Distilling Wisdom

This article was featured in the Elements Journal, a boutique publication published in Margaret River. Cover photography by Paris Hawken.

Back in the good old days, when alcohol was a medicine and people died at the ripe old age of childbirth, gin had something of a rep for causing mayhem on the streets of Britain.

The vexed history of this seemingly sweet spirit was brought to my attention by Cameron Syme, a downright legend who ditched life as a high-flying lawyer to start the Great Southern Distilling Company (AKA Limeburners) in Albany, 13 years ago.

In 2015 he started the Margaret River Distilling Company, which Cameron calls a ‘centre of excellence’ for gin in the South West. It’s 9am and we’re sitting on a timber deck overlooking the bush, and a guy shovelling sand.

Cameron needs coffee because I made the rookie error of scheduling a morning interview with someone who meddles with gin recipes into the wee hours of the morning. He’s being cool about it though.

I ask him for the history lesson I always wanted at school.

“Gin became really popular in England, mostly thanks to a King called Sir William of Orange or William III,” he says.
“Sir William popularised gin during the thirty-year war between England and Holland.”

Cameron explains that during the war, British troops stationed in Holland took a real liking to the sweet tasting spirit.

“By that stage there was this Juniper flavoured spirit [gin] that they’d make, and the English soldiers there were having shots before they went into battle,” he says.

“This is where the term Dutch courage comes from.”

After the war, British soldiers took their Dutch courage home, and the good folk of England thought it was pretty great too. So great, in fact, they started brewing it themselves.

Thanks to lax distilling laws at the time, it was particularly easy (and cheap) to make gin from the comfort of your home. This led to gin becoming even more popular, especially in London.

The Brewer’s Association was not too stoked on England’s newfound penchant for gin, so they rolled up their sleeves and did some old-fashioned damage with the oldest trick in the book, propaganda.

These days, a damning viral Facebook montage is enough to put any business or D-grade celebrity out of favour. Back in the 1600’s, naming and shaming meant commissioning an artwork that ‘painted’ you in a bad light.

This is exactly what the Brewer’s Association did when they commissioned William Hogarth to illustrate the debaucherous, and now infamous artwork, ‘Gin Lane’.

“The illustration was either produced or commissioned by the Brewer’s Association to demonise gin,” says Cameron.
“Whoever could produce the cheapest and strongest alcohol would make the most money, and the beer brewers were trying to make sure tax on gin was increased, so they sort of demonised it to justify to Parliament that they could increase the tax on gin and make beer cheaper.”

Google the piece and you’ll see a woman with her shirt open swilling gin, while her baby falls from a staircase and the people behind her vomit, drink and fornicate. The message is clear – gin causes social degradation. In simpler terms, drink gin and you’re a derro.

But the artistic manipulation didn’t stop there. Cameron tells us that Hogarth was also commissioned to create ‘Beer Street’ in the very same year. As you’d expect, the second piece showcases the finer culture associated with swilling beer.

“There was another picture commissioned showing ‘Beer Street’, which was all very healthy and this is what the workers drink, and that was the problem.”

Unfortunately for gin, the politicians bought it, and tax on the spirit increased significantly. Cameron points out that while there was a real problem with alcohol and crime on the streets of London, it wasn’t really fair to make gin the fall guy.

“Some of the figures I recall reading, in London in the 17 and 1600’s – it was something like 80 per cent or 60 per cent of houses were licensed to actually serve gin, so it was this massive problem in society if you like, because too many people were drinking,” Cameron explains.
“And there was no minimum age for alcohol, so you had kids who were 10, 11 or 12 drinking all day every day, because of course they were poor so that fed the cycle of crime and all these issues.”

Even today, gin is considered a lot more hard-core than its yeasty archenemy. Cameron says this misunderstanding around gin being a ‘demon drink’ continues, in part, because of what happened in England during those early days.

“It [the attitude] still sticks to our society now, you know, ‘I can’t drink Gin because it makes me cry’, I hear people say that,” says Cameron.
“Well gin to me is a flavoured vodka.”

Wait. Gin is flavoured vodka?

“A citrus vodka would be a gin if it had juniper berries in it,” explains Cameron.
“When you make a gin you start with a very high strength spirit or industrial strength vodka, and then re-distil it in the presence of botanicals, then you extract those flavours and put them back into the alcohol.”

If you want to learn a whole lot more about gin, and get really drunk on stuff you made yourself, you may be interested in Giniversity – a gin master class held at Margaret River Distillery, where participants actually distil their own bottle of the good stuff.

The class offers two courses – one using the traditional distilling method, and a shorter course, where people can create a compound gin, which involves adding essential oils to a high strength spirit.

If you want the authentic gin making experience, go with the longer one. Cameron says this is where the real magic happens.

“Doing the compound gin, yeah it’s gin, but it’s not quite the same as messing around with botanicals to do it,” he says.
“The difference with doing a distilled gin is that it’s less exacting; there’s more variability, like are we running the still hard or slower or faster and how does that impact it?”

Before Cameron started messing around with botanicals and full strength spirits, he worked as an accountant, and then a lawyer. Even so, his education in spirits started in high school, when he was suspended for drinking whiskey at 16.

“I remember one of my teachers saying, ‘you’ll be lucky to drive a rubbish truck’”, he says.
“I didn’t drink much then, in fact, I promised my mum after I got suspended that I wouldn’t.”

Cameron remembers that he barely saw his dad drink ‘a beer a month’.

“When I grew up to be 18, all my mates were, as a lot of Australian youths do, enjoying a drink,” he recalls.
“But for me I didn’t like beer and I didn’t like wine at that stage, and we didn’t have the great craft beers that we do now. It was very much Emu Export, Emu Bitter, VB, Swan Gold.”

The acidity of wine didn’t agree with Cameron’s palate either, so spirits became his go-to beverage.

“I’ve developed my palate and I love a great wine and I like fantastic craft beers now, but if I put my hand up, bourbon and coke was what I was drinking,” he admits.
“When your taste buds mature, you sort of move into appreciating spirits for what they are, rather than for the mixers.”

Exploring the flavour of quality spirits became a passion for Cameron, and at 18, he started wondering why there weren’t any whiskey distilleries in Australia. Perhaps ironically, it was a story from his old man that pushed Cameron to open one himself.

“I knew that I had those Scottish roots and through talking to my dad, you know he said to me, ‘Cameron, back in Scotland, the family had an illegal still out in the glen, out in the bush, and their boiler for the still started to wear out so they needed to replace it’”, he says.
“English police were asking people to ‘dob in your local distiller and get a reward’, so our family stripped their still out, took the still away from the distillery, left the boiler there, and the police went through and paid them the reward money.”

His family used the money to buy a new boiler and set up a distillery somewhere else.

“My research now was that a lot of Scottish people did that because it was one way to thumb your nose back at the English Government,” Cameron said.

Get educated at Giniversity in Margaret River. Enrol at www.distillery.com.au.