A Taste of Timaru – Saskia

Where did you get the inspiration for Humdinger? Years ago we were at a distillery in South America, and we were like, “Woah, this is cool.” We’re both from processing backgrounds – Andrew’s a mechatronics engineer, and I’ve ended up in a process technical role at Fonterra. Fast forward a few years to my brother’s wedding – he married an Irish girl – and we got talking to her uncle, who invests in a huge distillery back in Ireland. We thought, “We could do that!” Then we went to Canada on holiday, and it unintentionally became a distillery tour. That’s where it really took off – while we were over there, we took out a company name and bought a little ten-litre still. Then about six months later we committed to getting bigger stills and premises. That’s coming up to three years ago.

Does what you do at Fonterra help with the distillery? Absolutely. I was a manager for a bit, too, and it just showed me all that stuff that I’d never touched on before – budgeting, employment and what it takes to actually develop packaging, which is a huge piece of what we do. We blindly started off thinking we’d be able to spend all our time distilling, but actually ninety per cent of the business is running the brand. And we didn't know how to have a brand! But we’re slowly learning.

What are you working on at the moment? We’ve just released a pink gin for summer, which we wanted to infuse with local botanicals. For our other gins we use traditional botanicals like juniper and ginger root, but we wanted to make something to reflect our alpine environment. So we looked high, and we looked for what was edible. The gin is infused with Spaniard root, which is what gives it most of its flavour, as well as rosehip, and blackcurrant for the colour. And it’s sweetened with local honey.

What’s your favourite way to explore around home? I’m just big on hiking, I’ve been hiking my whole life. There are so many awesome tracks around here: all up in Peel Forest, up the Rangitata, even over into Mount Somers and down into the Hunter Hills. And the Mackenzie – lots of the Te Moana trails pop up in Geraldine, but otherwise they go right through to Takapō. That’s my ultimate happy place, just being out in nature. Hiking is so therapeutic, especially because work can be quite stressful. And when you’re out there you don’t think about any of it. I’ve taken Mariella, who’s eighteen months, out in the backpack a few times now.