My Journey
From Midwifery to Gin Distillery
I’d like to take you on a journey of why and how I got to become a Gin distiller. I came to New Zealand from the UK over twenty years ago, a midwife by trade. I soon settled into life working in Christchurch and living the dream on my days off exploring our big backyard either on skis or in tramping boots.
Midwifery took me to Westport for a couple of years before I met my now husband and it wasn’t long before I arrived in Kaikoura and started working as a midwife here and on the farm with Barry. We now have two sons aged 9 and 11 years and life has been pretty hectic for the last decade!
What (do I hear you ask) made my attention go from being a mother, wife and midwife to Gin distiller? I started exploring the world of Gin three years ago when midwifery became too hard as a working mum. I was doing a lot of running and multi-sport and as I wasn’t getting any younger either thought I’d explore my options on the farm.
I had a chat with my husband about possibly milking sheep and making sheep’s cheese.. His answer was “who will do that when you’re away doing your events?, no”, so I suggested raising calves… same response, breeding pigs wasn’t much different either! Eventually I said well I LOVE gin so I’d like to make gin… he said “Sweet, have the garage”. Before he changed his mind I cleared out the garage, put a ceiling and bench in it, gave it a lick of paint and went on an ‘Introduction to Gin’ course up in Auckland.
During the course I embraced the art of distillation and started to develop a passion for flavours and oils found in botanics. I realised how lucky I was to live in an area that had so many botanicals on offer and wanted to explore this world and find combinations that worked amazingly well together that would also allow me to tell a story through the botanics that I wanted to use… My Distillery was born.
Getting my inspiration from around the farm and the local area, I seasonally forage for botanics and started the process of drying them to use all year round (which also assists in consistency) to create my unique story inspired botanical gins.
The botanics are weighted and placed in the column of my traditional copper alembic still from Portugal named ‘Bruce’! A sugar based ethanol is diluted using the farms natural spring water to a 40% Alcohol by volume mix. Heat is applied and as the temps rise above 60 degrees ethanol boils and the vapours pass through all the botanics grabbing all the delicious flavours on its journey through the swan neck, down the condenser where cold water cools the steam back into a liquid form… Gin is collected at the outlet at 80% ABV.
Gin that is produced through a distillation run is typically cut into three sections… heads, hearts and tails. The art of making good consistent gin is to know when to make those cuts. With the part that I want to use to make gin I add spring water from the farm to bring the high ABV down to a very palatable 42%. This is then bottled, labelled and the batch number written on ready to be boxed and sold.
I love the whole process, love that I am hands-on from the start to the end and love that I have so much passion for what I am making. I wanted to show my children that if you have a dream, a bit of hard work and creativity dreams can come true. Getting my children involved was awesome, my eldest son drew the woolshed on the woolshed gin bottle and my youngest loves to come foraging with me.
Supporting the local businesses and having sustainable practices are all fundamental to my work ethic. I also love to support local charities where I can, either being on the committees and helping or now through donations from bottle sales. When I was setting up the business as the gins came with background stories I wanted to draw attention to those stories… The Shearwater Gin which takes inspiration from the botanics found on the flight path of the little endemic Hutton Shearwater bird in Kaikoura, a $3 from every bottle sold goes to either the
Hutton Shearwater Trust or the Kaikoura Hospital Wildlife Charitable Organisation. From the bottle sales of the woolshed gin I am in support of doing something for a local rural charity.
After two years of developing the brand and negotiating the hurdles that creating a new business comes with, I launched amid our pandemic. A week before launching I went to the NZ spirit awards as I had entered the emerging product award and l though I didn’t think I’d win, I thought I would go and introduce myself to some of the inspirational people from the spirits industry. I did win much to my amazement and I was truly humbled by the whole experience.
This was followed up by a fantastic local launch in Kaikoura a week later and a week after that as a stall holder at the original Gin event Gindulgence in Christchurch.
Mt Fyffe Distillery had arrived on the gin scene and boy was I busy, lambing had started too, my training for a big multi stage Ultra was in full swing and my kids still needed their mum!
These last eight months have been fantastic, the learning curve has been steep as I figure out the marketing, social media and accounting sides to my business. Being awarded a silver at the Australian Gin awards last September was also a fantastic accolade to receive and gave me great confidence that I am heading in the right direction with my small boutique Gin business.
I want to put Kaikoura on the gin map of New Zealand. I love that there is something else for people to visit when coming to this spectacular place I call home. I do Gin tours and tastings by appointment which I also love as I can talk to people about why and what makes this little bespoke grassroots gin distillery tick. Visitors’ faces always light up when they walk into the small distillery and see the attractive copper stills.
So where next you may ask…. Well life is busy, I do still help around the farm, my boys still very much need a mum outside of school and I keep signing up for adventure races and ultra running events… and the gin still needs to keep flowing! I want to continue to produce award winning story inspired gins, who knows if I have another little concoction brewing in my head….. Time will tell I guess ;-)
Written by
Justine Schroder
Mt Fyffe Distillery - Kaikoura
