Setouchi Gin: Lemon and Green Tea, From Japan's Lemon Country

A correction first, because our earlier write-up of this bottle described the botanicals in our house tonic and attached them to the gin. They are different things. Here is the gin.

Japan Has a Lemon Region

Most people do not associate Japan with lemons at all, and the Seto Inland Sea grows nearly all of the domestic crop, concentrated around Hiroshima and Ehime.

The geography does it. The Inland Sea is sheltered water between three of Japan's main islands, so it is unusually mild and unusually dry for the country, with terraced groves on island slopes catching sun off the water. It is closer to a Mediterranean setup than anything else in Japan.

There is a practical consequence that matters here. Imported lemons are generally waxed and treated for the journey, which makes the peel something you avoid. Setouchi lemons are largely grown for domestic sale without that treatment, so the peel is usable. For a gin, or a tonic, or a garnish, the peel is where nearly all the aromatic oil lives. That single fact is why Japanese bartenders are so attached to this fruit.

The Concept Is Lemon

Setouchi Gin is built around lemon rather than treating it as one botanical among many. It is fruity and aromatic in a fairly direct way, and it does not hide what it is about.

The problem with a fruit-forward gin is that fruit alone flattens out. It smells wonderful and then arrives in the mouth as one note with nothing behind it.

Which Is What the Tea Is For

So it is blended with green tea, and that is the decision that makes the bottle work.

Tea brings tannin. Tannin is astringency, that faint drying grip on the sides of your tongue, and it gives a drink structure and a finish. It is the same job tannin does in wine and in an over-steeped cup of tea, just dialled to a useful level.

It also brings a vegetal, slightly savoury depth that sits underneath citrus very naturally. Lemon and green tea are a pairing people already know from the other direction, and here it runs the same way: the tea catches the lemon on the way down and gives it somewhere to land.

How to Drink It

A gin and tonic is the obvious move and it is the right one. Use a decent tonic that will not bury it, and if you garnish, use lemon peel rather than a wedge. Peel gives you oil. A wedge gives you juice, and the gin has no shortage of citrus already.

Neat or over ice works if you want to taste the tea, which becomes much more obvious without carbonation in the way.

It is also a good gin for anyone who finds classic London dry too pine-heavy. The juniper is present but it is not the loudest thing in the glass.

Ask what is being poured in the seasonal cocktails, since gin like this tends to end up in them.