DIY gin Papa Salt just the tonic for Margot Robbie and co

Margot Robbie and her four best mates have released a gin that has been five years in the making and was inspired by lazy afternoons drinking in the sun.

Hold the ‘ger beer’ … besties Charlie Maas, Regan Riskas, Josey McNamara, Tom Ackerley and Margot Robbie are making lashings of their own gin. Picture: Nicholas Chalmers

Margot Robbie and her four best mates have released a gin that has been five years in the making and was inspired by lazy afternoons drinking in the sun.

Papa Salt, made in conjunction with Byron Bay distillery Lord Byron, has been the passion project of Robbie, her husband Tom Ackerley and their friends Josey McNamara, Regan Riskas and Charlie Maas.

Robbie met Riskas and her ­fiance Maas on a film set of Tina Fey’s 2016 movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and they all became firm friends when Maas and Riskas moved to London, where Mc­Namara, Robbie and Ackerley – all film producers – were living. They all bonded over their common love of gin.

“All five of us would say we are gin nerds,” says Riskas. “We talk about gin, we think about gin and we really love drinking gin.”

But when they all ended up back in LA a few years later for work, they soon realised they couldn’t get any gin they liked.

“It was weird because people in America don’t really drink gin that much and we couldn’t find our favourite gins anywhere,” explains Robbie.

“It started as a bit of a joke and we thought maybe we should just make our own gin and then we wondered how many bottles we would have to sustain 10 years in America. Maybe if we made 1000 bottles of our own gin, then we would always have it on hand.”

The award-winning actress and producer – soon to be seen in the upcoming Greta Gerwig movie Barbie – says they decided to go through with it and reached out to Maas, who works in the beverage industry, and his family distillery for help.

“My brother is a distiller and I asked him what to do next,” says Maas. The group started testing different flavour combinations and it took 59 different iterations over two years to get the right one.

“It was like a science experiment in the backyard with all these little beakers that were only fruitful for the first hour because we were all so drunk it didn’t matter,” Robbie says, laughing. “Our notes became really illegible.”

The group then decided to make their gin in Australia and settled on working with Lord Byron distiller Brian Restall to produce it – and Papa Salt is being released on Friday.

“There are so many good gins now in Australia so if we could make a gin that does well in Australia, then I feel confident it could do well anywhere,” Robbie says.

“Australia has the best food, the best coffee, the best wine, great beers, microbreweries and so many amazing gins.”

Maas says Papa Salt – named after the real-life living embodiment of a “salty sea dog” they met in Sri Lanka – has a mineral profile that was reminiscent of drinks and cocktails you have on the beach.

“We wanted this coastal gin that was easy to drink,” he says. “We wanted something that you could open with a bunch of friends and you would finish a bottle before you even realised.”