Removing the alcohol from a gin means removing the thing that carries most of its aroma, which is why the category is harder than it looks. Knut Hansen 00 comes from the Hamburg Distilling Company at 0% ABV, made in small batches in northern Germany, and takes its name from a sailor whose associations - freedom, the sea, northern tradition - the bottle deliberately borrows. The profile it aims for is citrus-led with a herbal edge.

Citrus is the leading impression and the one that does most of the work, bright and lifted at the top of the aroma where alcohol would normally do the lifting. A herbal register sits underneath it, green and dry rather than sweet, and it is the layering of the two that gives the drink its shape. Without spirit to carry them, both read cleaner and more immediate than they would in a distilled gin, but also lighter: the texture is necessarily thinner, and it closes faster than any bottle carrying alcohol would. That is the honest trade of the category rather than a flaw in this particular one, and it changes how the drink should be built rather than whether it is worth drinking.

Construction matters more here than with any alcoholic gin. Be generous with the pour, well beyond a standard gin measure, ice the glass to the top, and reach for a thoroughly chilled neutral tonic so the citrus stays sharp. Cold is doing the work that alcohol usually does; a lukewarm glass will taste flat within a minute. A wide strip of lemon or grapefruit peel, expressed over the drink, restores some of the aromatic top that the missing spirit takes away. Treated as its own kind of drink rather than as a substitute for gin, it does what it sets out to do. It ends citric and dry, the herbal note lasting after the fruit.