^{Some of the gins featured were kindly gifted. Article contains affiliate links.}

This year’s top ten strikes me as rather different to my last six, with notably fewer new releases, so it seems as good a time as ever to clarify how I’ve gone about choosing these gins over the years. It goes without saying they need to be exceptional (in my personal opinion!) but beyond that the only other (self-imposed) rule is that gins can only feature in my top ten once. Ideally they are gins I know well (which, more often than not, means I have a bottle in my collection) but they don’t have to be new releases; just new(ish) to me. So, with that (hopefully) cleared up, and without further ado, here are the top ten gins I enjoyed last year (and a few honourable mentions too)…