Once upon a time, if you craved an amazing cocktail, heading to a bar was your best bet. Those days are all but over now. Call it the silver lining of unfortunate Covid closures, but at-home cocktail culture seems to have taken off, and one of the most versatile spirits to experiment with is gin. We’re not talking your classic London dry style, though — we’ve become fast fans of premium Japanese craft gin Roku. 

Created by the House of Suntory in Osaka, Roku has a delicate and refreshing flavour. Its name means ‘six’, and this number is embodied in the six botanicals blended into every bottle: sakura flower, sakura leaf, yuzu peel, sencha tea (green tea), gyokuro tea (refined green tea) and sanshō pepper. They’re cultivated over four seasons for the perfect balance and in accordance with the concept of ‘shun’, which sees each harvested at the peak of its season to extract the best flavour and maximise the gifts of nature.

For the New Zealand summer, we asked Roku to curate a quartet of cocktails for you to emulate and enjoy at home. Each reflects the story of shun and requires classic Kiwi-summer ingredients.