Whitley Neill Aloe Cucumber

Aloe is close to tasteless, which is the point of putting it in. What it supplies is not flavour but sensation: a cool, faintly vegetal green impression and a slippery quality that changes how the liquid feels rather than how it tastes, and pairing it with cucumber doubles a texture rather than a note. Whitley Neill bottles this at 43%.

Citrus · Herbal

Cucumber does the work the nose can identify. Clean and cooling, it leads the aroma with soft lemon and orange peel behind it, and the pair of them makes the gin read as light before anything else registers. JuniperJuniperThe one compulsory botanical: gin must taste predominantly of juniper. Its "berry" is really a small conifer cone, resinous and peppery.Glossary stays in the background, present enough to be recognisable and not enough to argue. Underneath, the house botanicals hold the frame: coriander and angelica root add herbal depth, orris root rounds the mouthfeel, almond lays a faint nuttiness low down, and cassia bark supplies a restrained warmth. That cassia matters more than its quantity suggests, because a gin built on cucumber and aloe would otherwise be delicate to the point of being thin.

The palate opens crisp on cucumber and citrus, the roots fill the middle, and the close is clean, moderately long, herbal and soft, the cooling impression outlasting everything else by some margin.

A light Gin and Tonic with fresh cucumber is the obvious serve and the right one. Simple cocktails wanting clarity suit it too. Aloe on a label usually signals something for the skin rather than for a glass, and it is a stranger ingredient here than the cucumber it accompanies. Building a flavoured ginFlavoured ginGin with flavourings, often fruity, added after distillation. It may be coloured and lightly sweetened.GlossarySee Flavoured gin gins around two ingredients that are mostly water and mostly texture is a harder brief than building one around a berry, because there is very little to taste and therefore very little to hide behind.