We open at four and pour until the small hours, and for years the only way to drink a Negroni we had stirred was to sit at the counter while we stirred it. So we started bottling. Everything on this page is made in the same room on Lower Main Road, out of the same gin and the same bitters we reach for on a Friday night, batched on a Tuesday when the doors are shut. Nothing goes in to make it keep. A bottled Old Fashioned holds because it is spirit and sugar and nothing else, and it is better three weeks in than it was the day we capped it. We are not chasing shelf life. We are chasing the drink coming out of the bottle tasting like the one we would have pushed across the counter at you.
Equal parts gin, red bitter aperitivo and sweet vermouth, stirred down with a little water so it lands the same way it does over our own ice. Pour about 100 ml over one big block and put an orange twist in it if there is one in the house. Four drinks to the bottle, five if you are being careful with it. 500 ml.
R390.00Add to cart
Bourbon, our burnt honey syrup and a heavy hand of the naartjie bitters, stirred and then left three weeks on the rack in glass before we cap it. It comes out rounder than one built to order, which is the entire reason we bother bottling it. Straight over ice, and it needs no water from you. 500 ml.
R420.00Add to cart
Pink peppercorns cracked the morning they go in, then six weeks in high-proof spirit with grapefruit peel and a little gentian. Two dashes lifts a gin drink; four and it starts biting back at you. Dasher top fitted, so it lives on the shelf and not in a cupboard. 100 ml.
R180.00Add to cart
We take the honey almost too far in a dry pan, then knock it back with strong rooibos and a pinch of salt. Good in an Old Fashioned, better in iced coffee, and it keeps a month in the fridge once it is open. Shake it before you pour, it settles. 250 ml.
R135.00Add to cart
January naartjie peel, cloves, cassia and a bit of cardamom, macerated and then left alone two months to settle. This is the winter one, so put it in anything brown and leave the citrus drinks to the peppercorn. We make it once a year and when it is gone it is gone. 100 ml.
R180.00Add to cart
Wild buchu steeped cold so it never turns bitter on you, then balanced with lemon acid, cane sugar and a proper amount of salt. Long it with soda over plenty of ice for something with no alcohol in it that still tastes of somewhere. 500 ml.
R165.00Add to cart
Thandi does the filling. She started here washing glasses in 2019, went onto the stick a year later, and now spends every Tuesday and Wednesday at the bench in the back with a funnel, a scale and a marker. Every bottle is filled by weight rather than by volume, because a jigger measure is close enough behind a bar and nowhere near close enough in glass. She writes the batch number and the date on the back label herself, so if a bottle ever comes out wrong we can find the exact fifty it came from and pull them. About four hundred bottles a month leave that bench, which is what one person and two days can do without hurrying it.
Observatory, Cape Town. Refill your empties at the bar.
