Bespoke flavours, small batch, all hand-made, this is the DNA of our craft
Our Journey
Founder and Chief Distiller, Matt, began this journey as a young engineer with the South African Breweries, in Cape Town in 2002. Working on engineering projects and maintenance was great and helped him understand how (and how not to) design and run brewing equipment, but a real perk was learning to profile flavours each week. As with all things though, too much of a good thing can be bad – so it wasn’t long before his after-hours quest became the art of creating repeatable, finely balanced spirits, with depth and subtlety of flavour.
The Hop in Hopscotch wasn’t so much a Hop as it was a marathon! Hopscotch was born in a shed as so many good things are, from an idea to produce both beer and spirits using the same carefully designed equipment to allow this capability. The first Still was cobbled together with plumbing parts and a range of recipes began. It was when friends began asking to order the Gin and smoked ironwood brandy that Matt realised he needed to follow through.
Matt funded his passion by consulting on other craft distillery and brewery designs in Australia and worked with manufacturers in the USA, South Africa, China and of course Australia to perfect his own design for the distillery.
Our Process
Try , Try and Try again. If you are not failing at something you probably aren’t pushing the boundaries hard enough. All in all, the years taken to get to this point, and the long road of bumps and challenges, I hope, show themselves in the exceptional quality of Gin you taste today.
We undertake in-house fermentations to produce high quality, neutral wash. Multiple distillation stripping runs follow at different speeds and cuts to remove harsher flavours, and carbon filtration helps ensure a high quality end spirit that shows its own legs!
Our processes involve unique recipes for each product, and offer respect to those that came before. In fact one of our recipes is based upon the very definition of Gin – an 1875 Encyclopedia Britannica listed recipe! Some of our gins involve the steeping of botanicals in a boiler pot, some are based only on infusing the botanicals following the London Dry style, and some further use compounding of botanicals or combinations of these.
Cradle to grave distillations are time consuming, but its what makes the craft unique. All hand crafted, All small batch.