How Trish Brew started a gin brand (working as a brand ambassador)

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We live in fractious times; there is war and strife, inequality, the USA is doing USA things, and everything seems to cost more and more. When’s the last time you saw a good news story on your feed or on TV?

I consume a lot of media — really, far too much — and that invariably means I’m mainlining a barrage of bad news every day. But about five days before Christmas there was a little spark of great news: Trish Brew, brand ambassador for Fever-Tree, bartender, and 2024’s Person of the Year Victoria launched her very own gin brand.

It might seem like a small thing in this big bad world but I think it is very much A Good Thing. More to the point, it made me happy to see. That’s because Trish Brew is a former bartender turned brand ambassador, and bartenders making their own hooch is one of my favourite things.

The brand is called Bellicose Distilling Co., and the first release under that banner is Bellicose Pink Gin.

It’s great news because Trish is great — you don’t have your peers vote for you in overwhelming numbers as the person of the year without their deep respect. As the manager of Melbourne cocktail institution, Gin Palace, in the past she has trained and mentored many a bartender, and in her role as brand ambassador has supported bartenders and bars alike.

But launching a brand is a courageous thing to do, I think. There’s something like a thousand Australian gins out there on the market at the moment; we arrived at peak gin a couple of years back. No one in their right mind would launch a new gin — one they’ve scrimped and saved to fund themselves — right now, surely? What would possess someone to launch a gin?

It’s a challenge that only someone like Trish attempts. A positive mindset can do a lot for someone, and Trish certainly has that. She’s tenacious, too — working her way from glassy to the bar (and to manager) at Gin Palace in a time when women at the helm of cocktail bars was much less common, as Trish explains in this episode of Drinks At Work.

Not only is Trish launching into a crowded marketplace, she is also on a one woman mission to make the world’s best pink gin.

Central to that is the bartender, she says. First of all, as you might guess from her resume, Trish is a big gin fan and spent a lot time mixing cocktails with the juniper stuff — and she has made a gin for bartenders like her.

“I’m very much a dry gin drinker,” she says, “so it has so much juniper in there. So no [spirits show] judge is going to be like, I can’t taste the juniper.”

And the botanicals, as Trish says, are quite traditional dry gin botanicals, with the addition of some vapour distilled fresh (and expensive) raspberries.

That all sounds like a bartender’s take on a pink gin to me.

And, as Trish says at the end of our chat, she’s very much interested in what bartenders around the country think about the gin as it is right now.

“If you get a bottle, tell me what you think,” Trish says. “Because without your guys’ help, I will never make the world’s best pink gin. So please help me out.”

You can hear how Trish has gone about starting the brand and nailing down the recipe for Bellicose Pink Gin in this episode of Drinks At Work. We also talk a little about the history of pink gin, how hers is different, and how the brand was designed. If you’ve got aspirations for staring your own booze brand, or if you want to make anything that might one day be considered the best in the world — gin brand or otherwise — Trish is someone worth talking to.