Rose petals gathered on a Baltic dyke are not an ingredient anyone sources by accident. Knut Hansen builds a German dry gin on that kind of specificity: apples from the Altes Land, cucumber and basil grown under glass in Hamburg, and fourteen botanicals in total, distilled four times in small batches at 42%. The brand was founded in 2017 by Kaspar Hagedorn and Martin Spieker.

Four distillations is the reason a recipe this delicate survives. Each pass strips more of the heavier material out, and what remains is unusually clean, which matters when the headline botanicals are a vegetable and a leaf. Cucumber is the most obvious of them, cool and watery, and it gives the palate a texture rather than a flavour. Basil sits directly beside it, green and faintly aniseed, and the pair of them evoke a summer garden rather than a spirit shelf. Altes Land apples add a crisp orchard sweetness underneath, more tart than sugary. The rose petals are the quietest element, perfumed without being heavy, and citrus and lemon lift the top. Juniper holds a firm centre through all of it, and the balance across fourteen botanicals is what the four distillations buy.

Delicacy like this vanishes in a heavy glass, and a careless build wastes four distillations at once. Neutral tonic, ice heaped up, and a pour firm enough that the cucumber and the basil are not thinned away. A ribbon of cucumber echoes the recipe most closely, and a basil leaf, bruised once between the fingers, follows the other half. Double gold at the 2022 SIP Awards in both tasting and innovation is a fair reading. Naming the dyke where the roses grow is the kind of detail a brand only bothers with when it is true. It closes green, crisp and clean.