Panda Gin Limited Edition 2022

Mango and lychee arrive together at the top of this one, and the interesting part is everything the recipe put underneath them to stop the pair from becoming a dessert. The 2022 limited edition from the same Belgian house is built on that tension rather than on the fruit alone.

Limited Edition · Floral · Fruity · Herbal

Mango is the rounder half of the pair, thick and sunny, sweet in a way that coats. Lychee is thinner and far more perfumed, floral where mango is fleshy. Together they take up the entire top of the drink. Neither one is a routine gin botanical, and both are difficult to distil without losing the aroma that made them worth using. BergamotBergamotA bitter Calabrian citrus, the one that scents Earl Grey tea: floral and zesty.Glossary is the citrus chosen to sit with them, perfumed rather than sour, and lavender extends that perfume upwards into something honeyed and cooling.

Then the recipe changes its mind, which is what makes it worth drinking. Dill brings a green, faintly aniseed sharpness that has no business next to tropical fruit and works anyway, cutting the sweetness at the exact point where it would become cloying. Wormwood goes further still, adding the dry bitterness of an aperitif herb and dragging the finish back towards something adult. Juniper runs beneath all of it, resinousResinousAn aroma reminiscent of pine or fir resin. It is juniper's signature, due to compounds such as pinene.Glossary and steady, the reminder that this is still a gin and not a fruit cup. Six botanicals surround it, and they fall into two camps on purpose: four to sweeten and perfume the top, two to dry out the bottom.

Fruity, floral, herbal, and dry at the close in spite of everything at the front. Keep the mixer plain: a neutral tonic, ice to the rim, and lime rather than lemon. Fruit-flavoured tonics repeat what the recipe already holds and leave nothing for the bitter half to argue with. Soda and a lime wheel make the leaner version, and that build lets the dill through more clearly than tonic does.