You can now get Never Never Distilling Co.’s Oyster Shell Gin in the convenient and sustainable format that is ecoSPIRITS, which reduces single use glass. For more information contact your Proof & Company representative.

The beauty of the Martini is that it’s the perfect vehicle for great gin: choose the right one, and your Martini is just about foolproof; choose unwisely, however, and you’ll need some skills (and a lot of dilution) to come up with something passable.

I suspect that’s why I’m seeing gins with an extra dimension to them — in this case here, the Never Never Distilling Co. Oyster Shell Gin — being used in Martinis. It’s really rather simple: use a distinctive gin for a great Martini.

Sean Baxter is one of the trio behind Never Never Distilling Co. and recently stepped behind the bar at Old Mate’s Place in Sydney to show us the spec for their oyster-fied take on the Martini, the Pacific Martini. It uses the Oyster Shell Gin with a dash of saline and dry vermouth, garnished with a pickled cocktail onion. It's a simple affair made delicious thanks to the gin — as he shows us here.

Sean was in Sydney as part of a little roadshow celebrating the release of their Oyster Shell Gin into the sustainable ecoSPIRITS format via Proof & Company — something he talks about below.

So Sean, this is kind of a big deal. You’ve got Never Never spirits going into the ecoSPIRITS big green totes.

Huge, huge deal for us. ecoSPIRITS is an incredible platform when it comes to delivering a low waste, highly sustainable sort of solution for bars. This is the world’s first. It’s leading the way. It’s creating a whole new way of delivering our particular product, firstly, it was with Triple Juniper Gin, now, it’s with our Oyster Shell Gin.

It saves thousands and thousands of kilograms of packaging and glassware. It reduces our carbon footprint. Every time someone buys one of these, we plant a tree. I mean, I don’t plant the tree, but they plant the tree.

It’s so much beyond just saving space in a cool room, which it also does.

Why is it important for the Oyster Shell Gin to be going in there as well?

I mean, we never would have suspected Oyster Shell Gin to do what it’s doing. It’s capturing hearts and minds.

It’s built using botanicals that are certainly otherwise seen as waste products. It was kind of built for this [ecoSPIRITS] format and that’s what makes it so exciting and so unique.

What exactly is the deal with the ecoSPIRITS totes? How does it work?

The way it basically works is that we send our bulk spirit to a facility where that is then filled. And from that particular facility it then goes out to the various distribution points, which is now all major wholesalers around Australia.

There’s a bit of logistics involved in getting this stuff happening in the first place absolutely and from a sustainability perspective, it’s amazing, but from a small business perspective, it’s also incredible. It costs an enormous amount of money to ship things around Australia. So when it comes to trying to remove packaging, when it comes to glass, when it comes to all of the various things that we would need to put together a bottle that we would then sell to a bar, by containing it all with one device and removing a lot of that, it allows us to take a lot of dollars off the final price.

And it means that it’s a far more affordable product, especially if you’re going through the process of batching. If you’re batching in a venue and you’re opening bottle after bottle after bottle to go through a batching cycle. It’s such an easier way of being able to go about that whole process.

I’m guessing it cuts out on all that glass bottle weight, the cardboard as well.

Correct. So it’s cheaper to move around the country. Stopper, glass, label, carton, divider, they all cost money. So it is pretty cool technology. And it’s amazing to be the only Australian brand to be currently in ecoSPIRITS. It’s something that we’re really, really proud of.

How is this different to other bulk spirit formats?

The whole premise of ecoSPIRITS is that it’s closed loop, so that once these are empty, they get picked up and then reused. The reason why it’s made from glass that we can thoroughly clean, the reason why this is put together in such a way is so that it can be refilled and reused and have a second life.

Pacific Martini

Ingredients

• 60ml Never Never Distilling Co. Oyster Shell Gin
• 10ml dry vermouth
• Dash of saline solution

Directions

Stir all ingredients together with ice until very cold. Strain into a very cold glass. Garnish with a cocktail onion.