HOW IT ALL STARTED
Haiver first started at Wines of While on a Sunday night late 2018 in one of those typical drunken nights where all ideas seem great at the time. It was Dean Buchanan who was becoming fascinated with cold vacuum distilling as he was following it's rise on the South East Asian bar scene. He's always looking for ways to push the boundaries and create wildly good cocktails/drinking experiences, and this seemed like the next one.
Two others, Matt A & Matt G, loved the idea and after the hang over had subsided got together with Dean and thought lets try it. We started researching Rotary Evaporators only to find that the real thing, new, was going to cost a lot of money. Or at least more than a simple idea between mates had merit for. We scoured the internet to find one on Ebay from Canada for a fraction of the price. This would mark the start of our exploration into making spirits.
It arrived Jan 2019 and whilst on Christmas holidays we all started playing around with it and distilling what ever we could find, after mixing it with Vodka. It took a lot of YouTube videos and blog posts to figure out how to put it together and operate it but we got there eventually. For almost a year it was set up in the lounge room of Matt A & Matt G's apartment. A very agricultural set up indeed.
We distilled literally anything that popped into mind. Some of the highlights include: parsley, kaffir lime leaf, pandan, coffee, quandong, mandarin, chilli's, clam shell, sesame, yozu, strawberry, pineapple, coriander seed, juniper, parmigiano, sandalwood, lemon, grape fruit, lime, blood lime, finger lime, yoghurt, rose, orange, basil, mint, Geraldton wax, bush tomato, native thyme, ginger, lemon myrtle, apple, the list goes on...
We were ferrying distillates down to Dean's work for him to try and he eventually created a menu heavily featuring our work. We had a deadline for when the new menu was coming out and in turn a deadline for when we needed a liquor licence to sell, and in turn a warehouse/space to accomodate that licence. *Cue the next big phase...
