OK. It’s not really a garage. It’s a distillery but it’s behind the house and looks like it could have, at one time, been a really well built, grand garage. But because it’s behind the house and a driveway leads up to it, it could be called a “garage.”
I’ve spent almost three months wandering around Australia seeking out small, family-owned distilleries and getting to know the people making unique spirits. I’ve been to distilleries in forests with magical springs, distilleries in industrial warehouses, distilleries spread out on beautiful, formal estates and now I’m in an enclave of Sydney called Botany because it’s wrapped around Botany Bay which gets it’s name from an interesting event which led to the name of this distillery. I’ll get to that in a bit.
Australia is a fascinating place. As an American, I find it to be a bit of an alternative universe. You know those si-fi stories where you wake up and everything is just a bit different but mostly the same and you figure out you’ve been sapped into a new reality.
That’s Australia. Everything is similar to things back home, but a bit different.
The animals. The scents, The flavors. The wall plugs. Everything is a surprise to an eternal foreigner.
The animals. Ya gotta love the wacky animals in this universe. The birds, the hopping and waddling creatures and the platypus. I’m sorry America, you can’t come close. Sure, you have raccoons but certainly nothing like a platypus. And kangaroos and wallabies. Fantastic creatures. I’ve found Australians are obsessed with bears. Not the sleepy koalas that snore away in the gum trees. Australians are obsessed with real, American bears. Brown, black and Grizzly. The concept of being eaten by a bear has come up in multiple conversations, enough times that I can see a pattern here. I’ve never had a terrifying encounter with a bear while camping or hiking except once and it was more cautionary than terrifying. I was camping on my motorcycle in Grand Teton National Park and the campground was empty except for one guy who had taken an uber there from the closest town. He was standing in the middle of the road with a big can of bear mace, scared to death. He told me he keeps seeing a momma bear with two cubs in the campground and it left me a bit shook. I would have normally hung my hammock between two trees, but I imagined myself looking like a sausage hanging in a butcher shop and instead opted to sleep in my tent.
But the electrical plugs.
There is an on-off switch on every wall plug.
Safety, they say.
Huh?
Every appliance I’d plug into a wall has an on/off switch. Or I can just not plug it in.
“If a child sticks a metal object into the wall plug…”
Then that would be survival of the fittest, wouldn’t it?
And who’s to say that that same child wouldn’t flip that little switch before sticking his fork into the socket?
But when you plug something into the wall plug, you have to turn on the little switch for it to work. You already plugged it, that should be enough. So if something is plugged in, that should be enough for the toaster to work. But no… for safety, you have to give the plug permission to actually do it’s only job.
Nobody is going to use the socket switch once something is plugged in.
“The lamp is plugged in, but not working…”
I’ll move the couch and get on my hands and knees to make sure the switch is on for the light to work.
Silly.
Look at how far I’ve wandered off from The Magnificent Martini.
I’m currently at Banks and Solander Distillery in Botany, Australia, which isn’t a separate city, really, but a section of Sydney.
I got here yesterday from a suburb of Sydney by train. Sydney has a great public transportation system. The subway and trains and trolleys and buses can get you anywhere, easily and comfortably. The system is pretty easy to figure out, and the trains are beautiful, clean and quiet. I’ve been here a week without a car and dragging around a hundred pounds of stuff and it’s been simple.
I’ve been wandering around for coming up on three months, and I was about to book a flight home when Crafty Field said no, I’ve got some friends you should meet. I’ve yet to write much about Crafty yet, but we are all within Two Degrees of Separation of Crafty. He seems to know every living being in Australia that’s involved in distilling. Everyone knows Crafty, and one has to wonder from what secret universal source of energy he sprang.
So I held off on my flight home to meet the folks at Banks and Solander, and I’m glad I did, for it was there that I encountered The Magnificent Martini.
I can pin the alternative universe idea on why it’s so magnificent.
There are plants here, botanicals, that don’t exist anywhere else. And some of them got moved around. Eucalyptus, known here as Gum Trees, is all over California. Beautiful, huge, fast-growing trees that fall over, drop limbs and kill people, and burn like crazy. And they smell wonderful. Apparently, there are a couple hundred species here, and they all smell good.
But so many wonderful plants grow here that smell and taste wonderful. And a lot of them end up adding magic to Australian gins.
How is it I’ve never heard folks back home praising Australian gin?
Step up, folks.
I’ve had gin from all over and never had anything like this. So many unique flavors and scents that are utterly unexpected.
I got here last night when Marty picked me up from the central train station and we went to a local brewpub for a beer and a pizza. The neighborhood of Botany is a mixed-use neighborhood with a mix of houses and small businesses.
When Marty and Ed bought the house here, the original idea was to rent the house out and turn the shop in back into a motorcycle shop.
Again, that “I have to start a distillery” bug bit, and the motorcycle shop turned into a distillery instead. They took a trip to Tasmania and talked to some of my Tasmanian distillery friends and decided to take the leap.
That’s some magic that turns a motorcycle shop into a distillery… There are still two motorcycles in the distillery, which adds to “The Ultimate Mancave” feel of a room with a big wooden table and a gleaming chrome still.
It’s pretty damned cool.
I have an overstuffed garage with a big oak tree growing through the front wall and up through the roof and a big Harley Davidson Electra Glide and an ancient French Citroen DS both parked inside, and I suppose that’s kinda cool but nothing like THIS garage!
And they have a forklift named Guido. Something I will never acquire.
So there is a distillery in the garage behind the house, and it doubles as a cellar door where they do tastings.
This is a pretty unique distillery.
And my, oh my, they make some great stuff.
That martini.
They make a gin with flavors that you’ll have never encountered before.
Lemon Myrtle, Tasmanian Pepperberry, Roasted Wattle Seed, Coriander, Orange Zest, Green Cardamon, Star Anise, and of course, Juniper.
We’re all used to the Juniper, but everything else is a totally new sensation.
As a frozen martini, it’s a big leap away from anything familiar.
It’ll change flavors multiple times when you take that first sip.
It’s unique enough that James Bond would be taken aback at the baccarat table in Monte Carlo on his first sip and exclaim in a very not James Bondy kind of way, “Whoa Dude, this is amazing… I’m shaken AND stirred…”
I wish there was a way to describe all those flavors together. There just isn’t. I had that martini last night and woke up this morning thinking about the flavors. It was memorable but indescribable.
Interesting concept. Memorable, yet indescribable.
And it was born in a garage.
How can you taste it?
If you’re in Australia, go buy some. Order it online from Banks and Solander or get it from a bottle shop. If you’re not in Australia, you’ll just wander through life never knowing how good a martini born in a garage in Botany, Australia, can really be…
And I almost forgot about the name. Banks and Solander. It sounds like a place you’d order a custom-made cravat from who also supplies the Queen with bespoke Queen-level stuff, but it’s not. The name came from two guys who were responsible for a voyage by Captain Cook to conduct scientific studies around the Southern Hemisphere. The expedition spent time in what is now known as Botany Bay, and there were artists aboard the ship who collected and illustrated the plants they found. Banks was a wealthy gadabout who invested in the voyage, and Solander was a scientist. Based on the idea of using unique Australian flavors in all their wares, it makes a lot of sense.
And if you’re ever lucky enough to taste their gin, you’ll lose your 007 cool and exclaim, “No garage anywhere on the planet has ever created something like this!”
