NOW EXPERIENCING:5 new spirits on the bar cart of your most on-trend friend
Hit List|Spirits|Gin|Tequila

5 new spirits on the bar cart of your most on-trend friend


Read time 5 Mins

Posted 26 Oct 2023

By
Alexandra Whiting


Margot Robbie’s gin and Kendall Jenner’s tequila included.

Some people are always up on what’s new, noteworthy and buzzy – and some of us are their friends. If you fall into the latter category, welcome to a cheat sheet of the bottles those zeitgeist watchers will be pouring in your cup over the coming months and chatting your ear off about. This time, you’ll know about it first. Huzzah! Below, we round up the five new spirits everyone’s obsessing over right now.
Papa Salt Coastal Gin bottle with a glass of gin

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1. A gin that tastes like Byron Bay

Since time immemorial, mates have sat around the backyard, dreaming about what it would be like to craft their own gin together. For most of us, it stays a pipedream, but when you’re Margot Robbie (with four equally passionate film industry friends), you make it a reality. After five years and 59 variations, this gin-loving group have released Papa Salt Coastal Gin, distilled at the 100% zero waste Lord Byron Distillery in Byron Bay. The finished product is nothing short of exceptional, with proudly Aussie flavours of pink peppercorn, roasted wattleseed and a distinct saltiness from oyster shell. The aqua blue, cork-stop bottle looks and feels like sea glass – very coastal grandma chic, which, btw, is a total compliment.

2. The Aussie Double Malt Whisky

Archie Rose Gin is a national treasure at this point, but the distillery has been expanding into other spirits, known as their Fundamentals range. Joining their vodka, rum and whisky (they also do great premixed cocktails), Double Malt Whisky is their newest addition. The combination of single malt and rye malt whisky made with heritage rye and barley malts grown in NSW, it’s distilled in copper and aged in old sherry and bourbon cases, as well as new oak casks for a layered complex taste. It all makes for an approachably delicious dram to suit whisky lovers and non-believers alike.
Double Malt Whisky and a glass on a ledge

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818 Tequila bottle with glasses and lemon

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3. The toast of reality TV tequila

Kendall Jenner (the fashion model of the Kardashian-Jenner clan) has a tequila, and it gets air-time every season of The Kardashians – Kendall likes her privacy but being on a reality show requires a bit of sharing, ya know? 818 Tequila also starred in the latest season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills as a cause of contention when Lisa Rinna asked to try “my friend Kendall Jenner’s tequila”, instead of the one by her friend Kathy Hilton (who she was with). Kathy was very offended and drama ensued. Bravo-verse aside, this blanco tequila is very nice – and now you can finally get it in Australia! Bright and light, it’s honeyed in oak barrels to give it a nice sweet finish, and it’s genuinely delicious in a Margarita.

4. The rum-influenced whisky

Jura Rum Cask Finish Single Malt Scotch Whisky might be from an island off Scotland, but it’s got jungle vibes thanks to the Caribbean rum casks the single malt is matured in. What results is a vibrant and sweet drink with notes of toasted coconut, mango, banana and vanilla fudge. Yum. Jura Whisky is really making a name for itself in the spirits scene, not least because it’s the group effort of the 212-strong community of Jury. Every member contributes to the production. It’s giving The Banshees of Inisherin but Scots not Irish, and 2023 not 1923, and way, way less bleak. This bottle has been popular in the UK and now it’s newly available in Australia.
Jura Rum Cask Finish Single Malt Scotch Whisky

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Hendrick’s Flora Adora with glasses

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5. If Shakespeare’s most fun work was a gin

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if you’ve never read it (or seen the Michelle Pfeiffer movie), is a wild romp of forest flirting and frivolity between nymphs, fairies, some Athenians and a man slowly morphing into a donkey. That energy is in Hendrick’s Flora Adora. A Scottish gin, it’s garden fresh with an aroma of just-cut flowers and herbs. Rather than doing straight flavoured gins when the flavoured spirit boom happened, Hendrick’s has done a clever and elegant job of releasing limited and curated bottles (marked “From our Cabinet of Curiosities”) that tell a story, an experience, and a new way of enjoying gin. And what they’re putting down, the cool kids are picking up.
Get inspired about mixing up these spirits with our collection of cocktail recipes, which you can search by key ingredient. 
image credits: Charlie Hawks (photography), Bridget Wald (styling).