Take a sip of the rich history of Gin

Gin has been Britain's drink of choice since the 1700s, but with a nickname like "mother's ruin," the spirit's reputation has taken some knocks.

Now, thanks to some crafty distillers, a new gin craze is buzzing across the pond, ensuring the drink doesn't face a last call, reports CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, one is hosting London's first ever gin festival, and it's been a sellout -- no surprise to Olivia Williams who wrote the book on it: "Gin, Glorious Gin."

Gin's suffering is a lot of what her book is about, but the beverage has clawed its way back up to the point that there are currently around 200 types of gin on the shelf, with a whole new breed of distillers. At the forefront of that breed is the effervescent Sam Galsworthy and his Sipsmith gin.

"Sipsmith was the very first distillery to launch in London since 1823, and we were very proud of that," Galsworthy said.

He uses a back-to-basics approach.

"This is all man, this is all real hand, real passion and experience, skill. I think American's call it 'craft' and rightly so. I think there is a huge amount of energy and passion and attention to detail that goes into craft which Americans know very much about," Galsworthy said.

He said every single bit of it is real.

"Here at Sipsmith, what we make in one year, the big guys like Tanqueray make in a morning," Galsworthy said.

Although Galsworthy's cup clearly runs over with enthusiasm, his distillery's limited output raised a problem when it came to getting past Britain's strict laws on the amount of gin you have to produce to get a license; the amounts he was making were closer to moonshine-level.

"We were making 300 bottles a batch a day. That is absolutely nothing," Galsworthy said.

Now that limited supply has to meet a rising demand, from discerning palettes in England and in the U.S.

"It is all about the fine tuning. There are all sorts of things that influence, the smallest alteration of injection of steam or reduction of temperature here or even the flow of water anywhere in the system. Too much juniper, too little water," Galsworthy said. "There are all sorts of different aspects and elements to this that need to be controlled to the nth degree because it will influence the flavors incredibly."

While he said gin may be in fashion, it would be wrong to suggest it's a fashion statement.

Many see it as a drink for the posh, but it wasn't always so. The satirist William Hogarth's famous etching from the 1750s depicted the evils of a gin epidemic; a drunken mother carelessly lets her baby slip out of her arms.

"It was the first time that spirits had been widely available so cheaply and people were getting really, really drunk for the first time. It created a social crisis as well as a health crisis," Williams said.

Ironically, it was another health crisis that helped gin survive.

The Chelsea Physic Garden near the Thames has stood since 1673. One tree in that garden, the Cinchona, turned gin from a life taker, into a life saver. Inside its bark is quinine, which helped protect British forces in far flung places from Malaria.

It was given to soldiers in a drink called tonic water, which was still hard to stomach, but add a little gin and you've got a cure -- and a classic.