The name promises clover, and clover leaf is genuinely in the recipe. That is rarer than it sounds: most gins named after a plant use it as branding and leave it out of the still. Here it stands alongside juniper, cardamom, coriander seed, black pepper and lavender, in a gin made by three sisters at their family distillery in Kalmthout.

Clover leaf is a quiet botanical. It carries a green, faintly hay-like sweetness with no acidity and no bite, closer to fresh grass than to herb, and it needs company to register at all. Lavender provides the perfume above it, honeyed and cooling. Cardamom adds a warmer, more resinous floral note that keeps the lavender from turning soapy. Coriander seed runs a dry citric lift underneath. Black pepper is the counterweight: dry heat without aroma, arriving late, stopping the whole thing from reading as sweet.

Juniper holds the centre, which is what makes this a gin rather than a floral distillate. At 40% the balance is deliberate, with enough alcohol to carry the flowers and not enough to sharpen the pepper into heat. Distilled gin rather than London Dry is the right label for it: the category leaves room for the softer, more perfumed build this recipe is after, without the constraints a London Dry would impose.

The distillery publishes its own way of drinking it, and it is a good one: five centilitres to fifteen of Indian tonic over clear ice, with a thin ginger slice, a few coriander leaves and three juniper berries. The ginger is the part to get right. Cut thin, it echoes the pepper and the cardamom; cut thick, it takes over the floral half entirely, and that half is what the recipe was built for. The coriander leaf in the garnish is worth noticing too: it is the fresh, green side of a botanical that appears in the still as a dry seed, so the same plant turns up twice in two different states.