As much as I have often talked about the launch of Four Pillars Gin through crowdfunding being a rejection of the traditional approach to launching a spirits brand, the reality is that we also valued more traditional trade relationships (that is, bars, restaurants and booze retailers) immensely. Even before we had moved into our permanent brand home, Four Pillars Distillery in Healesville, we valued and took every opportunity to host trade and industry friends wherever and whenever we could.
One of the best decisions we made early on was to engage James France and his Vanguard team to be our distributors. Vanguard wasn’t the biggest player by a long way, but when it came to high-end influential bars and bartenders, it was by far the most respected. James had made his name by bringing the best and most interesting spirits into Australia, free from the constraints of the big global drinks companies.
As soon as we’d launched Rare Dry Gin, the opportunities to host and engage bartenders came thick and fast. Stu emphasised the need to build and deepen our relationships with the on-trade (bars and restaurants), and the Vanguard team leveraged their greatest asset beyond the gin itself: the proximity of our distillery and our co-founder and distiller Cameron. It might seem like a small and obvious thing looking back, but the reality in 2014 was that few bartenders or spirits retailers had ever experienced world-class gin-making close up.
Separately, on 9 June 2015, Qantas announced that Rockpool Group, led by the brilliant Neil Perry, would be taking over leadership for food and drinks everywhere from its lounges to its in-flight service. We’d already started to build a relationship with Qantas, with our gins served in their first-class lounges, but this was an opportunity to take this modern Australian relationship to the next level.
It took Stu exactly a day to see what that opportunity could be: a Bartender Series gin made with Neil’s Rockpool Group mixologists and served exclusively in Qantas lounges and across the Rockpool Group venues. Cam and I agreed instantly, and Stu went to work connecting the dots to set up the opportunity.
We also partnered with people who ran brilliant hospitality businesses, ranging from the beer- and music-inspired Sticky Carpet Gin we made to celebrate the reopening of the grand old Espy Hotel in Melbourne’s St Kilda to the pair of Midday and Midnight Gins we made to celebrate the Merivale family’s iconic venues in Sydney’s drinks scene.
We made small runs of gins to celebrate the reopening of Peter Gilmore’s Quay (QQQQ Gin) and the tenth birthday of Coda in Melbourne. And we partnered with modern Australian icons, such as the chocolate makers at Koko Black, the body scrub legends at Frank Body and the skincare and storytelling geniuses at Go-To Skincare.
Each of these collaborations had multiple impacts throughout our business and our brand. Each new gin gave us a new story to tell, a new process to celebrate, a new drink to share. Plus, each new collaborator gave us access to a fresh audience and fanbase (and by choosing our partners carefully, we always found an audience that was glad to meet Four Pillars). Lastly, each partnership and launch was an excuse for a party, an experience, an activation, an event or a pop-up.
But, perhaps most influential of all was our decision to collaborate with other craft gin distillers around the world. On face value, we might have seen these other craft gin-makers as competitors, but it was pretty obvious to us that we all had a common enemy (big, global gin brands and their corporate owners) and we all had lots in common (a desire to craft delicious gins that were unique to our places in the world), so why not trade ideas and create something special together?
First up was the Santamania distillery in Madrid, where Cam combined our signature Australian botanicals with their passion for more savoury notes to make Cousin Vera’s Gin. From Spain, we moved to Sweden where Jon Hilgren’s Hernö distillery was making (we thought) the best gin in the northern hemisphere.
The result was Dry Island Gin, with the blue- and-yellow label earning it the nickname ‘the Ikea gin’ from many of our customers. From there we went to Japan and made Changing Seasons Gin with Alex Davies, the master distiller at The Kyoto Distillery. It was Alex who introduced Cameron to the power and flavour of yuzu (an East Asian citrus), leading first to a Rare Dry Gin variation using fresh Victorian yuzu and then later to our sensational Fresh Yuzu Gin, now part of the Four Pillars permanent range.
We released Changing Seasons Gin just as the first Australian COVID lockdowns were taking hold. And the ongoing challenges of COVID meant that our next Distiller Series collaboration (with Stranger & Sons of Goa in India) had to be conducted entirely over Zoom. The result of all the trading of botanical ideas over the interwebs and through the postal system was Spice Trade Gin.
And then, with travel privileges returned, we finally made it over to visit Tom Warner at Warner’s Gin in sunny Northamptonshire, where we agreed to trade some of our iconic Shiraz fruit in return for some of his signature rhubarb. The result (our most recent Distiller Series) was Green Apple & Rhubarb Gin, where we added fresh apples, a distillery-made apple juice and a distillery-made apple cider to create a gin that was like an apple crumble in a glass.
Looking back at all the awards we have won over the past five years, I believe that, while our bartender and brand collaborations drove huge growth for our brand in Australia, it’s been these collaborations with other craft distillers and gin-makers that has helped cement Four Pillars’ reputation as, arguably, the most influential craft gin producer in the world right now.
Edited extract from Lessons from Gin: Business the Four Pillars Way by Matt Jones (Wiley $34.95), available at all leading retailers.