A truly small batch distillery creating world class SPIRITS
Our multi award winning tiny distillery has been operating commercially since January 2019. With a production capacity of up to 400 bottles at a time, we are one of Australia’s smallest commercial distilleries.
We currently produce four gins, all of which have won medals at the two largest spirit competitions in the world - the International Wine and Spirits Competition in London and the San Francisco World Spirit Competition.
Our Classic gin is exactly as the name suggests and is our homage to how gins used to taste before the gin revolution of the 1980s, when gin still tasted like gin and flavoured vodka had yet to be invented.
Our Connoisseur gin is a more contemporary gin and has a structure and complexity that will stand up well in all your favourite cocktails.
The Admiral is our navy-strength gin and with lashings of juniper, a thick layer of blood orange and the sweet nuttiness of kurrajong seed, this bad boy will have you immediately reaching for your negroni tumbler.
Our iconic Oyster Shell gin is a tantalising combination of oyster shells, saltbush, citrus and spice. It was named named 2021 Australian Gin of the Year by none other than The Gin Queen herself, Caroline Childerley. Read more here.
The newest addition to our core range is a truly unique Oyster Shell Vodka. This is an award-winning premium vodka made using a world-first process. Read more here.
We also produce limited edition and seasonal releases, including a traditional limoncello and a gorgeous barrel-aged gin for dark spirit fans.
We craft our gins using locally available botanicals
It was always important to us to create gins that speak to, and reflect, this beautiful part of Australia we call home. It was also important to us to create a business that “treads lightly” and operates as sustainably as possible.
Marrying those twin objectives, we consciously craft each of our gins to use as much locally available and seasonal produce as we can.
They all feature ingredients we either grow here at the distillery or forage ourselves, so we know exactly what goes into each bottle.
Some of the more unusual local botanicals that we use include fingerlimes grown here at the distillery, seaweed that we collect ourselves from the local seashore, and kurrajong seed from a tree in the back garden.
Our Oyster Shell gin takes our sustainability philosophy even further by taking the waste product of a local business – oyster shells – and transforming it into a gin.
The senior citizens of distillation technology
Our original still, “Jill”, is a 100-litre copper alembic still. Handmade in Portugal, Jill embodies a way of making alcohol that dates back over a thousand years.
As the grand old dame of distillation technology, Jill's undeniable old-world charms also mean she's a little more demanding and temperamental than her modern counterparts.
First, she has to be sealed with rye flour paste to help her get up a head of steam. And with a capacity of only 100 litres, she’s also very tiny compared to most commercial stills. She also doesn’t have any buttons so when we say that everything is done by hand and nothing is automated, we really mean that too.
It takes between 12 and 16 hours to make a 200-bottle batch of gin on Jill. We're with her the entire time. Partly because she has to be direct fired on an open flame, but primarily because nothing is automated. We manually make all the cuts, and just like in the days of the original artisans, everything is done by taste. Knowing when to make those cuts — the Heads, the Heart and the Tails - is what we like to think of as the art of distillation.
Keeping Jill company, we’ve recently added “Bill” to our distillery line-up. Another 100-litre copper alembic still, Bill is named in honour of our much-loved distillery dog who passed away in 2020 and has allowed us to double our production capacity to 400 bottles. While he looks identical to Jill, slight variations in his size and shape mean Bill runs a little bit slower than Jill and is always the last to finish.
Creating award-winning SPIRITS using truly artisan methods
We never set out to be the biggest distillery in Australia. Our aim was simply to create the best spirits we could using largely forgotten craft production methods.
So, what makes craft spirit? The term is bandied around a lot, but for us it means three things.
First, we strongly believe that it's about knowing who the people are that are making your spirits. For us, we take pride in the fact that every bottle that leaves the distillery has been made, bottled, labelled and packed by us.
We also believe that provenance and place are integral components to making a craft spirit, which is why all our spirits feature ingredients we either grow here or forage locally.
And while we’re deliberately and consciously old-school in terms of scale and process, our gin recipes in particular speak to the whirlwind of botanical innovations that are making contemporary Australian gin-making so exciting. Think kurrajong seeds harvested from the tree just behind the distillery, saltbush from the garden, or seaweed collected from the region’s pristine beaches.
Finally, you can’t be a craft distillery without some combination of passion and process.
But what makes us a little different is how we transform that passion that’s common to all good distilleries into our spirits.
By making the decision early on to use really old technology, we made the commitment to ourselves and our customers to make truly small-batch, handcrafted spirits. That’s what got us started on our distilling journey. And that’s what keeps us going.
