Garden spirit

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.