Suntory Roku Japanese Craft Gin (700 ml)

Suntory, the house that broke Scottish orthodoxy by building Japan's first malt whisky distillery in 1923, applied the same obsessive botanical precision to gin: Roku (六, 'six') is built around six Japanese botanicals — Sakura flower, Sakura leaf, Yuzu peel, Sencha green tea, Gyokuro tea, and Sansho pepper — each distilled individually and then blended with eight classic gin botanicals including juniper and coriander. That single-botanical distillation protocol is the technical core of the gin: rather than co-macerating all 14 botanicals together, Suntory isolates each Japanese ingredient to preserve its distinct volatile aromatic signature before final assembly. The result is a gin where Sansho pepper's citrus-tingly heat, Gyokuro's umami-vegetal depth, and Yuzu's floral-acidic brightness remain structurally distinct rather than merging into a generic 'Japanese' note. What makes Roku categorically unusual is the dual-tea architecture — both a pan-fired Sencha and a shade-grown Gyokuro are used, two teas with fundamentally different amino acid and chlorophyll profiles, giving the gin a layered savouriness that no European craft gin replicates. Suntory's Osaka distillery provides the production base for this expression.