Just the tonic

Four Pillars is creating the foundations for a world class Australian gin industry.

R & D, trial-and-error, endless mistakes before perfecting a prototype capable of going to market — it’s part and parcel of any start-up. But Cameron Mackenzie never wanted it to end. Not when the trial-and-error was going into developing a new Australian gin.

Mackenzie, a winery production manager turned distiller — and former Olympic athlete, a runner at Atlanta in 1996 — was willing to learn on the job. “Gin isn’t a tough recipe, but it takes a lot of experimentation. As long as you have a big canvas of juniper, you’ve got half a chance of making a pretty good gin, but there are hundreds of botanicals that you can use, and trying them is a lot of fun.”

It took Mackenzie and his two partners in Four Pillars Gin, Matt Jones and Stuart Gregor, 18 months to come up with the recipe for their first product, the Rare Dry Gin. “It was our ‘Breaking Bad’ phase,” he laughs. “We had a small glass lab still and just started playing with botanicals. We would have been happy to sit there experimenting for another 12 months, without releasing anything, if that’s what it took,” he says.

Having worked in wine, the partners didn’t want to recreate old-world styles. “We didn’t want to make an Australian version of London Dry Gin, not because we don’t like London Dry Gin; we love it, but because we thought the world simply didn’t need another one. We wanted to make modern Australian gin.”

Like all gins, the basis is juniper, which Four Pillars buys in from Macedonia, but also from Germany, Italy and Hungary. “We use juniper as a canvas, not as a focus. On that we wanted to add a modern Australian take, which to us meant a gin that reflected a number of different cultures — native Australian botanicals, but also some of the amazing spices and ingredients on our doorstep in South-East Asia.”

Four Pillars uses the same base botanicals in most of its gins: coriander from Western Australia, Tasmanian pepperberry leaf, lemon myrtle from the southern highlands of New South Wales, as well as organic oranges, finger limes (the native Australian lime) from Byron Bay, as well as fresh Australian ginger, cinnamon and turmeric. Another Australian twist is to use fresh organic oranges in the botanical basket rather than dried peel.  

The rest is an eclectic mix. “We use cassia from India, star anise from Vietnam, cardamom from Guatemala, our angelica root comes from Poland, and our lavender is a mix of French and Australian. We always try to have two or three interesting native botanicals in there: we’re always experimenting.

“For example, turmeric for us was a total mistake, but it’s one of my favourite things to distil, and we use it in our Navy Strength Gin. Parsnip is a really interesting thing to distil, although to date we’ve never used it in a gin. As long as it’s not toxic and it’s never had a pulse, I’m willing to give it a go,” he says. More recently Mackenzie has been “playing with” cubeb (tailed pepper, from Java and Sumatra), Java ‘longpepper’ and Sichuan peppercorn (which is actually a citrus) from China.

The first product, the Rare Dry Gin, was launched on the crowd-funding website Pozible in December 2013. “We had 420 bottles of batch one, and we wanted to sell 150 bottles in the first month, mainly to try to set up our social media pages. We sold 150 bottles in the first eight hours and the 420 bottles were gone in four days, and we then had a waiting list. We made our first sales to local bars and retailers soon after.”

Four Pillars has subsequently added to the range Navy Strength Gin, Spiced Negroni Gin, Bloody Shiraz Gin, Cousin Vera’s Gin, Modern Australian Gin, Barrel Aged Gin and an Australian Christmas Gin.

About 15 per cent of sales are export, with the gins going to 15 different markets, helped along by a string of gold medals for the Rare Dry Gin and Navy Strength Gin at prestigious international competitions.

The partners have been lucky that gin is a labour of love, says Mackenzie, for distilling is not an easy business, with excise tax to be paid every week. “Every Sunday, we pay our excise tax for the previous week’s sales. Nearly half of the retail price of every bottle that we sell goes in tax. It doesn’t matter what payment terms your customers are on, the ATO has to be paid every week.”

The benefit is that the ATO needed to see a business plan before approving its part of the licensing process. “We had to prove that we were financially solvent before we started, which was an interesting way to start a business. But it also teaches you some good habits,” he says.

Another hurdle was when the ideal building — a timber yard in the Victorian Yarra Valley town of Healesville — came up for sale. “It came up probably three or four years before we were ready for it,” says Mackenzie. “It was going to be ideal for a distillery and cellar door at some future point, but we were too small an operation for it. The building hadn’t been on the market for 30 years, and we knew it would never come back on if we didn’t act. So we pushed all of our chips into the middle of the table, and went from there.”

Equipment was another significant investment. “The stills are very important — in fact, it’s one of our namesake Four Pillars (the others are the triple-filtered Yarra Valley water; the botanicals; and ‘Love,’ the commitment to craft and attention to detail every step of the way.) We only use Carl stills from Germany, they’re the best in the world, but also the most expensive. And if you want a bespoke bottle, you have to roll the dice a bit: if the minimum order is 30,000 or even 50,000 bottles, and your budget is 10,000 bottles for the first year, do you really want to have five years’ worth of glass tying up all that money? No, but you have to do it,” says Mackenzie.

Safety equipment is also non-negotiable. “Distilling is a dangerous pursuit, you’re talking about highly flammable ethanol vapours floating around. We went off to the US to visit distillers, to see all of the explosion-proof measures that they took. It’s expensive to do all of that properly, but you can’t cut corners,” he says.

Insurance was another major expense. “We started only with public liability, we probably winged that a bit, because none of us had done a huge amount of that side of setting up a business. That caught us off-guard in the first year, when we realised that we were underinsured. But that’s the great thing about having a diverse group of investors: one of them said to us one day, ‘what are you guys doing with insurance?’

“We then sat down and went through our needs, and then had an extensive tender for the insurance requirements. That gives us a fair bit of security around machinery breakdowns, theft, all of those sorts of things. It’s the unsexy side of distilling, but insurance is one of the first things I tell people who ask my advice about getting into the business.”

In its first year, Four Pillars produced about 45,000 bottles: this year, volume will exceed 200,000 bottles. The business now has 25 employees, 15 of which are full-time. But it’s still burning cash: projected break-even is three to five years away.

The cellar door gives Four Pillars enough cash flow to pay the bills and the weekly tax, and the company has a “war chest” sufficient to invest for three to five years. “We have another Carl still coming, which will be our third production still, and we have a new bottling line coming,” says Mackenzie. “We’re not in any great hurry to become profitable overnight, we’re certainly not interested in selling the brand, we want it to be a sustainable and interesting business. And the bottom line is that it’s just heaps of fun, every day.”

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