Garden spirit

By Alex Jordan 02 : 02 : 2016 Distillery Botanica : Murraya Plant : Garden

Sydney – Distillery Botanica sources ingredients from its own garden, using an ancient method to distil the flavours of its home-grown Murraya plant-based gin.

Distillery Botanica has built its own living stockpile of ingredients just a short drive from Sydney
The gin-maker has created The Garden Martini in partnership with award-winning bartender Tim Philips

By growing its own ingredients on-site and practising enfleurage, a thousand-year-old French technique favoured by perfumers, Distillery Botanica is better able to capture the aromas of the Murraya plant, creating a distinctive gin with notes of jasmine, honeysuckle and orange blossom.

To create a drink that embodies the Australian summer garden, the Distillery Botanica team extract the untainted perfume without the use of heat by laying the Murraya flowers on coconut oil, which absorbs the fragrance. This is then infused into the gin along with other botanicals taken from the same garden, including sage, Angelica, coriander and juniper.

‘The different botanicals are distilled individually, at different rates, because some things reach their perfect purity at different temperatures,’ says partner and brand director Will Miles. As a final sensory flourish, the gin arrives with a spray of Murraya perfume, which fills the nose and engages the mind before the first sip.

The Big Picture

Drink-makers are experimenting with botanicals and distillation to set themselves apart in a crowded marketplace. Examples include Seedlip, a grown-up non-alcoholic drink, and Sweetdram a viral, liqueur-crafting collective of no fixed abode.