Smoked birch is a firewood note, and putting it in a bottle is how this recipe gets winter into a spirit. Raven Spirits built the Copenhagen edition of its HAVN series around four things only: seaweed, dill, lime zest and that smoked wood, at 40%, and the shortness of the list is why each one arrives with force.

Seaweed is the element that decides the character. It brings genuine salinity, a mineral savour rather than a taste of salt, and it opens the palate with the smell of a northern harbour at low tide. Smoked birch answers it from below with a dry, woody depth and the faint tar of a fire, and between them they account for the earthy, smoky aroma that dominates the nose. Dill is the third and the softest, green and faintly aniseed, and it is what makes the whole recognisably Nordic rather than merely maritime, since dill and seaweed belong to the same table. Lime zest supplies the only brightness in the recipe, deliberately restrained, lifting the top without pulling attention away from the darker half.

Dry and slightly savoury is the texture, and it dictates the glass. A dry gin and tonic with a neutral mixer is what the producer intends, ice packed high, and enough gin poured that the smoke survives dilution. A dill frond is the honest garnish; a strip of lime peel is the alternative. Nothing sweetened, which would turn the salinity strange. A port city translated into four botanicals leaves no room for decoration. Most maritime gins reach for salt and stop there. This one adds the smoke of a fire on the shore and the herb that would be served alongside the fish, which is a fuller picture of a harbour than salinity on its own could ever give. It ends smoky, saline and dry.