DESOLATE Gins - CLASSIC 7

Seven botanicals, and the name puts the number on the label. CLASSIC 7 makes no secret of its recipe: juniper, lemon, blueberry, coriander seed, cinnamon, ginger root and black pepper, which is short enough that a drinker can follow every one of them. Seven is a working number as well as a name: enough to build a progression, few enough to keep it legible.

Citrus · Dry · Spicy · Fruity

They arrange themselves as a progression. Pine and lemon arrive first and arrive clean. Blueberry follows in the middle, soft and faintly floral, the one unexpected plant in an otherwise orthodox list and the reason the gin is not simply dry. Then ginger and black pepper take the finish, dry heat after soft fruit, with cinnamon bridging the two. Coriander seed does what it always does, linking citrus to spice so the two halves do not sit apart. Blueberry and juniper are both dark berries, which makes their pairing less of a leap than it looks on paper.

Copper & Coal Distillery triple-distils the spirit and uses gentle vapour infusionVapour infusionBotanicals sit in a basket above the liquid, so only the alcohol vapour passes through them, for a lighter, fresher extraction.Glossary, then bottles it raw and unfilteredUnfiltered ginThe essential oils of the peels and plants stay in the gin: when chilled or mixed with tonic they turn it slightly cloudy, like pastis (the "louche" effect).Glossary at 43%. Those two steps pull in opposite directions, one cleaning the spirit and the other loading it with aroma. Unfiltered means small differences between batches, and the distillery treats those as part of the method rather than as faults to be engineered out. It also means the gin may cloud slightly when cold, which is a sign of aromatic oils left in rather than of anything wrong.

An Indian tonicIndian tonicThe classic tonic: sparkling water, bitter quinine and sugar. The name recalls colonial India, where quinine warded off malaria.Glossary keeps the pepper in line. 4 cl of gin, 10 cl of tonic, plenty of clean ice, a few juniper berries and a wheel of lemon. Have both bottles cold and mix once. Crush the juniper berries very lightly between your fingers before they go in: whole, they are decoration, and properly crushed they would overwhelm everything else in under a minute.