The fourteenth botanical is not named. Thirteen go into The Botanical's London Dry Gin openly and one is held back, which is a common enough piece of theatre, except that the rest of the making is described with unusual precision: five distillations in two John Dore copper stills, with only the purest part of the run selected, at Langley Distillery.

What that method protects is juniper. A London Dry cannot be flavoured after distillation, so everything reaching the glass has to survive the still, and five passes with a narrow cut are a way of taking out harshness without taking out aroma. At 42.5% the bottling carries more weight than the usual 40% without turning hot, which matters in a classical build where no sweetening is there to cushion it. Two stills of that make are also a deliberate limit on volume: copper pot stills of that size fix how much can be run at once, and five passes through them multiply the time each batch takes.

The producer publishes its own proportion, and it is worth following: one part gin to three parts neutral tonic, roughly three centilitres to ninety millilitres. That is a drier drink than most gin and tonics poured today, and it explains why the garnish is a single wide grapefruit peel, or a lemon twist, but never both.

Grapefruit is the better of the two. Its pith carries a bitterness that travels with the quinine rather than against it, and its oils are heavy enough to hold across a long glass. Lemon is sharper and shorter, and it suits a smaller pour. The bottle comes in one litre, seventy and thirty-five centilitre formats, so the size of the glass is never the constraint. The undisclosed fourteenth is the usual commercial reflex, and it changes nothing for the drinker: what reaches the glass is a dry, juniper-led classic, and the missing name is the only thing withheld.