Spirit of Craft (SOCraft) Awards 2025/26 – Our Award Winning Gins
VIDEO: Interviewing us about our distillery and our reaction on hearing about our SOCraft Awards wins
Video script:
Sarah:
So over the many years Ray and I have been together, we have had a lot of experience, including in hospitality and restaurants. and since moving to our property in Gaven, we’re now making our beautiful spirits including gin, which came initially from our dragon fruit grove for making our pink gin.
As a herbalist, I love what I do here at Artisans Secret in the garden, sourcing different botanicals that I’ve been growing. We’ve got a wide range such as citrus, dragon fruit and natives. In my herb garden I have companion planting as well as I like to have the best plants that can keep away the aphids and other pests, to create a really nice healthy environment for our herbs to grow in.
Ray:
What I love most about the distilling is it’s so technical. And I love technical things that you can get your teeth into learning. It’s very artistic. The way Sarah adds the botanicals together, you can make a variety of quality spirits. And depending on your ingredients, it comes out wonderfully.
The process that we like to go through here when making our Artisans Secret gin, is we actually brew from the grain. So we make our own base spirit. Very few Australian distilleries make their own base spirit. I like to use wheat and oats. The oats give it a really nice mouthfeel and a unique flavour as well. By doing this, we’ve got our own style of neutral spirit, and to that we add our botanicals and make our gins.
Sarah:
So over the last couple of days, Ray and I have just been on cloud nine. We still are! We’ve received awards for three of our gins. We weren’t expecting to get anything other than a bit of feedback from the judges to help us along the way on our distilling journey.
Ray:
Spirit of Craft (SOCraft) Awards are only in their second year, but they’re very prestigious. They actually open the gateway to the Asian market, which is quite exciting. People come from all over the world to enter their spirits. They had twenty judges, all highly qualified, all blinded so they don’t know what they are tasting, and then they mark it.
We were amazed with the awards we got. We took three of the twenty five awards…international awards! Couldn’t believe it. My jaw is still on the floor in the office and we’ve been walking on air ever since. I haven’t come down yet. It’s amazing.
At the moment we’re only making up to 400 litres of alcohol a month. With popularity increasing due to the awards, we’re really going to have to up our ante and start producing a little bit more.
Sarah:
We’ve been talking about lots of different plans for maybe some other types of spirits as well. With our gin, we’re making sure that we are keeping up so that we can have the capacity to meet new orders coming in. So from there, the sky’s the limit.
