The process

My old friend said once - imagine your favourite movie, now imagine that you can only watch that one movie for the rest of your life, it'll get boring eventually. While we weren't talking about gin in the moment, it is true about a lot of things. 

Good gin is made one batch at a time. But even good gin is usually made to one recipe. But does it have to be? We think not. 

We start with sourcing the ingredients that are in season in a specific neighbourhood. With your help. We look for anywhere from 5 to 10 botanicals. Only 2 botanicals remain unchanged, hand harvested wild Himalayan juniper and Hawkes Bay grown coriander seeds. You can't make gin without juniper and coriander seed is the second most important botanical in gin, traditionally, it adds a a citrusy character and bridges other ingredients together. The rest of the ingredients will always change and we like to source a combination of garden grown and foraged botanicals, paying special attention to invasive species like fennel, gorse flower, jasmine etc. 

The botanicals are then macerated, starting with juniper and coriander for the first 24 hours. Then we add the freshly harvested ingredients for another 12 hours. And when we want to focus on a specific ingredient, we add it to the botanical basket right in the pot-still so the vapours pass right through them during distillation. 

Finally, it's distillation time in our hand-crafted 500 litre copper pot-still. The copper contact adds texture and the design of the alembic pot-still concentrates the aromas. We slowly distill the botanical maceration to extract as much flavour as possible while keeping the gin full of texture. 

The freshly distilled gin is then rested for at least a week to help marry the flavours and finally pure New Zealand water is added to achieve bottling strength. 

Because our gin isn't filtered and we try to achieve maximum flavour, it can turn cloudy with colder temperatures and dilution. 

Cheers

Egor