Spring has arrived on the Granite Belt.
The blossoms are beginning to appear, the days are getting longer, and there’s that wonderful feeling that everything is waking up again.
Including the distiller.
After a rather extraordinary few months — graduating in the USA, exploring California’s wine and spirits, salmon fishing in Alaska and meeting some wonderful people along the way — the jet lag has finally disappeared.
The memories, thankfully, haven’t.
I’m still working my way through those stories, and there are plenty more to come. But for now, it’s back to the copper, the botanicals and one particularly fragrant problem.
We need a few hundred lemons.
Well… perhaps an experiment at Conrad Distillery is never completely over.
But after numerous trials, tastings, adjustments and a considerable amount of extremely serious “quality control”, I’ve finally locked in the formula for our Limoncello.
And it is exactly where I wanted it.
Fresh. Fragrant. Intensely lemon.
The sort of flavour that reminds you why something made slowly, from proper ingredients, is worth the effort.
Which means it’s time to stop experimenting and start making it properly.
My next mission is sourcing the lemons.
In my imagination, this involved wandering romantically through a lemon orchard, carefully selecting perfect fruit directly from the trees.
Reality is slightly less cinematic.
I’ll be visiting some of our wonderful local fruit suppliers and looking for the best lemons I can get my hands on.
Then comes the tiny flaw in my otherwise brilliant plan.
Someone has to peel them.
Not ten lemons.
Not twenty.
A few hundred.
And when I say peel, I mean carefully removing that beautiful aromatic yellow zest while avoiding too much bitter white pith.
Suddenly that romantic vision of handcrafted Limoncello becomes considerably more… handcrafted.
Limoncello isn’t the end of the story.
It’s part of something we’ve been developing at Conrad Distillery called Ginritta.
Our rather delicious collision of gin and Limoncello.
Bright citrus. Gin botanicals. A little bit of Conrad mischief.
And now that the Limoncello formula is finally locked in, Ginritta is getting dangerously close to being ready for release.
That means the copper is glowing, spring is waking up around us and there is every possibility I’ve already started wondering:
What can we make next?
That question tends to get me into trouble.
Good trouble, usually.
If you happen to visit Conrad Distillery over the next little while and find me buried beneath a suspiciously large pile of citrus, you’ll know why.
And if you’re tempted to volunteer for lemon-peeling duty…
Payment negotiations may involve gin.
No promises.
But I’m the Master Distiller, so I know a person.
Cheers
P.S Yes the main image was AI generated – I never look that glamorous in the Distillery.
Debra Spence is the Founder and Master Distiller of Conrad Distillery, an award-winning Australian distillery dedicated to sustainability, innovation and transforming rescued wines into premium spirits.
