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.