Vapour infusion

Instead of steeping botanicals in the pot, the distiller places them in a perforated container in the still's vapour path. Bombay Sapphire, which describes its own process on its website, holds the botanicals "above the spirit in perforated copper baskets" in Carterhead stills that it dates to the 1830s, so that the rising vapour is "gently infused" with their aromas. Both methods can produce London gin, because in both the flavour comes from distillation in the presence of the botanicals.

Summarising Hodel and colleagues (2019), Parr, Sutherland and Fisk (2024) report that vapour-infused gins have a lighter flavour, owing to less heat on the botanicals, but contain more monoterpenes than steep-infused gins. Hodel and colleagues (2020) found that in vapour-infused gin the ratio of botanicals mattered more than the ethanol concentration.