Fireweed is the plant that arrives after a fire, colonising burnt ground before anything else will grow there, and it is on this botanical list for reasons of place rather than fashion. Feddie Ocean Distillery works on Fedje, an island off the Norwegian coast, and builds an organic London Dry around it at 46%, on organic wheat spirit.

Fourteen botanicals arrange themselves in clear layers. Fireweed and Norwegian spruce hold the northern half: the first delicate and faintly floral, the second resinous and green, doubling the juniper without simply repeating it. Sugar kelp sits underneath and adds the maritime element, a clean saline trace rather than any obvious taste of the sea. Above them the classical structure does familiar work. Lemon and orange peel supply the citrus, coriander the warm seed spice, cardamom a cooling lift, cinnamon a dry warmth. Angelica and iris root anchor the base and bind the rest. Liquorice root then closes the arrangement with a sweetness no sugar produced, and the finish owes its length to that. Pink pepper adds a light aromatic bite above everything, sharper than black pepper and considerably less heavy.

At 46% the spirit can carry a full mixer without thinning out. Neutral tonic, a glass filled properly, and a pour on the firm side. Lemon peel is the safe garnish; a short spruce shoot follows the island half of the recipe and is the better choice if you can find one. Gold at the 2024 European Spirits Challenge and silver in London that same year suggest somebody noticed. Distilling on an island of that size is a supply problem before it is anything else. An island gin that names a plant nobody else would think to pick is doing more than borrowing a view. It ends citric, resinous and long.