Birthday Cheers! with Sunshine & Sons
Tony Cox discovers the best way to deal with deadlines and being confined to indoors as Tropical Cyclone Alfred teased our coastline.
What better way to kill a bit of time when on deadline and waiting for a cyclone to arrive, than with a little glug of Nil Desperandum’s Artfully Corrupted spiced rum and a few cubes of ice to get into the subject a little more intimately?! Full of delicious spices such as cardamom, cinnamon, vanilla bean, ginger, star anise, clove and nutmeg, among others, it is a terrific sipping rum over ice. It isn’t overtly sweet and defies the trend in the spiced rum category that allows dominant sweet notes of vanilla to come to the fore, much to the detriment of complexity and other flavours. The Nil Desperandum team are in the Goldilocks zone – they’ve got it just right.
And they never rest! To celebrate five years of making Australia’s first certified organic rum, Nil Desperandum’s The 1871 Club has just announced the first release for 2025 – The Famous Five – a 48% abv rum that has been aged in a former bourbon barrel that had been filled with port, emptied and then filled with rum for a minimum of five years. Notes of ground coffee and dried fruits, think dates and prunes, are to the fore. And with just 101 bottles produced you will need to move quickly.
Fresh from the trophy for Best Rum at the Australian Distilled Spirits Awards and a Gold Medal at the 2024 World Rum Awards for their Botanical Rum (amongst a swag of other awards!), the guys at Woombye continue to push the excellence envelope with a commitment to quality ingredients, including being the first Australian distillery using certified organic molasses for their rum range. They are masters at supporting local producers and creating special occasion drops mixing traditional botanicals into its award-winning gin range. Think of the Sunshine & Sons Wild Peach gin and the Dragonfruit Love Dragon Valentine’s Day special edition.
With Easter coming up, the team have released the Sunshine & Sons Hot Cross Bun limited-edition gin infusing dried fruits and fragrant spices, reminiscent of classic Easter favourites in a bottle. Mother’s Day will also see the return of Mum’s Rose Bouquet – a bouquet of roses in every glass!
With distribution in key retailers, products from both Nil Desperandum and Sunshine & Sons can be found in many parts of the country but the best way to experience both is to head to the Distillery Door for a tour, tasting, cocktail class or simply great drinks created by the onsite mixologists from 10am to 5pm, seven days a week.
The ice has melted, my glass is empty. A quick search of the booze cabinet has seen a bottle of Nil Desperandum’s First rum poke its head out – which looks a likely candidate for next cab off the rank.
Cheers and good drinking!
SPECIAL SIPS!
It wouldn’t be a special occasion without a limited-edition special sip from our favourite distillers!
Hot Cross Buns Gin
Make every day Good Friday! Smooth, rich, and brimming with warming spice and dried fruits, this is the Easter treat you never knew you needed!
HOP to it!
Mum’s Rose Bouquet Gin
With locally-grown rose petals, rose hip and rosella, mum will appreciate this fragrant drop as much as you appreciate her. Plus the label has a blank panel for a special message to your #1 mum.
Visit sunshineandsons.com.au/collections/limited-edition to order online or visit the Distillery, open 7 days from 10am.
