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Craft

The colour of saffron

On the first time we watched a hundred grams of threads turn ten litres of grain spirit into something gold.

The colour of saffron — cover

It happens fast. The threads sit in the macerator looking inert — dark red, almost brown, smelling more of hay than spice. You leave them for an hour and come back to a tank that is unmistakably gold. By dawn the next morning the colour is settled: an amber so deep that the spirit, in a clear glass, looks like late-afternoon light through honey. That’s what every batch of Saffron Gin begins as. It is also why we never bottle it filtered.

Filtering would clarify it. It would also strip the colour and a fraction of the flavour with it. We accept the slight cloudiness that comes with un-chill-filtered spirit because the alternative is to throw away the most beautiful thing about what we make.

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