Twelfth Hour’s ‘Cloudy’ Gin a Clear Winner

After picking up three silver medals in quick succession, Twelfth Hour Distillery is riding a wave of success that they hope will lead to more Kiwi gin drinkers embracing their uniquely cloudy offering.

Even before you take your first sip, your senses are immediately awoken by the distinctive aroma of kaffir (makrut) lime, the hero botanical, once it hits your nostrils. Upon touching your lips, you can feel the oils coat your palate, hitting the tip of your tongue with the kaffir lime, then juniper and coriander seeds before a final flourish of cinnamon and sweet flavours roll down to the back of your mouth. And unlike other gins, those flavours linger on the palate, leaving a long-lasting sensation that has more than just the judges impressed.

A few ice cubes will cause a further explosion of flavour and aroma, like a depth charge in your glass, as well as revealing one more defining characteristic of this gin – it's cloudy. For the uninitiated, the thought of a cloudy gin may seem incongruent with this normally clear spirit, but it’s precisely what preserves Twelfth Hour’s unique flavour profile. And what has helped to earn them the accolades they’ve picked up in such a short amount of time.

Although it took Twelfth Hour months of experimentation to achieve the end result, the real story began at dinner between friends three and a half years ago with a very questionable looking liquid. Longtime friends and Directors of Twelfth Hour, Andrew, Pawat and Angela, were sat down to dinner one night when Pawat and Angela presented Andrew with ‘two little jars of liquid’ “I’m like “What on earth is that?” It wasn’t clear, it was sort of brown in colour, and I’m like hmmm. They hadn’t done a proper distillation on it or anything like that, so they’ve literally given me a very interesting brown liquid from mascerating the botanicals into base alcohol and going from there.” said Andrew.

Despite Pawat and Angela’s rough first attempt, however, Andrew didn’t take much convincing. “I love my gins and I love my red wines, so I was like, “Yeah, I’m completely on board... it’s taken us a hell of a lot longer than what I thought it was going to take to get the bloody stuff into the bottles. But we’re there now and it’s good.” he explained.

At the time, the New Zealand gin market was still coming into its own with only a handful of boutique distilleries around the country. And being the gin enthusiast that he was, Andrew saw an opportunity to bring something truly unique to the market “You’d probably back in 2018, estimate 15 to 20 distilleries perhaps, in the New Zealand market, and nobody had touched kaffir lime. And I just love kaffir lime, I just think it’s such a great flavour. And I said to Pawat and Ange, let’s focus on that kaffir lime, and get that as our hero.” he said.

When asked what specifically he loves about kaffir lime, Andrew said "When you taste something, it’s not just what’s in your mouth, it’s actually the smell as well... And the actual aromatics of the kaffir lime botanical are quite fragrant. We open a bottle at tastings and people are like “Oh, I can smell that already.”

As they quickly discovered, however, the process of perfecting their gin wasn’t easy, and many nights were spent past midnight (the twelfth hour) trying to achieve the ideal distillation “We did 22 iterations of that gin though, to get it to where it is, because literally there was just so many sort of intricacies. When you throw another botanical in with your kaffir lime, it can very easily overshadow it and make it go hiding in the background.” Andrew explained.

The fact that Master Distiller Pawat is from Thailand where kaffir lime is used extensively in local cuisine may be pure coincidence, but it has also presented Twelfth Hour with the perfect opportunity to strengthen their relationship with a key local supplier – Pawat's mum. All of Twelfth Hour’s kaffir limes are sourced directly from the trees on her property, which not only provides them with a consistent and reliable supply but a fresh one too "We don’t want to put in frozen botanicals, and stuff that we’ve had to freeze that we don’t have to... I think that’s something that distillers need to be aware of as well, is you need to try and figure out what is available to you at a constant, because the last thing you want to do is suddenly go s**t, we can’t get any of that product anymore.” said Andrew.

Not content with simply having a unique botanical as their hero, the trio were also determined to maximise the strength of flavour by going against the grain and choosing not to chill filter their gin “Most gins are chill filtered, which means a lot of those botanical oils are removed... A lot of people take those oils out and chill filter it to remove a lot of that, so it doesn’t go cloudy and it’s clear in the glass and it looks clean, right? But that’s where the flavour hides.” As Andrew explained further, by keeping those flavours it gives what he describes as a “big, bold, mouth feel” and allows the flavours to linger on your palate, something most New Zealand gins don’t do.

Given that the cloudy appearance is so unfamiliar among New Zealand gins, however, Andrew’s job as Head of Sales is not only to sell his gin to stockists but to also convince the gin drinking public to embrace its unique appearance “It’s up to me to explain to people why things go cloudy, and that the oils are just a normal chemical reaction and all of that kind of stuff, that I guess, is widely accepted outside of New Zealand... It’s something we’ve owned, recognised, and tell people about just so that they’re aware of how we’ve done stuff, and what it looks like and why it looks the way it does.” said Andrew.

As with any new product, the proof lies in the pudding, and following promising results in several blind taste tests in which Twelfth Hour pitted themselves against a few commercial gins, Andrew says that most of the feedback has been “great.” And even one stockist who was initially skeptical of their gin has since become an avid supporter “When I first met this person in Taupo, honestly, the grilling I got when I first walked in, he goes, “Another gin, seriously? What’s so good about this one?”… And I had a bit of a chat with him and then asked him to try it. So he tried it, and he goes “S**t, that’s good. I like that.”... So he started stocking it. And he has reorderd it multiple times since, and he says it’s the gin that he pushes all the time. So now that he’s overseeing the store down here [Christchurch] for a few weeks, he said “Yep. We’ll take a case because I know it. I know the product’s good.” The feedback from consumers has been just as positive “So, that’s great, and you get people at tastings, they just go “Wow, that’s just really different.” Because of the oils, the way they coat the palate, the kaffir lime adds a sort of freshness, it’s just a different flavour profile that I guess they’re not used to. But yeah, it’s generally really positive, which is great.”

Not only have they impressed the general public, but they’ve also impressed the critics, picking up three silver medals at three different competitions in the space of six months. Not resting on their laurels, Twelfth Hour has plans to enter further competitions abroad including The London Spirits Competition and The San Francisco World Sprits Competition, but for the time being, they remain focused on embedding their gin into the New Zealand market “We’ve got 350 stockists nationwide. So, that’s quite good, we’re pretty stoked with that amount of support we’re getting. We’re looking at how to grow the on-premise, the restaurant trade and so forth, so that encourages people to be able to taste it.”

Within the next six months, Twelfth Hour could also be expanding with at least one more Asian fusion botanical gin as well as a classic dry for use in cocktails like a Negroni.

In a blossoming local industry where boutique distilleries are seemingly cropping up every day, Twelfth Hour brings something new and exciting to the table that has captured the attention of gin enthusiasts and casual drinkers alike. And you can bet that they will continue to push on well past the twelfth hour as they gain more recognition here and abroad.

To order a bottle of Twelfth Hour’s Dry Gin and for a full list of available stockists, visit twelfthhourdistillery.co.nz

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