00:00 Gin is an incredibly popular spirit in Australia, but the main ingredient, juniper berries,
00:10 is mostly imported.
00:12 Farmer Lucy Vincent is on a mission to change that.
00:15 Most of them are made with juniper that comes from overseas, so Italy, Bulgaria, Greece,
00:22 Macedonia, those places.
00:25 There are three gins in Australia that are made with Australian juniper only.
00:32 Juniper berries are actually the female seed cones of a type of conifer.
00:36 They are the essential ingredient of gin and give the spirit its distinctive flavour.
00:41 Oh, that tastes like gin.
00:43 Lucy and Bruce planted their first 300 trees across their 151 hectare property in 2018.
00:51 Now they have close to 600 trees and what they think is one of the largest establishing
00:56 juniper orchards in Australia.
00:59 In their third year of harvesting, Lucy admits they're still finding their feet.
01:04 First year was kind of funny.
01:05 We got 2.2 kilos, which was like having another child.
01:09 Really exciting, but commercially useless.
01:12 And second year, massive increase.
01:15 We got just over 60 kilos.
01:20 Master distiller Gavin Hughes runs the award-winning North of Eden gin based in nearby Bega.
01:26 He decided to join forces with Lucy after she paid a visit to his distillery.
01:31 To be able to take Australian grown juniper, grown within 100 kilometres from here, near
01:37 Bombala, is just a fantastic thing.
01:41 It lowers our carbon footprint, but makes it a truly Australian gin.
01:47 After extensive experimenting, last year Gavin launched his first gin using Lucy's berries
01:53 and has just released the second.
01:55 He believes there's a huge difference in taste.
01:59 We're delighted because the piney fresh note is just so clean and bright, so much brighter
02:07 than what it was before.
02:09 Even though it was a great gin before and it meddled at the largest competitions in
02:13 the world, we actually think this has taken it to the next level.
02:17 I thought the original version, which had Macedonian berries, I said it was like pastels,
02:22 you know the pastel kind of colour.
02:25 And then the same style of gin made from our juniper was like flurose.
02:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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