Take the alcohol out and you remove the thing that carries aroma. Ethanol is what dissolves and delivers most of what a gin smells of, and it also supplies the warmth and the weight that make a spirit feel like one; a bottle at zero has to replace all three with botanical material alone. Sir Chill built this one to attempt exactly that.

Four elements do the work. Mandarin peel supplies the brightness and freshness, sweeter and more scented than orange, and the nose meets it before anything else. Vanilla follows with roundness and a gentle sweetness that stands in for some of the body alcohol would otherwise provide. Almond adds a soft nutty dimension that gives the palate real texture, which is the hardest thing to achieve without spirit. The tobacco plant extract then contributes an herbal, slightly bitter accent, and take it away and the drink stops reading as adult: without a bitter note, a zero-alcohol recipe of vanilla and citrus would read as a soft drink.

The palate is smooth and layered, moving from fresh citrus into a creamy, lightly sweet core, then closing on those herbal and faintly bitter notes. The absence of alcohol shows most in the finish, which is clean and restrained with no heat at all.

It is built for alcohol-free serves rather than adapted to them. Ice, a neutral tonic or a faintly citric one, and the same measure you would pour of anything else. It also holds its own in non-alcoholic cocktails where citrus, vanilla and a herbal edge are wanted. Most zero-alcohol spirits fail on texture rather than on aroma, because the mouth notices the missing weight before the nose notices anything at all, and the almond is the answer to that specific problem rather than to a question of flavour.