What drinks do you have your gin in? For a martini or gimlet where it's almost all gin, the better the gin the better the drink. But for a gin & tonic or anything else that has a considerable amount of stuff other than gin, the gin is too diluted for me to notice the difference. And if I'm drinking a whole lotta gin & tonics in one particular evening, and going out on a lot of particular evenings, the difference between call Tanqueray and top shelf Bombay Sapphire starts to add up.

That said, I think my drink of choice is now a vodka martini. It's gonna turn me into an alcoholic. Like today towards the end of the day at work some folks were talking about goin out for happy hour, I said, "ya know I never really got into the happy hour thing," but the seed was planted. Couple hours later, and I have the thought of that taste in my head, and I'm getting a craving for it. I never got cravings for gin & tonics, but damn if I couldn't go for a vodka martini or five. And that's from drinking Stoli martinis, not even the top shelf stuff.

When I first started drinking I immediately went for the top shelf stuff but the call stuff is pretty darn good too. Here in cheap little Madison it's only maybe a buck more for top shelf over call, but in Chicago or DC, both places that I visit reasonably regularly, top shelf can be 8 or 9 bucks whereas a call is more like 5 or 6.