Six months in oak is a short ageing for a gin, and that is the intention. Long enough to round the edges and take colour, not long enough for the wood to cover the botanicals, which in this recipe are unusual enough to be worth protecting: hazel catkins, hogweed seed and angelica beside juniper.

Hazel catkins are the spring flower of the hazel, dry and pollen-like rather than sweet, and they leave the top of the drink with a dusty green note that has no equivalent in a classical gin. Hogweed seed is the loud one. It carries a resinous, faintly citric aroma closer to cardamom than to any European hedgerow plant, and it is what a taster tends to meet first. Angelica does what angelica always does, anchoring the middle in dry earth and holding the other two in place. Juniper runs beneath, resinous and steady.

The oak sits on top of all that rather than through it. At 40%, after six months, the wood reads as soft vanilla and a rounder mouth rather than as a barrel-aged gin in the American sense. The distillery works by infusing plants in a certified organic grain distillate, distilled twice and cut back to its middle fraction. Taking only that fraction matters more than usual for a gin destined for wood: the tails carry heavier compounds, and six months in oak would have amplified them rather than covered them.

An Indian tonic and an orange peel suit that wood better than a citrus-led mixer would: the orange answers the vanilla, the quinine keeps the seed spice dry. Four centilitres to ten over clear ice, with three juniper berries dropped in whole. Do not crush them. Their dry aroma is there to frame the oak, and crushed berries add the bitterness those six months were spent removing.