Prohibition Liquor Co.
"We wanted to make the best drinking martini gin we could create..."
- Adam Carpenter and Wes Heddles, Founders
Welcome to the world of the bootleggers of the 1920s, brought to you in a thoroughly contemporary way by Artisan Food Selections Australia. We’re pleased to share with you our international award-winning Original Prohibition Gin, which we’ve created to echo the small-batch craftsmanship of those original bootleggers – but with exceptional quality and without the risk of jail time.
Founded by Adam Carpenter and Wes Heddles, who shared a passion for the world’s best gin, Prohibition Liquor Co’s Original Gin contains 11 botanicals including juniper, lemon myrtle, wormwood, pink peppercorns, coriander seeds, ginger, blood orange, ruby red grapefruit, green tea, lavender and vanilla.
Developed in collaboration with the expert know-how of Brendan Carter from Applewood Distillery in the Adelaide Hills, it is bottled and labelled by hand at the company’s base in Adelaide.
Adam, who also runs graphic design company Toolbox, which designed the gin’s exceptional packing, and Wes, whose professional background is in the food franchise industry, refer to themselves as bootleggers.
“We believed that bootlegging philosophy for us was right. Gin’s the fastest growing spirit in the world and this growth in gin demand is unforeseen since prohibition days so it’s like the new era prohibition,” Adam says. “From a branding perspective it was playing on the mystique of the prohibition era but still being contemporary and high quality.”
Prohibition Gin’s primary goal was to create a seriously drinkable gin. “We designed it as a martini gin”, says Adam, “that’s how we would drink gin, so we wanted to make the best drinking martini gin we could create.”
Apart from the extensive list of botanicals, one of the big flavours to be incorporated into the gin was wormwood, which is also used to create absinthe. For many years a banned product, it played in nicely and balanced the flavour well.
Then there are pink peppercorns, which in pirate days were considered ‘black gold’ and a trading currency. Ruby red grapefruit and blood orange are references to blood spilt during times of prohibition and make a perfect accompaniment for the other botanicals, with a dash of lemon myrtle to give it a truly Australian dimension.