Maredsous Invictus Organic Gin

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.

Organic · Woody · Dry · Herbal

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 resinousResinousAn aroma reminiscent of pine or fir resin. It is juniper's signature, due to compounds such as pinene.Glossary, faintly citric aroma closer to cardamom than to any European hedgerow plant, and it is what a taster tends to meet first. AngelicaAngelicaThe root of a tall umbellifer, earthy and musky. After juniper and coriander it is the most common botanical: it binds the aromas and holds the finish.Glossary 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-agedBarrel-aged ginGin rested for a while in wooden casks. It picks up a golden colour and notes of vanilla, spice or the wine that filled the cask before.GlossarySee Barrel-aged gin gins 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 tonicIndian tonicThe classic tonic: sparkling water, bitter quinine and sugar. The name recalls colonial India, where quinine warded off malaria.Glossary and an orange peel suit that wood better than a citrus-led mixer would: the orange answers the vanilla, the quinineQuinineAn alkaloid from cinchona bark that gives tonic its bitterness. The British in India drank it against malaria and added gin: the gin and tonic was born.Glossary keeps the seed spice dry. Four centilitres to ten over clear iceClear iceIce without air bubbles, made by slow, directional freezing. Denser, it melts more slowly and dilutes less.Glossary, with three juniper berriesJuniperThe one compulsory botanical: gin must taste predominantly of juniper. Its "berry" is really a small conifer cone, resinous and peppery.Glossary 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.