On The Wild Side

The local boom in craft brews and spirits has seen producers turn to bush tucker for their botanicals

- Max Allen

I’m sitting under a palm tree at the Darwin Sailing Club, watching the sun go down, drinking a beer.

But this isn’t just any old beer. This is a wattleseed lager. It was produced by the Something Wild Beverage Company, majority-owned by the Motlop family, famed Indigenous AFL players whose Larrakia country includes Darwin and surrounds. It doesn’t, I think, get much more Australian than this.

Something Wild Wattleseed Lager is one of a growing number of drinks produced using native flora, and indeed fauna, in the case of Something Wild’s green-ant gin, released last year.

Since the craft spirits boom kicked off at the beginning of this decade, we’ve seen dozens of new gins hit the market, distilled from local botanicals such as lemon myrtle, strawberry gum, mountain pepperberry – even boobialla, or native juniper. The best of these, such as Kangaroo Island Spirits’ Wild Gin from South Australia, or Botanic Australis from Far North Queensland, or Brookie’s Byron Bay Dry Gin from NSW, have featured heavily in these pages.