Adnams Smidgin Dry Gin

Pour two and a half millilitres into two hundred of tonic. That is the whole instruction, and it produces a gin and tonic of roughly 0.6% alcohol, about a tenth of a unit, from a bottle filled at 50%. Adnams built Smidgin in Southwold to solve moderation by concentration rather than by removal.

Citrus · Dry · Spicy · Floral · Herbal

The distinction matters. Smidgin is not a non-alcoholic spirit and not a diluted low-alcohol gin: it is a real gin, distilled the way the house distils its others, but carrying a far heavier botanical load so that a tiny measure still reaches across a long glass. Most low-alcohol products take the alcohol out of something finished and lose the aromatics with it. This one leaves the alcohol alone and multiplies everything else, then relies on the drinker to pour almost none of it.

Six botanicals carry that load. Sweet orange peel comes forward first and fastest, with juniper behind and the warm spice of cardamom beside it. Hibiscus lays a soft floral tone across the middle, tart rather than sweet. Coriander seed adds a dry, faintly citric lift, and orris rootOrris rootIris rhizome dried for years, then ground. Powdery and violet-like, it mainly works as a fixative that binds and lengthens the other aromas.Glossary works quietly underneath, tying the others together and lending the distillate a more perfumed structure than six ingredients would normally allow.

Neat, it is not a conventional pour: extremely concentrated, citrus and juniper and spice arriving compressed together. Diluted, it opens into something entirely familiar, the orange fresh, the juniper clearly leading, the hibiscus softening the frame, the cardamom and coriander keeping the drink from tasting thin. A good tonic, plenty of ice, and orange zest as the garnish, since the peel is already in the recipe. Very few products in this category are honest about what they are: most low-alcohol gins hope the drinker will not notice what was taken out, and this one asks them to measure carefully instead.