a massive fan of the flavoured tonics with lemon and what have you in them, because I think that interferes too much with the flavours you're trying to get out of the gin, which can be fairly subtle. I'm a big fan of the straightforward light Fever Tree in a gin and tonic, maybe with a slice of fruit. This is something else we were experimenting with yesterday, which is why we ended up drinking so much. But a London Drizzle, for example, goes quite well with vegetal things like a slice of cucumber whereas, I think Asian Parsnip works quite well with a piece of lemon, but it's got to be a fairly small piece. If you put too much in, you just end up with a sort of lemon pop.

SL: Let's talk a little bit about the bottle designs as well. The labels are quite stark-looking. There's a list on your website too that states what words you’re not going to use to describe James Gin: “deconstructed”, “artisanal”, stuff like that. I get a sense that maybe you feel that people who are making gin, who are promoting gin distilleries, maybe take themselves a bit too seriously?

JM: I do think there's a lot of bullshit spoken about this stuff. I was reading descriptions of a beer that we were trying in the pub, and — I should have kept the can — it had this very convoluted little, almost short story on it about what the flavour meant. And I thought, “Oh, for God's sake, come on, it's beer.” I realise they can be different, and I'm very interested in the flavours of different beers. But it's not a mystical thing. It's not.

This isn't just true of drinks. You also get it on milk and, you know, free range sausages or whatever. You know, the “Our Story” bit, and I never believe it. I can just smell the marketing department making something up. Coffee is the worst offender. You always get this “...back in 1968 two brothers bought a second hand’...” and I’m thinking Bollocks. Did they, fuck!

We're trying to be a bit of a counter to all the things you were just mentioning, all the terrible use of words, and, to be honest, the sort of pseudo-intellectualization of this to make people feel like they're being very sophisticated, or connoisseurs because they're having a gin and tonic. But you're just having a gin and tonic. Frankly, that’s perfectly reasonable — you don't have to justify it.

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SL: You've travelled a lot, James, you've seen the world. Which nation has the best bars? Who's got the best drinking culture? Where's the UK fit into that?

JM: I think Britain would have to come quite near the top, because pubs are a very unique thing. They're under threat, and we're having to rethink it a bit. But I think if you get a good pub that does the proper pub stuff properly — good beer, good spirits, and has someone there who knows about wine and chooses them carefully — then I think a really good pub is quite hard to beat.

I've been to some fabulous bars in America all over, but particularly on the east and west coasts. Japan, I've had some nice drinking and sushi experiences. I've been to some rough ass, basic Australian pubs — not quite beer coming out of a hose, but not far off. And I've actually really enjoyed that you know, because it's utterly straightforward and unapologetic. You go there for some beer, and that's tremendous. But there's other countries I've been to, bits of the Middle East, bits of India, where there hasn't really been any drinking at all for obvious reasons.

I've been to Iceland a few times. I don't know how anybody can afford to drink in Iceland, but the bar experiences are really great.

SL: Places like Reykjavik, it’s just a completely different culture, right? Lots of people pre-drink, like students, right? You go to your local supermarket and then pop out…

JM: That's because once you've popped out, it's going to financially ruin you. So I think you have to. I think they call it “pre-loading”, the youngsters…

SL: So what view makes for a good pub then? Or the flip of that — what can’t you stand to see in pubs?

JM: I honestly think, I've never been able to explain this, but I've observed it in pubs that I've lived near over my life — a good pub is down to the landlord or landlady or couple. They often are couples. You can have a pub that's very successful, very welcoming. Might not be particularly smart, but, you know, it's a nice place to go. You change the people in charge, and even though nothing else changes, for some reason the mood changes.

And similarly, it works the other way. You can have a pub that's struggling and miserable and you don't really want to go there. But if you put someone else in charge, everything else stays the same, the crap 70s decor is still the same… and suddenly the pub becomes a warm and friendly place. There's some sort of magic going on. I don't actually know what it is, but I think that's the most important aspect.

But beyond that, I think for a pub to be viable in modern Britain, it has to have a decent range of drinks. It can't just be a sawdust-and-spittoon beer place, and it has to have at least fairly decent food, if not excellent. And it has to have clean bogs and stuff like that. We can't cling on to this idea that, “Oh, it's traditional for a pub to be a bit shit”, because I just don't think people will put up with it anymore.

SL: You're a publican now as well, right? You have The Royal Oak.

JM: Well I'm a pub owner. I don’t have very much to do with the day-to-day running of it. I bought it with another bloke, and he's much more business-like than me, but we both recognize that you shouldn't attempt to run one — lovely and romantic though the idea is. Because it's actually very difficult. It's very hard work. It's not particularly well paid. It's a bit anti-social in terms of hours. It's potentially very unhealthy. But most of all, there's nothing worse than somebody who used to be on the telly or used to be a footballer or a politician saying, “Oh, I'm going to buy a pub and run it.” They always fuck it up, because you need to be a professional to run a pub properly. So the first thing we did was install a manager. That's the best thing we ever did.

SL: You still pull a good pint though?

JM: I actually pulled a few yesterday. I did a Guinness and a couple of bitters. I can do it, yeah, but I have to think about it a bit harder these days. I'm a bit out of practice. I picked the art for the pub. The manager, Chris, is a Yorkshireman, and people from the north, from Yorkshire especially, have different views on what a pint should look like — the northerners like a bit more head, whereas the soft southerners, as the Yorkshire people would say, like their beer a little bit flat and dull at the top. So I can go into the pub, and if Chris is there and he's behind the bar, I say, “I'll have a Yorkshire pint of bitter, please”, and I know I'm going to get a nice half inch head of foam on it.

SL: You can't name your own, but which pubs would you say up and down the UK would be your favourites?

JM: I've tended not to be very adventurous in recent years, but my nearest pub is the Cross Keys in Hammersmith, which is just around the corner from my house. Very straightforward. I like it. I mean, it's convenient, which is the point of a local pub. Historically, the pub was your local, because it's local. But I also like the riverside pubs. I like The Dove. I like The Carpenters when going up into town. I quite like bars in town. I'm a bit of a fan of the Soho Hotel bar. I like the Covent Garden Hotel bar. My pub is too bright. I keep having arguments with them when I go in there and I say, you've turned the lights up again and the heating, turn it down!

SL: Some of the tabloids have said there’s a rivalry between you and Jeremy Clarkson over your respective pub pursuits. Is it a real rivalry?

JM: No — I mean, I've never been to his pub, and he's never been to mine, right? In the olden days, we used to laugh about the idea of us opening a pub together that nobody would be allowed into but us — we’d have various criteria that would effectively bar everybody. We never did that, and it's just as well we didn't, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier.

He did ring me when he finally decided he was going to buy one as well. And I said to him, “It's a nice thing to do, but don't think of it as a money spinning venture”. Pubs aren't and in fact, people like me and Jeremy are, in a sense, in a very lucky position. We can buy a pub and enjoy the pleasure of saying, “I own a pub”, but without the need for it to be a profitable business. It just needs to make enough to pay the staff and maintain itself. So you can think of it as a very charitable gesture when we buy pubs. But no, there isn't really a rivalry, because the two pubs are about 1,885 miles apart. I don't think we're going to be poaching each other's customers.

SL: You make a good point about the difficulties maintaining pub culture in the UK — lots of publicans being forced out, prices of property and rental prices, etcetera. Do you feel there's anything that could be changed to help protect them?

JM: I actually don't know that much about the fiscal side of it, but firstly, I don't think pubs are an institution that have to be preserved for historical reasons, like artworks and Stonehenge and castles and so on. I think they are functioning parts of society and have to move with the times.

But it does annoy me that somehow supermarkets can get away with selling booze so cheaply. Pubs, even if they're not making any money on it, are forced by the duty costs to charge quite a lot for beer. And obviously, if you go to the pub, I would argue, well, you don't just get the beer, you also get the company. You get the fireplace, you get nice furniture to sit on, a game of backgammon or darts or whatever. The costs put them on the back foot a bit.

I mean, you look at people, you know, currently whining and campaigning about things like inheritance tax for farmers, and that's a slightly different issue, but they're saying, “Oh, it will be the destruction of farming, and it's an important thing for us to keep.” Well, yes, it is, but I think the idea of pubs is important for us to keep too. I don't think they need to be stuck in the past — I'd rather they weren't. I like them to modernise. But the idea of the pub as a community meeting-drinking-and-eating space, I think, is as valid as ever.

And I don't think pubs are going to disappear. I think their number will reduce. We're sort of in a way slightly oversubscribed with pubs, it's a hangover from the Victorian era and up to the 50s, I suspect. But I think the good ones will survive. Because people like them.

SL: I thought it might be fun today to talk about bar snacks! Traditional, modern, whichever you like. Could you give me your top five?

JM: Salted peanuts, I think, are pretty near the top. I'd quite like to see the return of the pickled egg. Yeah. A good pickled egg. Also the gherkin — gherkin with a pint of beer or a gin or anything like that. Not wine so much, but a mouth full of gherkin and a swig of a gin and tonic, that can be really fabulous. Salt and vinegar crisps. I do like that old tradition of roast potatoes being put on the bar.

Johnny the chef at our pub occasionally will do this a series of, sort of, almost, I suppose if you were being pretentious, you'd call it “British tapas”. He does a very good, small Scotch egg — he does something with truffle oil in the coating. And I know that's a bit close to the pickled egg in the jar, but it's not because it's not pickled. So I think, yeah, Scotch egg too, or sausage on a stick,.

I mean, it's quite 70s, bits of cheese and sticks. But I like it, it's sort of miniature comfort food in a way. It sort of makes you feel at home in the pub, and especially if you know the landlord chucks them on for free. You've got to be slightly careful, because if you fill people up with all that stuff, they won't buy the posh food off you!

SL: So where will we see you next, James?

JM: I’m not working on very much at the moment, to be honest — my new series has just started on Quest, “James May and the Dull Men” which is sort of about sheds and tools and making things. And I'm in the middle of working on a series for Channel Five about great explorers. But after that, my life is a bit blank, to be honest. We're working on a new gin flavour, which I can't tell you about yet because it's still secret, but that will be coming out soon, so I'll probably spend more time interfering in the pub and making gin.

SL: And are you still a gadget man?

JM: Yes, I'm sort of a gadget man. I like mechanical things, but I'm also a massive fan of things like the iPad. I get my Screen Time reports, and it's gone up to something like four and a half hours a day. And to be honest, a lot of that is watching YouTube. So, you know, maybe I'm turning into a teenager now I'm in my 60s. I like anything that I can fiddle with, especially if it's small. Screwdrivers. I love screwdrivers, for example, and tin openers. I'm strangely obsessed with tin and bottle openers.

SL: Next time we have a chat, then I'll ask for your top five tin openers.

JM: Yeah, “Top Five Kitchen Things That Give Me Pleasure”. That’d be nice.

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