The colour comes from a fruit you cannot taste. Blueberry skin gives this gin its blue-purple cast, and blueberry is nowhere in the flavour: the recipe is an elderflower gin, and the berry is doing a job that a synthetic dye would otherwise have done. Buss Spirits adds no sugar and no artificial flavouring either, and bottles at 40%.

Elderflower is the botanical everything else is arranged around. Its character is honeyed and heady, a floral note with real sweetness in the aroma and none of it in the liquid, and it holds the top of the palate from the first moment. Lemon and orange operate above it, one sharper and one rounder, and they keep the flower from becoming perfume. Then the house structure appears underneath, the same list this producer builds on: juniper holding a green centre, coriander adding a warm spiced seed, cardamom a cool camphorous lift, angelica the dry ground beneath. Vanilla lays a creamy warmth low down, iris root binds it all with a powdery floral character, and liquorice stretches the close, sweet although no sugar went in. Rich and floral is the shape, with citrus and herbs filling in behind.

Originally a winter release, and it has outlived that brief. Neutral tonic, ice first and plenty of it, then a normal measure. Lemon peel keeps the top sharp; an elderflower head, if the season obliges, repeats the recipe exactly. Skip flavoured tonics, particularly elderflower ones, which would simply say the same thing twice. Colouring a spirit with a fruit rather than a dye costs more and shows less. The same holds for leaving the sugar out: a sweetened elderflower gin would be easier to make and considerably harder to drink twice. It ends floral, citric and soft.