THREE
Riding the fourth gin wave

I've already noted that the distilling landscape in Australia was still in its infancy, but this is probably the right time to quickly recap the state of the gin category in 2012 more broadly. As I saw it (thanks to the rapid education I received from Stu and Cam), there had been four waves of gin, each with different levels of maturity, and only three of them had come to Australia at any meaningful scale.

The first was classic London Dry Gin, aka nana's favourite tipple - think Gordons gin. This is the gin that gave me such a horrifyingly bad hangover back in 1998 that it put me off gin for another four years (in hindsight, it was my fault, not the gin's).

On a good day, great London Dry Gin smells like a pine forest; on a bad day, it smells and, arguably, tastes like Pine O Cleen. London Dry Gin is traditionally made to precise and narrow specifications and, typically, with just a handful of botanicals, led and dominated by juniper. It's as old as the hills, with benchmarks including Gordon's (launched in 1769), Tanqueray (1830) and Beefeater (1863).

The late twentieth century saw a second, new wave of gin led by Bombay Sapphire (launched in 1987) and Tanqueray No. Ten (launched in 2000). These gins were still technically London Dry, but lighter in style, more botanically focused and often used vapour infusion to achieve a more delicate flavour profile. With gins like Bombay on the scene in the 1990s, gin was starting to get its mojo back, but it needed one more push from a new brand with a very novel approach.

Hendrick's was launched in 1999, and represented the third style of gin: contemporary. Using two stills, two signature botanicals (cucumber and rose) and one signature serve (a G&T with cucumber), Hendrick's quickly became a dominant player in the new category of super-premium contemporary gin.

By 2013, Hendrick's was dominant in Australia, commanding over 60 per cent of the super-premium gin category (gin sold at over $70 a bottle). Fortunately for us, Hendrick's domination of the category was helping to liberate drinkers' ideas of what gin could be. And this was further augmented by the arrival of a key non-gin player on the scene: Fever-Tree. I'll talk a bit more about what makes Fever-Tree (and good tonic in general) so special in the G&T drinks break on page 90.

Fever-Tree was part of a drinks revolution that was setting the scene for the fourth gin wave, elevating the gin and tonic with a focus on using quality tonic. Meanwhile, the rise of hugely influential bartenders, like Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske and Dick Bradsell, was helping to bring back the popularity of classic (often gin-led) cocktails.

Now that twentieth-century trends of vodka, flair bartending and tragically bad G&Ts were all behind us, a new century was bringing a gin boom, a resurgence of classic cocktails made with a few exceptional ingredients. The G&T was once again seen as a drink of choice for people under the age of 80, all of which set the stage for what was coming.

The fourth gin wave (which is still rolling on as I type) brought with it a new world of locally made (but globally famous) craft gin, with Sipsmith in London as its champion. This was the movement that had not yet come to Australia, and, to be fair, no one was clamouring for it. While there were some inspiring early movers in this space, most notably a gin called The West Winds Distillers from WA, I don't think anyone was losing sleep over the lack of a great Aussie craft gin.

In short, there was an opportunity here. And, if we played our cards right, we had the chance to be at the front of this fourth craft gin wave in Australia. But, we also needed to be realistic that we were about to start solving a problem that no one was asking to be solved.

Maybe that wasn't a bad thing. As the strategist Alex Smith has noted, sometimes listening to customers is the last thing you should do, as customers can only tell you what they want based on what they know (leading, as Alex puts it, to commodification of your offer and distraction from your original strategy).

So what did we decide to make? In short, we decided to make a modern Australian gin. After all, why would you set up a gin distillery 16 000 kilometres from London and make your first move a London Dry-style gin? Again, to paraphrase Alex Smith, we did something all businesses should do (but many fear), which was to be bad at something. In our case we chose to be bad at making classic London Dry Gin.

To be fair, Cameron could have made a great London Dry Gin. The point was that he didn't even try. Because, just as we had made the decision to be uniquely focused on gin, we wanted to tighten that even further and be utterly focused on making modern Australian gin - gin we could only make because of the unique opportunities afforded to us by making gin in Australia. It was that extremely narrow definition of our focus, our craft, that ultimately spawned the extraordinary creativity that has defined Four Pillars.

Don't listen to your customers (if we had, they would have told us that they didn't need an Australian alternative to Hendrick's), choose to be bad at things (in our case, making any other spirit than gin), and place your creativity within narrow constraints (we were modern Australian gin-makers working to self-imposed and highly exacting standards). These were all counterintuitive decisions we made in those early days that played a critical role in setting the long-term direction for Four Pillars. Let's just take that last one as an example: the constraint to only make gin and only make that gin in a modern Australian style.

There's nothing lazier than creativity without constraint. It allows all manner of off-strategy ideas (that the business has neither the right nor the ability to execute well) to distract from the core. Instead, true creative thinking comes from embracing constraints. Constraints that may, at first, seem confining, frustrating even, but which ultimately push you to places that would otherwise have never been found and explored, like combining gin with Shiraz grapes. But again, that's all in the future.

A quick recap

So we had just made our next big decisions:

• We were going to work as a trio to make gin together.
• We were only going to make gin.
• We were going to make gin in a uniquely modern Australian style.
• Cameron was going to be our master distiller and would focus on acquiring the learning and experience required to make world-class gin.
• We were going to invest in the best gin still we could find, made by CARL in Germany.
• Establishing modern Australian craft gin would take time (so we were going to need enough cash to stay in the game long enough to succeed).
• We were going to need some substantial start-up capital.

DRINKS BREAK NO.1: The (Gin) Martini

I never liked gin. In fact, my first and most abiding memory of drinking gin was throwing my guts up in the bathroom of an ex-girlfriend's house in London in 1998. Gordon's and tonic out of a pint glass was the culprit. The smell, that cloying Pine O Cleen odour, was something I felt lingering in my nostrils for weeks afterwards. And the dislike of gin stayed with me for years.

Gin's first chance for redemption came four years later in 2002, when one of New York's most iconic bars, Milk & Honey, opened in London's Soho. It was a member's bar, and I signed up immediately - not because I had the palate to appreciate the quality of the drinks being made there, but because I wanted to be part of something cool.

Little did I know that what was happening at London venues like Milk & Honey was setting the scene for an extraordinary resurgence in gin. And that, 11 years later in 2013, I would be launching a gin brand in Australia that would be the direct beneficiary of the momentum that was building back in the early 2000s in that very bar in London.

I had no idea any of that was happening. All I knew was that Milk & Honey was cool and I wasn't (but wanted to be). I knew that being a member of a Soho bar with an unmarked door on Poland Street, being ushered past a velvet curtain, being in the room and in the know felt good (and, I hoped, made me look good). And I knew that these drinks tasted good, and nothing like the Long Island iced teas of my university years.

One of the drinks that saw its reputation revived in the 2000s was the classic gin Martini (stirred, never shaken). I'd had a few vodka Martinis in my time, but the idea of gin in a Martini scared me thanks to my 1998 trauma. Fast-forward to today and I can't imagine a Martini made with anything other than gin.

At Four Pillars, we've always said that the martini is the ultimate test of a gin. It's a simple drink, but super expressive and allows almost infinite opportunities for subtle personalisation. One of the things I learned from Stu, Cam and the amazing bartenders I've spent time with at Four Pillars is that the Martini (like so many great drinks) has four key ingredients. So, yes, the gin and the vermouth are critical, but so is the ice (giving the drink both coldness and dilution) and the garnish.

Here are a few of my favourite Martini serves (and no, you don't have to make them with Four Pillars Gin, but it...