Research backs Australian farmers growing juniper berries to support the nations gin industry

Gin is an incredibly popular spirit in Australia, but the main ingredient, juniper berries, is mostly imported. Farmer Lucy Vincent is on a mission to change that. Most of them are made with juniper that comes from overseas, so Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, those places. There are three gins in Australia that are made with Australian juniper only. Juniper berries are actually the female seed cones of a type of conifer. They are the essential ingredient of gin and give the spirit its distinctive flavour. Oh, that tastes like gin. Lucy and Bruce planted their first 300 trees across their 151 hectare property in 2018. Now they have close to 600 trees and what they think is one of the largest establishing juniper orchards in Australia. In their third year of harvesting, Lucy admits they’re still finding their feet. First year was kind of funny. We got 2.2 kilos, which you know was like having another child, really exciting but commercially useless. And 2nd year, massive increase, we got just over 60 kilos. Master Distiller Gavin Hughes runs the award-winning North of Eden Gin based in nearby Bega. He decided to join forces with Lucy after she paid a visit to his distillery so to be able to take Australian grown juniper. Grown within 100 kilometres from here near Bombay is just a fantastic thing. It lowers our carbon footprint but makes it a truly Australian gin. After extensive experimenting last year, Gavin launched his first gin using Lucy’s Berries and has just released the second. He believes there’s a huge difference in taste. We’re delighted because the Piney fresh note is just so clean and bright, so much brighter than what was before. Even though it was a great gin before and it meddled at, you know, the largest competitions in the world, we actually think this has taken it to the next level. I thought the original version, which had Macedonian berries, I said it was like pastels, you know, the pastel kind of colour. And then the same style of gin made from our juniper was like fluoros.