Til about Dr David Clutton who’s the only person with PhD in Gin, however stupid that sounds.
How do you get a phd in a discipline where there’s no-one to grant you that phd? How was it done in the past?
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To reiterate what others have said:
1) no one has a Ph.D. In Gin. That us a turn-of-phrase for advertising purposes. However there are many, many, many people with PhDs in chemistry, specializing in the research of the chemical compounds involved in scent & taste. No doubt hundreds of thousands across the globe. And some of those PhDs will have been earned doing research on gin & other spirits.
Here is just one random article you can look up:
“Analysis of gin essential oil mixtures by multidimensional and one-dimensional gas chromatography/mass spectrometry with spectral deconvolution”
Notice in the article there are 4 different authors, and i am sure at least one, if not all, have PhDs.
2) It is true that PhDs are all in areas that are at least partially unique. That is, by definition, the way getting PhDs works. One is doing unique research that has never been done before. BUT no one is doing completely unique research, meaning that no one has ever done anything related to the topic before. One’s research is only about maybe 1-10% completely unique. One works with an existing PhD already doing research, and your research will be very similar to theirs, with some slight variations to make what you are researching unique.
3) no matter how unique advertisers make a PhD sound, it is not in an entirely new discipline. We do already know a whole lot of science, and everything “new” is simply an extension of some discipline we have already been working on for many, many, many years. Be it biology, chemistry, physics, etc.
Look up this research that is already 84 years old:
Controlling Gin Flavor, published in the journal Industrial and Engineering Chemistry in 1937 (authors Willkie, Boruff, and Althausen).
4) where did this guy get his PhD? His LinkedIn profile only lists his grammar school??? Very suspicious. I would not be surprised if he just made it up. It was a lot easier to get away with that kind of BS years ago.
But to try to better answer your question, i would have to know exactly what his research was in. If it truly was in the chemical composition of gin, it would be a PhD in chemistry. Or if he was working on distilling gin, it may be chemistry or biology. If it was a more anthropological approach (who is drinking what kind of gin & where, or the cultural history of gin in society), it would be aPhD in Anthropology. There is also the possibility of Botany and Ethnobotany, Food Science, possibly Pharmacology (if his university had some kind of unusual arrangement with the areas of research of the existing PhDs).
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