A Brief History of Archie Rose Gins

In 2013, Archie Rose founder Will Edwards set about figuring out why Sydney didn't have a distillery. A year later, Archie Rose swung open its doors in Rosebery, Sydney and set about to bring the highest quality Australian whiskies, gins and other spirits to the world. Over ten years in business, we’ve made a lot of gin. Gin is one of our home spirits we’ll never tire of producing and experimenting with. Here, we look back on some of the great and award-winning gins we’ve made over the years.

Our first gin was our Signature Dry Gin, launched at the end of summer 2015. We wanted to create a traditionally inspired dry gin with an Australian twist. We began with a typical gin base and then used Australian native botanicals to outshine some of the more traditional botanicals: citrus notes from lemon myrtle and blood limes, herbal notes from river mint and Dorrigo Pepperleaf, and fresh apples, oranges, and ginger to bring it all together. In 2020, we re-imagined our original Signature Dry Gin to its latest edition, which celebrates Sunrise Lime, Waxflower, Strawberry Gum and Valencia Orange. Our Signature blend has been well-loved since the start and has taken home the gold twice as Australia’s Best Gin.

In the spring of 2016, our production team doubled down on producing a version of their favourite gin, and so Distiller’s Strength Gin was born. It is described as ‘the boldest, most elegant gin’ in our range. It features sixteen botanicals individually distilled in our copper pot still to create distinct clarity and flavour, including honey produced by the 100,000 plus bees that call our distillery hives in Botany, Sydney, home.

Inspired by Japanese tattoo art, we began working on a collection of seasonal gins, with the four-strong Horisumi gin range released on the first day of each season throughout 2017. These involved a long and deep creative investigation, trialling what we thought each season in Japan would feel and taste like. They were so popular that when we launched the final release, ‘Summer’, the traffic crashed our website! It was a chaotic and lovely surprise, as we hadn't entirely realised how much momentum the range had built throughout the year.

We celebrated the summer of 2018 with our Summer Gin Project: a two-part gin series showcasing the character of Australia’s most iconic season and natural environments: Bush and Coast. Each gin featured distillates made from local, wild foraged ingredients, sustainably sourced by Diego Bonetto, such as lemon myrtle, farmer’s friend and pink peppercorn.

During the R&D phase of our Summer Gin Project, our Master Distiller, Dave Withers, experimented with melting huge hunks of ice into water at Three Blue Ducks next door to the Archie Rose Bar & Cellar Door in Rosebery, Sydney, using sustainably sourced NSW ironbark. An intense Smoked Gin featuring ironbark smoked water, juniper, native thyme, wattleseed, caraway and a small amount of distilled chocolate malt was the result, and became a limited release under the Archie Rose Concepts label, a range of rare and experimental releases.

In 2019, we began a new tradition, our Harvest Gin series, a new range to celebrate the bounty and diversity of Australia’s annual harvest. We started with Harvest Gin 2019 Poorman’s Orange. The Poorman’s orange, with its unique and complex flavour, thick pith and sweet, almost-tropical-tasting flesh, is a cross between the pomelo and tangerine. It’s this rare and unassuming fruit that captivated our minds and spirits, becoming our hero distillate, thanks to grower Peter Dryden in NSW and to Jock Zonfrillo’s Orana restaurant pop-up in Sydney for sharing the fruit peel with us.

Later that year, an Archie Rose dream came true as we embarked on a spectacular collaboration to celebrate the beauty, diversity and creativity of Australia’s leading cultural icon, the Sydney Opera House, with a two-act gin release. Named Outside Gin and Inside Gin, these gins celebrated the timeless architectural splendour and natural surrounds of the Sydney Opera House alongside the creative energy and artistic talent experienced on its stages with a symphony of Australian native botanicals.

Our Bone Dry Gin, which we’ve been producing since the winter of 2021, pays homage to gin’s foremost botanical, juniper, and showcases its raw power to deliver an indulgent encounter with a bracingly dry finish. It is many in the Archie Rose team’s favourite gin, endorsed by multiple award wins, including a Double Gold Medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Awards and two wins as the World’s Best Gin.

Sunrise Lime Gin was the second spirit from our Harvest vintage series, released in 2022, featuring native sunrise lime, a hybrid citrus fruit grown by Mark and Vickie at Marvick Native Farms in Western Australia.

In 2022, we also launched our Straight Dry Gin, part of our Fundamental Spirits range, cold-distilled with sustainably sourced local and Australian botanicals, including lemon myrtle, reclaimed orange peel and pink peppercorn.

The same year, we released Sea Salt Gin for our delicious Salt and Pepper Twin Pack—two gourmet savoury spirits in precise 200ml bottles. This salty gin is a complex blend of native sea celery, sea lettuce and lime—ideal for martinis by the sea, we think.

Our love for Australian native botanicals truly knows no bounds, so for our next Harvest addition in 2022, we made our Lemon Scented Gum Gin, a truly delicious drop.

Last year, in 2023, we had a lot of fun making The Big Fruit! Gin, A loud and proud limited edition. The most recent addition to our Harvest series, our Raw Honey Gin, is extra special. It is made with raw honey from our very own Distillery hives, a true expression of the provenance behind our spirits. At the Archie Rose Distillery in Botany, Sydney, we house eight hives together with Urban Beehive. Each harvest from our beehives carries a distinct flavour that changes with the seasons, depending on the flowers the bees encounter. As distillers, we get really excited about this flavour complexity.

And on that note, we’re never finished evolving and experimenting. Can you guess what we might do next?