Dubbed Nine Circles Distillery, the business is based at South Pambula with owners introducing their product to the general public at the Merimbula Eat Festival last month.

"The local support has been absolutely second to none, we've had people coming and seeing us at markets just to say congratulations," co-owner Cat Coathup said.

"We thought there'd be local support but we had no idea just how much and how passionate they'd be about there being more local products, so we're very, very thankful."

Cat said that by 10.30am the morning following their launch, they received a call from a local bottle shop asking if it could stock their product.

"They contacted us and said 'we've had two people already coming in this morning saying they want your gin, so we'd better get it in stock'," she said.

Nine Circles is owned and run by Cat Coathup and her husband Ben, along with his childhood friend Jason Ball.

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While Ben takes care of the creation of their products as head distiller, Cat and Jason look after the rest of the business, from corporate structure, marketing, branding, social media management and so on.

Cat said her husband was a self-taught distiller and had completed the first part of a master's distilling course with the Institute of Brewers and Distillers in Edinburgh, which he completed online due to COVID.

"I think this is probably a big challenge for him because you can never know everything about distilling, but it's quite a creative process as well, which is great it has really piqued his interest and he loves it," she said.

The business idea was first brought up three years ago when Jason was visiting. The business project however was delayed due to the challenges of drought, the Black Summer fires and then the last two years of COVID-19.

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"Jason was actually visiting and had been talking about starting a distillery as his retirement plan. He and Ben started talking about the process, and how it would work and it just kind of snowballed from there," she said.

"Eighteen months ago was probably when we made the decision to really jump into it, start investing funds and go for it and it's been a great journey."

The distillery is set up and run out of the Coathups' garage in South Pambula, which they renovated to suit during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021.

"We cleaned it all out, sealed the floors and lined the ceilings and set it all up and we're off and running," she said.

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"It was a long process and it took some time. It was a lot of work and a fair bit of investment, but it's functioning really well at the moment."

Cat said their current set up also has the capacity to grow, which will allow them to upgrade their equipment as demand increases.

Cat said their signature gin at Nine Circles was made with 14 different botanicals within it, including several native ingredients.

"There's a lot going on, but it's quite balanced. So it's not really citrus heavy," she said.

Meanwhile their vodka product has a more sweet tooth approach.

"We're making a vodka from scratch and we're using an Australian wheat that has caramel notes to it," she said.

"We've only distilled it twice rather than three times, which is kind of the industry standard."

Cat said other vodka distillers generally strip their vodka right down, however they decided to leave some of the flavour in theirs.

"It presents with quite a really nice sort of honey overtone, which is really different for vodka because with a vodka you just expect it to be completely tasteless," she said.

Cat said they are very excited to release their pink gin in the coming weeks and are currently in the process of fine tuning the product.

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"At the moment we've just got our signature gin and vodka and we'll release more as they become available but that'll be a progressive thing," she said.

Cat said they didn't want to flood the market with too many products at once and instead will release their new flavours and products gradually.

"It has been an enormous amount of work for all of us, including some hard labour from the children but we are so happy with what we created and have high hopes for our trajectory," she said.

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