Singapore craft gin is built on botanicals drawn from across Southeast Asia, including torch ginger, butterfly pea flower, Dragon Phoenix Pearl jasmine tea and hawthorn, chosen as much for where they come from as for how they taste. At Brass Lion, Singapore's pioneering craft gin distillery, every botanical maps to a strand of the city's identity. They weren't picked because they're rare or exotic. They were picked because they taste like growing up here.
What Makes Southeast Asian Botanicals Different?
They carry the flavours of trade, migration and centuries of layered culinary culture, something no European botanical list can replicate.
First, the non-negotiable: juniper is still the backbone. It has to be, legally and on the palate, or it isn't gin. Every Brass Lion expression leads with juniper. But that's where the resemblance to European gin ends.
European gin was built from what sat in European kitchens and apothecaries: juniper, coriander, angelica root, lemon peel. A fine tradition, and a good one. Southeast Asia offers something categorically different. These are ingredients shaped by centuries of trade and migration, each culture's pantry layered on the last.
Singapore is a city built on arrivals. People came from China, India, the Malay archipelago and beyond, and they brought their ingredients with them. Those ingredients became part of how the city tastes, how it smells, what it remembers. That's the palette we distil from, not because these botanicals are native to the island, but because they belong to the people who made it what it is.
Some of Our Botanicals, and What They Add
Torch Ginger
Torch ginger is one of the most recognisable scents in a Singapore kitchen. The pink flower turns up in laksa, in rojak, in Peranakan sambals. It carries a clean, floral heat that sits nowhere near the sharp bite of regular ginger. In the glass, it delivers a mid-palate warmth and a sweet, almost honeyed floral note that softens juniper without smothering it. It is the botanical we get asked about most.
Butterfly Pea Flower
Butterfly pea flower has been used in Southeast Asian cooking for generations, long before it became a colour-changing parlour trick in cocktail bars. In Peranakan cuisine it dyes rice and kueh a deep, natural blue. Add citrus and it shifts to lilac. This is a chemical reaction, not a gimmick, and it is what makes the Butterfly Pea Gin the most visually arresting thing on a back bar. Flavour-wise, it adds a subtle earthiness that balances floral notes.
Dragon Phoenix Pearl Jasmine Tea
This one requires a little more explanation. Dragon Phoenix is a variety of jasmine tea from Fujian province, loose leaves hand-rolled into small pearls, each one dried alongside jasmine blossoms until the fragrance transfers into the leaf itself. When the pearls steep, they unfurl. The flavour that comes with them is delicate, layered, and unmistakably floral without being perfumed.
In the Pearl Jasmine Gin, it sits at the heart of the whole expression. Amy, our Head of Manufacturing and the architect of our flavour profiles, spent a long time working out how to best showcase its unique flavour profile in the product. The result took home the IWSC Flavoured Gin Trophy in 2025 with 99 out of 100 points.
Hawthorn
Hawthorn berries occupy a particular corner of the Singapore memory. You find them in TCM shops and in haw flakes from the provision shops of a certain generation's childhood. Sweet, tart, a little jammy. They hold a lot of nostalgia in a small package.
The Hawthorn Gin is Brass Lion's take on a sloe gin: lower ABV, fruit-forward, bracingly tangy before it settles into a lingering sweetness. It is probably the most accessible thing we make.
Singapore in a Glass: A City Built on Mixture
Singapore is rojak by nature. Rojak is a local salad of fruit, vegetables and dough fritters tossed in a pungent, sweet-savoury sauce, and it has become shorthand for Singapore itself: gloriously mixed, better for it, not quite like anything else anywhere. Chinese, Peranakan, Malay, Indian, Eurasian and a dozen other cultures, arriving, mixing, and producing something that does not exist anywhere else in the world. The food reflects this. The language reflects this. The gin, if it is doing its job, should too.
The botanical choices at Brass Lion are not a theme. They are a reflection of that story. Torch ginger at the hawker stall, handed down through Peranakan kitchens. Hawthorn at the TCM counter, a holdover from Chinese medicinal tradition. Jasmine tea on the table at a family meal, with roots in Fujian. Butterfly pea in the kitchen of a grandmother who knew its properties long before any cocktail menu did. These are ingredients people in Singapore grew up around. We distil them because they belong here, and they belong in the glass.
If you want to see how our botanicals blend together to create our unique flavour profiles, our Distillery Tour runs every Saturday and Sunday at 3pm, at 40 Alexandra Terrace. Book your tour here.
FAQ
What are gin botanicals?
Gin botanicals are the natural ingredients, roots, flowers, fruits, herbs and spices, added during the distillation process to create the gin's flavour. Juniper berries are always present (they define gin legally), but every distillery builds its own recipe from there. The number and combination of botanicals is what gives each gin its distinct character.
Why do different gins taste so different from each other?
The botanical recipe, the base spirit, the still type, and the distillation method all play a role. A gin distilled in a copper still with Southeast Asian botanicals is going to taste categorically different from a cold-compound London Dry. At Brass Lion, we use a hybrid copper still, Nala, and small-batch distillation to give us more control over how each botanical expresses itself in the final spirit.
Do the botanicals in Brass Lion gin grow in Singapore?
Not all of them, and that’s the point. Singapore is a city shaped by immigration — people arrived from across Southeast Asia and beyond, and the ingredients they brought with them became part of how Singapore cooks, eats and remembers. Our botanicals are Singaporean in that sense. Torch ginger, hawthorn, jasmine tea, butterfly pea flower: these are ingredients woven into the food and cultural memory of the communities that made this city. We source as locally as we can, but what guides the selection is cultural provenance, not geography.
What is the key botanical in Brass Lion's Singapore Dry Gin?
The Singapore Dry Gin uses 22 botanicals in total, including pomelo peels, chrysanthemum and torch ginger flower.
Can I learn more about the botanicals in person?
Yes. The Distillery Tour runs every Saturday and Sunday at 3pm at 40 Alexandra Terrace, and it covers the full production process including an introduction to our botanicals. The Gin School, which runs on Saturdays at 2pm, goes deeper — you work hands-on with botanicals to distil your own gin.
