Gin is in as local drops raise spirits

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This was published 9 years ago

Gin is in as local drops raise spirits

By Neil McMahon
Updated

World Gin Day is here, and for the 2014 edition of this celebration of a favourite spirit Melbourne has a special reason to take part. For the first time, drinkers can add their tonic to a top-shelf, locally produced tipple.

Boutique distilleries Four Pillars Gin and The Melbourne Gin Company, both based in Melbourne’s outer east, have been bottling their Australian-tinged products for less than a year but have already taken the market by storm. Four Pillars Gin has already been recognised at global awards, and both gin brands are proving a smash with barmen and buyers.

With a recent survey showing an explosion in Australia’s gin consumption over the past five years, the men behind these home-grown products find themselves leading the pack of a small but growing craft distilling industry.

Cameron Mackenzie, founder of Four Pillars Gin, spent three years getting his concept from brainwave to burgeoning business. Mackenzie is a former Olympian - he ran in the 4x100 metres relay team for Australia at the Atlanta Games in 1996 - and then entered the wine industry. When he decided to tackle gin, he was determined to create a product different to the popular London dry gin that is most often consumed around the world.

“We wanted to make what we loosely call 'modern Australian gin',” he says. “In the lab we distilled about 80 botanicals, playing with different flavours, different aromatics, to see what worked. We didn't want Australiana, we wanted modern Australia.”

The end product includes 12 botanicals - including the traditional juniper, but also lemon myrtle and the Tasmanian pepper berry leaf - but the most unusual twist is the infusion of fresh oranges. “Quite strange for gin,” Mackenzie says.

But the results are spectacular.

The first bottling was only seven months ago. By March, Four Pillars had been awarded a double gold medal at the World Spirit Awards in San Francisco.

“It’s not just great for us, it’s great for Australian craft distilling,” says Mackenzie, whose new gin projects include a barrel-aged gin, and a navy strength gin. “That’s the strength that if you spill it on gunpowder you can still light the gunpowder.”

All of this magic happens courtesy of a giant still that was imported from Germany for the purpose. Mackenzie calls her Wilma, after his late mother. “I always thought my mum was quite beautiful but she also had five sons so she could explode at the drop of a hat. We thought it was appropriate.”

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Andrew Marks, founder of The Melbourne Gin Company, also has a background in wine-making. His gin passion was born of regular martini nights with friends at his flat in Collingwood, and it was there that he began experimenting with a tiny still. Like Mackenzie, he went through trial and error experimenting with botanicals before he settled on a stellar result.

“Its been a real journey to alchemy,” Marks says of his product, which was released last July. “It’s blown people away. They say, ‘Wow, where has this come from?’.”

He says the name, which came to him while walking down Gertrude Street one day, suggests sophistication; it's evocative of both the drink and of the elegant city it references. He is preparing now to take his product to the world - like Four Pillars Gin, The Melbourne Gin Company is eyeing the export market.

“It embodies the city,” Marks says.

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