Global Gold Local Blue at Sunshine & Sons
Nil Desperandum just beat the world for rum. Weeks later, it turned parochial with 480 bottles of blueberry gin. Words by John Caruso
Monday nights in Melbourne rarely mean much to anyone outside Melbourne. This one meant a great deal to a shed full of stainless steel on Nambour Connection Road, Woombye, where a small team had spent two years waiting to find out whether its rum made with organic Queensland sugarcane and a lot of patience could hold up against the world.
Melbourne Royal opened its Australian International Spirits Awards to the global market for the first time in its twelve year history, which meant the competition got harder. Nil Desperandum, distilled in Woombye, walked out with the Champion Australian Distiller (Medium) trophy and the Raymond ‘Spike’ Dessert III Trophy for Best Rum, plus four gold medals, against a global field.
The distiller’s trophy is the harder of the two to win honestly. It’s calculated across a distillery’s three highest-scoring exhibits, recognising a whole range rather than a hero product. The golds came from The Triple Six in the Overproof Rum, Dark class, and from Special, The Tropical Temptress and The Sherry Bomb in Underproof Rum, Dark. Three of those are single-barrel releases of 101 bottles each from The 1871 Club. Special is the one you can walk in and buy.
It’s worth being clear about what ‘beating the world’ means here. Rum has spent four centuries being defined by the Caribbean, and most Australian producers have settled for a junior role in that story, content to be judged against each other rather than against Jamaica, Barbados or Guyana. This year put Nil Desperandum in the same room and the team came away with more gongs than most. Not bad for a rum made with sub-tropical, organic Queensland sugar cane that’s not grown near the equator.
It’s the second time in three years Nil Desperandum has taken the Best Rum trophy outright, which starts to look less like good fortune and more like a habit.
Matt Hobson, founder and chief imagineer of Nil Desperandum, said to win The Raymond ‘Spike’ Dessert III Trophy for the second time in three years, and to be named Champion Australian Distiller against such accomplished competitors, was incredibly humbling.
“We imagine Spike would be proud that an Australian Certified Organic rum, showcasing Queensland sugar cane and molasses, wild fermented, sub-tropically matured and, importantly, unsweetened, has wowed the judges,” he said. “And that a brand with a big heart and big dreams, just like him, has won in front of some incredible whisky and gin makers.
“It’s not easy striving every day to make Australia’s Finest Rum, but we love doing it.”
Head Distiller Adam Chapman, whose fingerprints are on every barrel, was characteristically more interested in method than medal.
“The distiller trophy is judged across three rums, and the rum trophy on one, so between them they cover everything we do,” he said. “Wild ferment, organic Queensland molasses, nothing added after the barrel, that’s the whole method,
and it held up.”
There’s a version of this story that stops at the trophy cabinet: local distillery, global recognition, cue the champagne. But the more interesting version sits in the fortnight after the win, when this Sunshine Coast distiller with genuine international bragging rights chose to spend their energy on 480 bottles to raise funds for a blueberry festival in a town of a few thousand people. Gold medals travel well. So, it turns out, does good manners.
The Sunshine & Sons Blueberry Gin is a strange little thing, in the best sense. Fresh Mundubbera blueberries were crushed and steeped in the distillery’s classic gin base for six weeks, long enough for the fruit to hand over its colour along with its flavour. What lands in the glass is a genuine ruby-blue, no dye, no shortcut, just anthocyanin doing what it does when left alone. Juniper and cassia bark still do the structural work underneath, so it drinks like a gin that happens to be berry-forward rather than a cordial wearing a gin’s clothes.
It’s been timed to feature at the Mundubbera Blueberry Festival at the end of September, with proceeds supporting the local group behind it.
Serve it simply, there’s little else to do: over ice with a good tonic and a lemon twist, or a handful of fresh blueberries if you want the colour to do double duty.
The Blueberry Gin lands end of September, available at the distillery door in Woombye and online while stock lasts, which for a run this size won’t be long. It’s the latest in a line of handcrafted small batch gins using local and native ingredients such as yuzu, dragonfruit, elderflower and more.
The Woombye distillery housing the multi-award-winning Nil Desperandum and Sunshine & Sons is open 7 days from 10am. Head along for tastings, tours and why not indulge in a Cocktail Masterclass?
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