This Sydney-based urban distillery is setting the bar high with its modern take on a historic process.
Opened in March 2015, Archie Rose Distilling Co was the first independent distillery in Sydney in 160 years.
The distillery, in the Rosebery suburb of Sydney, makes vodka, gin, and white rye.
The idea for the company blossomed after Will Edwards, Archie Rose’s founder and CEO, found himself in New York several years ago when some of the first inner-city distilleries were opening since Prohibition.
Edwards wondered why there were none in Sydney.
In fact, there were no distilleries within an urban centre in Australia and few in the country at all.
Like New York, Edwards thought, Sydney had a great bar scene, craft brewers were doing amazing things, and the city had a history of distilling.
But no one was making local spirits.
“Off the back of that trip, I wanted to return to Sydney and figure out why we couldn’t start a distillery here,” Edwards says.
“After doing some research, I realised you could do it; it was just very difficult and high-risk. And that’s when I decided that that’s exactly what I was going to do.”
From vision to reality
Edwards converted a disused industrial building into functional, yet atmospheric, distillery and bar space.
Acme & Co fitted-out the 550m² vacant shed at The Cannery (the site of the former Rosella soup factory) at Rosebery, Sydney within five kilometres of the CBD, to become a space capable of educating and entertaining consumers by engaging them in the production process.
The interior design embraces the distillery’s fitout with stainless steel tanks, copper equipment and oak-ageing barrels, as well as materials from the original structure.
Raw surfaces, corrugated iron, textured brick, a concrete floor, and joinery and furniture made from whisky barrels accentuate its industrial credentials.
In getting the distillery off the ground, the first step was finding the stills. Archie Rose approached craftsman Peter Bailly to make its three copper pot stills by hand, a project that took just shy of a year.
The second step was figuring out how to design the Archie Rose brand.
“I knew this was important, and I had a good idea of how I wanted the brand to look and feel,” says Edwards.
“But I wasn’t a designer, and I didn’t know how to brand this thing myself. So it was about finding the right branding agency to come on the journey with me.”
So that journey began with Sydney-based Squad Ink.
It was an undertaking that saw them researching extensively and following spirits movements in the likes of London and Brooklyn.
And soon it became clear that an important part of the equation was bringing customers on the Archie Rose journey, as well.
“People are excited about the production and meeting the makers… that’s part of the story,” says Matthew Squadrito, owner and creative director of Squad Ink.
“This idea of sharing in the journey needed to come through in everything – in the packaging, on the website, and in the video content.”
Thus, the packaging reads ‘Distilled, bottled, and shared at Archie Rose Distilling Co’.
“It sums it up,” says Squadrito. “It’s simple, it’s direct, it’s pure, and it lives on everything.”
The complete package
The other challenge with packaging, says Squadrito, is its fickleness.
The Archie Rose packaging couldn’t reflect a passing fad.
This is especially true when you’re working with spirits, which may not be ready – or consumed – for years to come.
Archie Rose needed to feel like a legacy brand that had been there for years, he says.
It also needed to be packaging that would work across gin, vodka, whisky, and whatever may come next for the brand (there’s a rum in the works, for example.)
The company also wanted the packaging to represent the attention to detail and the labour-intensive process that Archie Rose follows to produce its spirits.
So the packaging also includes the handwritten distillation date, the batch number, the distiller’s signature, and a breakdown of the botanicals in the bottle.
For Archie Rose, this attention to detail is also critical to the customer experience.
Again, because the distillery was built on the notion – and the importance – of taking the customer along on the journey, the Archie Rose customer experience is immersive at every level – both at the physical distillery and on the virtual website.
For customers, Edwards wanted to completely unlock the distilling process, unlike the country distillers of old, who wouldn’t tell you anything about the yeast or the production process, for example.
“I wanted to give people the opportunity to get involved in how their spirits are made,” he says. “At the distillery, you can see into the production, go on a tour, and taste and try everything.”
A tailored approach
Then, Edwards took things a step further and introduced Tailored Spirits – a tool available on Archie Rose’s website that allows customers to make their own gin, vodka, and whisky.
The tool aims to be a virtual representation of the distillery itself.
By providing all the elements that the distillers at Archie Rose play with, including botanical distillates, cask types, wood types, and smoke levels, customers can design their own products.
They can develop their own blend, with its own flavour profile, at a single-bottle scale and with their name on it.
“We didn’t know if people would understand this, let alone want to buy it,” says Edwards. “But when we launched it last November, we did 1600 bottles in the first two weeks.”
This customers-as-participants approach has led to an interesting marketing phenomenon for Archie Rose.
“From a marketing standpoint, you don’t have people out there saying, ‘Archie Rose is amazing; look at this fantastic gin I got there’,” says Edwards.
“Instead, you have people saying, ‘Look at my gin that I made. I’ve put all this stuff in it. It tastes delicious. I’m a master gin smith... So they’re not really Archie Rose brand advocates; they’re advocates for their own single bottle of gin.”
Edwards hopes customers will share that experience , and urge their friends to create their own blend. Then they can see which is better. After all, what’s a little friendly competition between friends?
The process
Archie Rose Distilling Co has invested a lot of thought into its gin, vodka and white rye production process.
To produce its gin, for instance, it uses Australian wheat to provide the cleanest and smoothest base to infuse its gin botanicals.
Before distillation, it cuts the spirit with local Sydney water that has been filtered six times, and distills all of its botanicals using three different techniques tailored to suit the type of botanical.
The maceration technique sees botanicals added directly into the spirit and leaving them to steep; hot vapour infusion involves suspending botanicals in a basket at the base of the neck of the still; and cool vapour infusion sees the botanicals held in a Carter Head-style infusion point in the still’s Lyne arm.
Kindred spirits
Veteran marketer and Kindred founder Victoria Tulloch teams up with craft brands, such as Archie Rose Distilling Co, to help bring their unique stories to life.
Having grown up in Australia’s Hunter Valley as part of the family that owns 120-year-old wine company Tulloch Wines, Victoria Tulloch was no stranger to craft brands.
Still, until recently, her 20-year marketing career on the agency side saw her launch and promote some of the biggest brands in the world.
Tulloch recognised an exciting opportunity for smaller artisan producers and creative entrepreneurs to achieve success in a different way from their big-business counterparts, so she started Sydney-based boutique marketing company Kindred to work with small brands and start-ups to help fast-track their growth.
“I could see a viable unmet need around launching growth products that specifically were built around the DNA of craft brands, with an overall mission of helping these brands create better consumer lives for all of us,” she says.
