Inside the Four Pillars Yarra Valley gin distillery
The joys of gin, inspired design and a sustainable ethic have converged in Four Pillars’ new headquarters in Victoria’s Healesville.
Sustainability is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when you take that first blissful sip of a gin and tonic on a balmy summer evening (or any evening really). Reducing environmental impact is something more to the fore when you’re buying clothes or household goods, or even food.
But it will be the first thing you see when you head to the new Yarra Valley home of Australian craft gin label Four Pillars. The $7 million expansion of the distillery, bar, retail and bottling facilities will be wrapped in an extraordinary copper veil made of 1.65km of bent piping. It will not only look spectacular, it will also work to cool and recycle hundreds of litres of water from the stills.
“The thing with gin distillation is that it’s hungry,” explains co-founder and head distiller Cam Mackenzie. “It’s hungry on power, it’s hungry on water, it’s hungry on resources. We have always tried to be as sustainable as possible; we reuse spent botanicals and try to reduce our footprint. So we wanted to try to not waste 60,000 to 70,000 of litres of water a day in the distillation process. It comes out as fresh mains water but it is just very hot, so we worked with our architects on ways to passively cool that water as part of the design, which is now the beautiful copper veil.”
Those architects are multi-award winning Melbourne firm Breathe, which has sustainability as a core principle. Mackenzie and his wife Leah, who is head of experience at Four Pillars, and also project managed construction of the original distillery and the gin laboratory in Sydney’s Surry Hills, approached Breathe to ensure the design would reduce their environmental footprint.
This was back in 2018, when it was clear that, despite being only three years old, Four Pillars had run out of space. Mackenzie, along with Stuart Gregor and Matt Jones, released the first batch of the gin in December 2013 with 400 bottles. Just seven years later they are doing a million bottles a year and have collected multiple international awards and beverage company Lion has taken a 50 per cent stake.
“When we first opened the distillery we thought we would open Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights,” Mackenzie tells WISH. “We were going to have a couple of trestle tables doing some gin tastings, and all of a sudden we are getting 100,000 people through the door and we are scratching our heads going, okay, I don’t really want people standing and waiting out in the baking sun or standing in the rain. I would much rather serve them a gin and tonic or a martini inside.”
The Four Pillars distillery is located in Healesville in the Yarra Valley, about an hour out of Melbourne. It used to be an old timber yard and you can’t miss it driving into the village after passing some of the valley’s most famous wineries. “We call it the diamond of life,” laughs Mackenzie of the location. “Across the road from us is Liberty Family Church, and across the road from that is a midwife and across the road from that is a funeral home. So it is kind of hatches and dispatches, with a distillery in the middle. I am surprised we haven’t had a wake here yet.”
The prime location has not been lost on the team from Breathe who worked on the expansion – Camilla Carmichael, who headed the project, and Bettina Robinson, who did the interiors.
“We wanted to celebrate the landscape of Healesville and also create a landmark project for the area because it is their home,” says Carmichael. “We are right at the gateway of the town,” adds Leah Mackenzie, “so it was really important to do something great for the town and have a great architectural building, because we want people to come and see it.”
The copper veil certainly fulfills that brief, as well as unifying the existing distillery and the new building as it wraps around both. The hot water will only run through the pipes at a higher level (out of reach), and it is hoped it will create steam when temperatures dive in the Yarra Valley in winter, and even help heat parts of the hospitality spaces.
After the water is cooled, it will be pumped back into the distillery to be reused. Mackenzie describes it as akin to a car radiator. “It means we don’t tip all the water down the drain as it is literally a closed loop system,” he explains. “I can’t even begin to imagine how much water it will save us.” The only water that will remain is the liquid left in the bottom of the stills after distillation is complete. It is full of spent botanicals and smells like a “beautiful tannic chai tea”, according to Mackenzie. This stillage will be piped into a river that will run through the entrance courtyard and not only make the place smell divine but also cool the water down before it goes into trade waste.
“When we first walked through the existing building, it just smelt amazing, just like chai tea,” says Carmichael. “It’s really beautiful and steamy and we wanted to try and capture that in this new space, so there will be a little river running through the courtyard to create a really nice aroma.”
The native botanicals used in Four Pillars will be on display in the plantings around the buildings and also in Jude’s Gin Garden, a new cocktail bar that seats 100 people on an outdoor roofed deck. There will be lemon myrtle and pepperberry plants, and the area will able to be closed off with glass doors when the harsh Yarra Valley climate in winter or summer gets a bit too much. The bench seating will be made from recycled brick and there will be viewing windows into the bottling area.
“We still want people to feel like they are part of the gin-making process,” explains Leah of the windows and the broader experience at the expanded Four Pillars distillery. “So whether it is the bottling process or it’s cocktail making or the gin-making process, which they can see next door [in the original building], it’s kind of all there in front of them. They are at the heart of it.”
The main interior space in the new building will house Beth’s Bar, an almost 200 square metre area that will seat 128 people. The centrepiece will be a curved copper bar where staff will create innovative cocktails that are guaranteed to make all the visitors very, very happy. “It is sort of the hero of the space because it’s where the product is fully on display as the drinks are being made,” Carmichael explains.
There are also a number of sustainability aspects to the space and the interiors. The upholstery used in the booth and baguette seating will be made of pineapple leather, a material created from discarded pineapple leaves. The concrete floors are Envirocrete, which is made from recycled waste materials. There will also be gin pipes – yes, you read that right – running directly from the distillery into the bar so that staff won’t have to keep opening bottles, which will reduce waste. They will also have tonic water on tap and move to kegs instead of bottles.
“Instead of bottling gin just to serve it from the bar there will be gin pipes running from the bottling room,” explains Carmichael. “So the gin will just run to copper taps in the bar and then the staff can serve it from the taps. It means there is so much waste product that’s eliminated by having to bottle things and then just throw the bottles out. And we are also doing that with their tonic.”
A new kitchen behind the bar will mean Four Pillars can serve more than just bar snacks with drinks, and it will also be where they produce their made-from-gin products. Since the early days of Four Pillars, Mackenzie and his co-founders wanted to try to use all the waste from the distilling process, including hundreds of kilos of gin-infused steamed oranges and all the spent botanicals.
“We did 20,000 jars of marmalade last year and it has got to a point where I wonder if gin is actually the byproduct and we are a marmalade business,” Mackenzie says, laughing. “Back when we started producing gin at the back of a shed at a mate’s winery, we made a couple of jars of marmalade with some oranges we used and showed them to local jam maker and pickler Caroline Gray, and the next thing we know she’s making 20,000 jars of marmalade for us.”
They also teamed up with Olsson’s Salt to produce a salt blend that includes the dry botanicals, and Melbourne chocolate makers Hunter + Gathered to produce rare dry gin 70 per cent organic dark chocolate. Then there is the Breakfast Negroni marmalade (oranges plus a “tiny bit” of Campari), limited edition curry powder (it goes with the Spice Gin), and Christmas puddings.
“So we are getting to the point now where there is not a huge amount of by-product left,” says Mackenzie. “It’s only the stillage, which is sort of a chai tea liquid. It’s not a huge volume in the scheme of things and we do get a lovely aromatic effect out of it, but if I could find a home for that – which is my next project – then I think we would almost be zero waste when it comes to production.”
Another way Four Pillars is reducing its environmental footprint is by running the new distillery on renewable energy. This will be achieved by doubling the number of solar panels on the roof and buying green power if any extra is needed to run the site. The roof material has even been selected for maximum solar reflection to help this process. Rainwater will be captured and used for irrigation and the toilets, and there are also plans for electric vehicle chargers in the carpark.
The process to create this sustainable distillery has not been quick; Carmichael and the Breathe team have been working on it since 2018. But as with every other building project in the country, there have been Covid delays and supply issues, and being in Victoria, lots and lots of lockdowns. After three years of stops and starts, it is expected to be open at the beginning of April.
“It’s been so exciting seeing it come together in the past few weeks and it has just been an incredible team effort from Four Pillars and the builder, so I cannot wait to see it occupied, buzzing with people,” says Carmichael. “And designing a gin distillery is not something that you do very often.”
Cam and Leah Mackenzie feel the same and are looking forward to seeing the project completed. “We are really proud of it,” Cam tells WISH. “The three founders and our families are incredibly proud of what we have done. I think in a little community like Healesville we are probably one of the bigger employers. We have 65 people on the books and will add another 25 to 30 with this new addition.”
But after eight years, does Mackenzie ever get fed up with gin?
“No! I haven’t got sick of it, and I haven’t got sick of trying to come up with new and interesting variations on gin,” he says, laughing. “I still drink a lot of gin and my hair is not going to grow back so I may as well just keep drinking!”
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