Just three decades ago, craft distilleries were illegal on Tasmania, the remote and strikingly gorgeous island state to the south of the Australian mainland. But today, in trendy bars in the sleepy Tasmanian capital of Hobart, as well as in Melbourne and Sydney, there are entire pages on menus devoted to Tasmanian gins. Tasmanian gin is on the rise thanks to the overturning of an archaic law banning small-scale distilling in Australia, intended to discourage backyard moonshiners and make the industry easier to control. An aspiring Tasmanian distiller challenged the federal statute in 1989, paving the way for a boom first in craft Tasmanian whiskies, and more recently, gins. “Almost every month now, you hear of a new gin” in Tasmania, said Louise Radman, a self-taught gin distiller, who along with her husband, Nav Singh, started their own label, Sud Polaire, in Hobart two years ago.

Source: International New York Times February 08, 2019 09:56 UTC