Sir Hans Sloane spent his life collecting plants and cataloguing them one by one, and the gin named after him is made the same way: nine botanicals, each distilled on its own before anything is blended. The parallel between the man and the method is the whole idea, and it produces a spirit that arrives assembled rather than cooked in one pot. Bottled in the Netherlands at 40%.

Distilling separately means every plant is caught at the moment that suits it, and in a recipe this short every one of them is audible. Sweet orange and lemon lead the citrus and they are the loudest voices, bright across the top and clean through the middle, which is why the profile reads as citrus-forward before anything else. Juniper holds a green resinous centre underneath. Coriander seed adds warm spice, cardamom pods a cool camphorous lift, and angelica root the dry ground beneath. Then the softer three appear. Vanilla beans lay a creamy warmth low in the glass, liquorice root draws the close out on a sweetness containing no sugar, and iris root binds the whole arrangement with its powdery floral character. Clean is the word that fits, with floral and herbal notes filling in behind the fruit.

A gin built for precision needs a glass that will not blur it. Neutral tonic, ice heaped in, and a measure firm enough to keep the vanilla legible. Lemon peel tracks the citrus and is the obvious choice; orange peel the rounder one. Named World's Best Gin and Best White Spirit at San Francisco in 2011, which is a considerable claim for a nine-botanical recipe. Naming a spirit after a collector and then collecting each distillate separately is a pun carried out at some expense. It closes citric, floral and clean.