When you think of Hunter Valley, you probably think of wines first. Seeing as it is the number one wine region around Sydney.
The area is teeming with lush vineyards and famous wine brands, showcasing some of Australia’s best varieties on offer. However, when you look past the wine frontier, you can see an alternative that is just as good!
About Hunter Valley Distillery
The Hunter Valley Distillery is a passionate team aiming to provide the region, including the locals and tourists, with exceptional top-shelf spirits. They only use organic ingredients sourced locally to create their signature spirits, practising a blend of traditional methods and state-of-the-art production to enhance their flavours.
Hunter Distillery‘s Cellar Door
The shop is open seven days per week, from 10am until 5pm. With large groups over ten bookings necessary. Try out the test tube tasting, which includes a range of vodkas, gins, and liqueurs. Discover your favourite and buy a bottle for your family and friends.
The Range at the Hunter Valley Distillery
This Distillery has a wide range of spirits, including gins, vodkas, and Liquors, with aged spirits and other varieties also available. These aren’t ordinary spirits you can purchase at the local bottle shop, with unique flavours which can turn your drink into a memorable taste. The vodkas can either be sweet or spicy, with sweet apple flavours, to sour lime, to even spicy chilli. For gin, there have four signature types to choose from, with some being ordinary pure gin, to others being sweet colourful ones! Liqueurs and Schnapps are the majority of the time sweet, but Hunter Distillery creates these sweet liqueurs into unique tastes, creating the typical butterscotch and strawberry flavours, as well as inventing exciting choc orange or green tea choices.
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Vodkas
Vodka, a popular drink choice worldwide! The drink has quite a history, developing since its creation in 1400AD, and becoming a staple in bars and bottle shops around the world. Its recipe is quite simple, simply converting sugar into starch by fermentation and distillation. However, over the years, professionals have created new steps and methods in creating a clear liquid, using starches such as potatoes, sugar beet molasses, or even grains. These raw elements help create the end taste, with the diverse recipe and methods assisting in the variety of vodka. The clear and harsh liquid is usually blended with sugary soft drinks or in refreshing cocktails when served, but at Hunter Valley, all you need is the spirit itself. This is due to the hundreds of flavours offered by the Distillery. With the taste ranging from sweet strawberry vodka, to sour green apple, to finally a spicy chilli spirit. Transforming the regular clear liquid into a cocktail taste in itself.
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Gins
Gin is the bitter sister to vodka, tasting of Juniper, similar to pine, herbaceous, and floral. It can come in four main styles; London dry gin, Dutch jenever, old tom, and compound gin. The styles are all created by different recipes and methods, with the main creation styles being distilled, re-distilled, and compounded. For the Hunter Valley Distillery shop, they have created four distinct styles of gin. The first is Copperwave Gin, which is created by distilling it in the traditional London style. This produces a juniper, lemon zest and liquorice aroma and taste, with a smooth palate bursting with both earthy and citrus flavours. Their Jail House Gin is a modern take to traditional gin recipes, blending together the original gin with a lemon myrtle flavour, adding a spicy twist at the end. Mystery Gin is next, and unlike the other two, is not a typical clear gin colour, but a deep purple. The vibrant colour comprises of sweet and fruity flavours, with blood orange being the most prominent taste. Lastly, there is the bright pink gin named ‘Native’! Known as the little sister to the Distillery’s gins, this one is great for those wanting a pretty and sweet drink to end the day! With flavours of berries, lime, and plum.
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Liquors
Liqueurs and Schnapps take over the rest of Hunter Valley Distillery’s menu. Ranging from sweet, creamy, spicy, and sour, no matter what your flavour of choice is, it is guaranteed you’ll find it here. Schnapps and liqueurs are essentially a form of distilled spirit, creating the liquids by fermenting fruit or other components alongside with the base liquor. There are around twenty different flavours to choose from, to a common strawberry liqueur, to a unique green tea flavour. The distillery offers guests a ‘test-tube’ option, where visitors can try out a sip of each flavour, working out which ones they enjoy enough to buy a bottle of.