It’s hard to believe it was barely four years ago that Corinna Kovner and Felix Clark released their very first bottling of Ester Dry Gin. The Sydney-based couple’s rise to the top of the craft spirit scene in the time since has been a rapid and well-deserved one given the outrageously high calibre of their output. And it just keeps getting better.
Not long ago, they added an Old Tom Gin to their line-up, which will knock your socks off – a first-rate riff on the sweeter 18th century English style that they pack with citrus, perfume with jasmine flower and round out with macadamia. Glorious stuff. They’re also proving their wingspan stretches well beyond the realm of gin with a handful of new pre-release products they’re calling the Ester Tester Series. Cute.
The Spiced Cane Spirit has already made a huge splash, scooping up the gong for the World’s Best Spiced Cane Spirit at the 2024 World Rum Awards. Easy to see why. It steers well clear of synthetic ‘spiced rum’ clichés and goes big on orange, ginger, nutmeg and hibiscus, calling on honey and golden syrup for nuanced sweetness. Its base, the White Cane Spirit, also won big, taking home the trophy for the World's Best Unaged Pot Still Cane Spirit. Up front it’s all tropical, grassy, agricole-style funk, while the back is gently smoky and spicy. Both have been released in batches of only 50 bottles, so you know what to do…
They’ve also added a Trashy Triple Sec to the fold, using spent orange peels from a Marrickville coffee roaster and piling on the citrus flavour by adding finger limes, lemons and mandarins. Simply put, it is a gauntlet thrown to all the tragic orange liqueurs out there. It also forms the base of new apéritif called Alternativo Aperativo. Kovner and Clark say it sits somewhere between Campari and Aperol, but we say it’s worlds better than both, with a proper sense of bitterness and lots of native Australian character care of rosella, Davidson’s plum and anise myrtle.