A tiny disused kitchen space at one of our venues, Pink Moon Saloon was licensed for spirit production - we began to formulate ideas for spirits that we thought would be delicious and relevant. While not limiting ourselves to making gin this is where we wanted to start - aside from Miller’s Westbourne Strength martinis being some of our greatest formative hospitality experiences, we felt that gin is a language that people currently understand very well, a language that would enable us to start conversations and get into people’s glasses.

During this process we crossed paths with Brendan Carter through involvement in spirit judging - Brendan is a unique and ambitious thinker that convinced us to think a little larger scale wise than our tiny kitchen space. Not long after this, Brendan and his wife and business partner Laura came on board as partners in the project. 

Working with Brendan and Laura from Applewood and their Head Distiller Mitch gave us a good start, eliminating some of the struggle of resourcing and production bottlenecks that can hamper you at a very small scale.

We formulated two primary ideas we believed could slot straight in to the bar setting - a fresh, modern dry gin style made for ultimate flexibility and versatility, and a super savoury herbal and umami focused spirit to satiate our ultimate thirst for wet martinis. We started working on this core range with Mitch and Brendan - refining recipes and testing them through our bars. Over and above our own thoughts, customer and staff feedback became key to this process.

The result was BRIGHTER LATER®’s core range - ‘Astral Orchard’ Modern Dry Gin and ‘Marine Ultra’ Savoury Dry Gin.

We are proud of them and the work we have done to produce them, and proud to offer them to you.

With love, Henry, Marshall and Dana x