Kagoshima is one of Japan's main tea-growing regions, and Komasa Jyozo has distilled there since 1883. Putting a roasted local tea into a gin is a matter of proximity here, not of exoticism. Hojicha shares the recipe with juniper and with hinoki, a cypress from the same botanical family as juniper, so two of the three plants are cousins pulling in one resinous direction while the tea pulls in another. A list this short gives nothing to hide behind: each plant has to carry its share, and the tea turns out every bit as assertive as the wood.

Hojicha is the one that changes everything. It is green tea roasted at high temperature until the leaf turns deep auburn, and roasting removes most of the astringency that makes green tea difficult to distil. What is left is toasted, nutty and faintly sweet, closer to a roasted grain than to a leaf. Against it, juniper reads greener than usual and hinoki supplies a dry, sawn-wood aroma that sits between the two, so the gin moves from green to woody to toasted as you work down the glass.

The base spirit is not a neutral alcohol but honkaku shochu, which carries its own character rather than disappearing under the botanicals. The house launched its gin brand in 2018, more than a century after it began distilling, and bottles this one at 45% in 500 ml. Komasa accepts the exposure of a three-plant recipe instead of padding it with supporting botanicals.

Soda rather than tonic is the right call here, and the producer says so: quinine would flatten the roasted tea. Count 4 cl of gin against 10 cl of well-chilled soda, hard ice, a few hojicha leaves and a shaving of hinoki. Keep the soda refrigerated until the last moment and barely mix at all. The shaving is worth the trouble, because the wood smells of what the gin tastes of.