Three years separate the first attempt from the bottle on the shelf. Pumori began on a handmade two-litre still and now runs in 200-litre batches in Goa, which is a hundredfold increase in volume and, more to the point, three years of adjusting a recipe before anyone was allowed to taste the result.

Twelve botanicals from across the Indian subcontinent make up that recipe, and they fall into four groups. Himalayan juniper leads, as a London Dry requires. Orange and lemon peel carry the top. Cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg and aniseed hold the warm middle, each pulling in a slightly different direction: cardamom bright and eucalyptic, cinnamon sweet and woody, nutmeg dense, aniseed clean and licorice-like. Underneath, coriander seed, almond, liquorice root, vanilla and rosemary do the structural work, the almond adding weight, the liquorice sweetness without sugar, the rosemary a resinous line that answers the juniper. Twelve is a crowded list, and it works here because the groups are spaced rather than stacked on top of each other.

There is a geographical joke in all this. The juniper comes from the mountains and the distillery sits on the coast, so a botanical shaped by cold thin air is worked into a gin made in the tropics. At 40% the alcohol is moderate for a spice-heavy recipe, which means the bottle rewards being drunk cold rather than being drowned. Small batch is literal here rather than a marketing word: 200 litres is a working day for one still, not a production line.

An Indian tonic keeps the spice honest. Ten centilitres of it for four of gin, over ice solid enough not to collapse, with a twist of orange and a few cardamom pods. Chill everything first and stir once, briefly. Both garnishes are drawn straight from the twelve, so they sharpen the recipe instead of arguing with it.