I’m thinking maybe this should be…

“Hendrick’s Theism Remedy”?

No matter. HENDRICK’S GIN has always confused me. The first time I tried it, I paired it with lime and tonic. I didn’t bother reading labels back then; I saw the word “gin,” and that said G&T to me. How strange it was to notice a weird, incongruous flavor intermingling with my citrusy mixture. What the hell was it? I struggled for several minutes, my fellow inebriates, not for a moment suspecting this novel taste to be…cucumber.

Yes, cucumber. The very things P and V eat voraciously during the summer—one of few vegetables they tolerate without complaint. In my gin. However did this come about?

I do not know who David Stewart is—Annie Lennox’s Eurythmics partner, perhaps?—but one day he lurched into a rose garden looking for cucumber sandwiches and had a dubious stroke of genius: cucumber-flavoured gin. Thus HENDRICK’S came to market in the year 2000, boasting 11 botanicals (coriander seeds, angelica, chamomile, yarrow, lemon peel, orange peel, orris root, elderflower, caraway seeds and cubeb berries), and subjected after distillation to lashings of cucumber and rose essence.

If you enjoy sacrilege and you generally like weird things, HENDRICK’S may be for you. I like both, and I also like 41.4 percent alcohol, but goodness knows I have to find a better mixer if any more HENDRICK’S comes into the house. Perhaps, if I pray hard enough, my parents will think of something.