Gin Torfowy

Peat-smoked malt is a whisky ingredient. It has no business in a gin, and putting it there is exactly what this bottle is for: Mikrogorzelnia built the recipe out of a fondness for Scottish whisky and for cooking by the sea, and the result sits between two categories rather than inside either. Distilled under vacuumVacuum distillationLowering the pressure makes alcohol boil at around 30 to 50 °C instead of 78 °C, so delicate aromas are not cooked and stay fresher.Glossary in Warsaw.

Woody · Spicy · Earthy

Smoke is the first thing and the last. Peated malt gives a genuine phenolic character, medicinal and faintly ashy, and because vacuum distillation never lets the temperature climb, it arrives clean rather than burnt. Dried Persian limes work against it from the opposite direction, and they are quite unlike fresh lime: dark, sour and slightly fermented, the way that fruit becomes when it is dried whole. Long pepper is the warmth, more floral and more lingering than black pepper. Then the roasted material fills in the base: hazelnuts and almonds toasted rather than raw, cocoa beans dry and bitter, coffee darker still, and together they give the palate a depth that no botanical list of leaves and roots could reach. Amber contributes a gentle resinousResinousAn aroma reminiscent of pine or fir resin. It is juniper's signature, due to compounds such as pinene.Glossary sweetness. Guérande sea salt sharpens everything above it, and black pepper and coriander hold the middle.

A long glass is the wrong home for this. Undiluted over one big cube, given a few minutes, is where the smoke and the salt pull apart from each other. Should you mix it, the NegroniNegroniAn Italian cocktail of equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and red bitter (Campari), served over ice with orange peel. Born in Florence in 1919.Glossary holds up, its vermouthVermouthAn aromatised, fortified wine flavoured with herbs and barks; its name comes from the German Wermut, wormwood. Dry vermouth goes into a Martini, sweet red into a Negroni.Glossary bitterness meeting the cocoa as an equal. Tonic thins the smoke immediately. A gin made by people who would rather have been making whisky is an honest kind of hybrid. Every ingredient here was roasted, dried, smoked or evaporated from seawater, and not one of them is a fresh leaf. It ends smoky, nutty and saline.