Four Pillars has unveiled two new citrus variations of its original Rare Dry Gin. Swapping out its trademark orange for new seasonal citruses, both gins are only available for a limited time.
Rare Dry Gin is modern, bright and big on warm orange citrus that’s known as the Four Pillars classic gin. Rarer Dry Gin is a brand-spanking-new limited-edition flavor, cumquat. Rarest Dry Gin, meanwhile, is bergamot-laden gin that will only be around for a short time.
Made with nine botanicals, plus fresh oranges, Rare Dry Gin is the backbone to Four Pillars gin. But the question has been posed (and answered) of what happens when you swap that iconic orange for a different citrus? That’s what the Rare Dry Gin variations are – curiosity distilled.
Last year, Four Pillars ran this swap-the-orange experiment with yuzu and bergamot (keeping all the other nine botanicals exactly the same) and it went down so well there’s now a year-round Fresh Yuzu Gin in the range, and bergamot has been bought back for another season.
Four Pillars Rarer Dry gin introduces cumquat. A new citrus for the Aussie brand, some of these fruits were tracked down in the distillery’s backyard of the Yarra Valley, which are used alongside some from growers up in sunny Queensland. These small but mighty fruits pack a real citrus punch and bring the warm notes of bitter orange, but also the bright fresh notes of lemon and lime. To the gin they bring a natural tanginess but also dial those lower, rounded sweet citrus flavors up to 11. This gin really lends itself to highball-style drinks.
“We’ve used a lot of cumquat,” said Master Distiller Cameron Mackenzie, “about two times the amount of orange we used in Rare Dry Gin, because it can be more subtle and we wanted this to be big, and deliver oomph. Compared to Rare Dry, this gin is more bitter, has a bigger texture and is deliberately more citrus-led.”
Four Pillars Rarest Dry Gin finds the return of bergamot is back. Because bergamot is the rarest of all citruses, it’s the Rarest Dry Gin. To taste, green bergamot is a hybrid of lemon and bitter orange, and if the fruit is picked early, when dark green, the oils are stronger, hugely aromatic and more bitter. So that’s exactly what has been done for this gin – in fact when the team zested it in the Distillery you could see the oils flying off the skin and the scent was out-of-this-world magnificent.
The green bergamot gives herbal, Earl Grey and bitter orange notes and creates a gin that heroes the bigger botanicals like green cardamom, cassia, and Tasmanian pepperberry.
Single bottles are available for $78, two-bottle bundles for $140, and three-pack bundles for$215 with free shipping. 700mL. ABV 41.8%. All of these bottlings are exclusive to Australia.
The bottled can be purchased from the brand’s official website and the Gin Shops at the Four Pillars Healesville Distillery and Four Pillars Surry Hills Laboratory from 20 September 2022.
In June, after two years of intensive work, Four Pillars unveiled two new ‘spirits’ that saw them enter the non-alcoholic drinks market: Bandwagon Dry and Bloody Bandwagon.
In April, the brand opened the first carbon neutral gin distillery in Australia.
