The gorse, heather and lavender are foraged on the Old Course at St Andrews. That is the whole idea of this bottle: three of its botanicals grow on the links where the game was codified, and they are picked there rather than bought in. Links land is poor, sandy and exposed to the North Sea wind, and the plants that hold on in it tend to be tough and strongly aromatic.

Gorse flowers smell of coconut and warm almond, which is the note most people notice first on the nose and rarely expect in a gin. Heather is drier and honeyed without being sweet; lavender is the most assertive of the three and needs a careful hand, since it turns soapy as soon as it is overdone. Coriander seed bridges them with its citrus-and-sage edge, and juniper anchors the lot. Then there is Scottish kombu, a seaweed, which adds a faint salinity rather than a flavour of its own and makes everything above it taste more defined, the way a pinch of salt does in cooking. Seaweed in a gin reads as a stunt on paper; here it does a plain technical job.

Eden Mill was established in 2012 on the Eden Estuary, a few minutes from the course, and the Golf Gin first appeared in 2018; this is its 2026 edition, bottled at 42%. The label is worth a minute: the Swilcan Bridge, a flag, the distillery itself, a sheep, and a key to room 269. Whether you care about golf or not, it tells you where the plants came from.

A premium tonic with restrained quinine lets the gorse through. Fill a tall glass with hard ice, add 4 cl of gin and 10 cl of tonic, then a blackberry and a mint sprig. Serve it properly cold, mixed only just enough. The blackberry echoes the heather's dark, honeyed side, and the mint lifts the lavender, which can otherwise dominate a long drink.