Sea samphire and dulse seaweed are the two botanicals that give this bottle its address. Both are gathered on the Breton coast, both taste of the place they come from, and neither appears in gin often enough for their presence to be a coincidence. H2B distils them with juniper and other wild plants from the same shoreline in a copper pot still, at 40%.

Marine botanicals do something no land plant can. Samphire is succulent, faintly salty and green, and it leaves a saline trace across the palate that reads as minerality rather than as salt itself. Dulse is the deeper of the two, a red seaweed with an umami weight and a note somewhere between shellfish and dried mushroom, and it settles low in the glass giving the finish an unexpected savoury length. Around them the recipe stays herbal and woody rather than floral, which is the right decision: a flower against seaweed would simply argue. Juniper holds its resinous pine centre, and the other coastal plants occupy the middle with a dry green bitterness. Nothing is sweetened anywhere, and the finish is properly dry.

Salinity is a rare thing in a gin and it changes what belongs beside it. A neutral tonic works, though soda water is the more interesting route, which leaves the samphire audible where quinine would cover it. Ice generously either way. Lemon in a twist suits the saline notes better than any herb would, and a caper or an olive is the unconventional garnish that follows the savoury side. Undiluted, barely chilled, the dulse is easiest to identify. Coastal gins usually mean a picture on the label rather than the shoreline in the bottle. Distilling something that grows where the tide reaches it is a narrow idea, and narrow ideas travel further than broad ones. It ends saline, herbal and dry.