Twenty-four botanicals go into Applaus Stuttgart Dry Gin, and the house names four of them. Juniper, cinnamon, fine citrus fruits and fresh rosemary are the ones held up as the flavour; the other twenty stay unlisted. Withholding part of a recipe is common enough, but the four chosen here make unusual company for each other.

Cinnamon is the one that rarely turns up in a dry gin. It brings the warm sweetness of bark, which classical recipes normally leave to cassia in much smaller amounts, and it sits directly against the resinous dryness of juniper. Rosemary works from the opposite side, green and camphorous, closer to the pine end of juniper than to the spice. Between the two, the citrus keeps the top of the drink lifted and clean. The image the producer uses is theatrical, and the name follows it: juniper and cinnamon bow while the citrus and the rosemary take the stage.

Production stays small. The gin is hand-bottled in numbered batches of 408 bottles, in a 500 ml format, and the distillate is made by Dr Hans-Otto Frey in Wolfschlugen. At 43% there is enough alcohol to carry a heavy botanical load without the spice turning heady. A batch of 408 bottles is also small enough that the recipe cannot be smoothed out by blending across a large run: what the still gives is what goes in the bottle.

A Mediterranean tonic suits it better than an Indian one: less quinine bitterness, more herbal lift for the rosemary. Five centilitres of gin to ten of tonic over clear ice, with a short rosemary sprig and a lemon peel. Clap the rosemary once between your hands before dropping it in, and keep the sprig short. Too much of it flattens the cinnamon, which is the thing worth tasting here.