The Only Lemon We Trust

A hillside above Sorrento

There are cheaper lemons. There are bigger ones, waxed to a shine, available in February from three continents at once. We do not buy those.

We buy from one grower, on one terraced hillside, who has been sending us the same variety for six seasons. The fruit arrives dull, uneven, and occasionally scarred — and the peel smells like something you would want to stand in.

Why the peel and not the juice

Almost none of the flavour you taste in a good limoncello comes from juice. It comes from the oil held in the outermost skin, and that oil starts leaving the moment the fruit is cut.

• Picked in the morning, crated the same afternoon
• In our kitchen inside twelve days
• Peeled by hand within forty-eight hours of arrival
• Pith left behind — it is where the bitterness hides

The peeling is the slow part. A good afternoon gets us through nine crates and leaves everyone's hands smelling of the stuff for two days.

What patience actually does

Peel and neutral spirit go into steel and sit in the dark. No heat. No vacuum rig. No agitation beyond a turn of the vessel once a week.

1. Week one: the spirit turns faintly yellow and smells sharp, almost green
2. Week three: colour deepens, the sharpness rounds off
3. Week six: it goes cloudy, and that is the signal

Good liqueur is mostly waiting, and knowing when to stop waiting.

We taste every Thursday. Some batches are ready at five weeks. One, memorably, took nine and was worth every day of it.

The bit we get asked about most

Yes, you can freeze it. No, it will not go cloudy in a bad way — that is the oil, and it is supposed to be there. And if a bottle reads B-041 on the base, that is batch forty-one, peeled on a Tuesday in March by four people who would rather have been outside.

Curious what six weeks tastes like? Browse the range, or come and say hello — the workshop is open on Saturdays.