We put basil in a drink and half the office left the room

Basil is a bully. Put a little too much of it in anything and it is the only thing you can taste. Put too little and it vanishes completely, leaving a faint lawn-clippings note that nobody can name and everybody dislikes.

We knew this going in. We did it anyway, because pear on its own is a polite drink, and polite drinks don’t get bought twice.

Batches one to four

Fresh basil, steeped cold. It browned within a day and the drink went the colour of pond water. Batch three smelt so strongly of pesto that Sam opened every window in the unit and then left for lunch early. Half the office followed him.

“It’s not bad. It’s just dinner.” — the tasting note on batch three, in full.

Batches five to eight

We switched to an extract, which fixed the colour and the pesto problem but brought a new one: it tasted like a scented candle. We tried less of it. We tried it with lemon. We tried it with a pinch of salt, which helped more than it should have and which we’re still not allowed to talk about.

Batch nine

The fix was the pear, not the basil. A riper pear, about 9% juice instead of 6%, carried enough body that the basil had something to lean on instead of shout over. The herb arrives halfway through the sip now, cold and green, and then leaves. That’s the drink.

Batches ten and eleven were just batch nine again, to check we hadn’t imagined it. We hadn’t. Pear + basil is here, if you’d like to check too.