It was the beautifully simplistic and elegant white bottle with cork lid that first drew us to Karoa Cara White gin, but the wonderful flavour and passion of the Ballito founders kept us captivated.
This is unlike any other gin you’ve ever tasted. Not only does it have the wonderfully unique flavour combination of spearmint and cardamom, but it’s also South Africa’s only cloudy gin on the market.
“We like to think of ourselves as trend-makers rather than trend followers,” says Mtunzini-based co-founder Janie Barnes. “My husband and I both have rebellious spirits. We like to go against the grain and do things differently.”
Originally a farm girl and horse trainer from Namibia, Janie, with her husband Elwin, first started toying with the idea of distilling about five years ago. Elwin is an engineer and the couple moved to Mtunzini in Zululand from Gauteng 11 years ago.
“We watched a documentary about distilling and thought it would be a good business idea,” she says. “We bought a small, 5-litre still (that was full of leaks and hardly worked) and starting experimenting. We never made it to drink ourselves, this was always going to be a business.”
Now the couple, along with their business partners and close friends Sonnia and Harold Kruijer, have a fully-fledged, Ballito-based distillery where they make the country’s only cloudy gin.
A true labour of love, Janie (who owns her own beauty salon in Mtunzini) says it took over two years to get this product on the shelves. There was lots of blood, sweat and tears as well as waiting for licenses and legalities and, of course, hundreds upon hundreds of hours spent perfecting the flavours. “When we started, the gin craze had just taken off and everyone was using florals and citrus flavours. In true ‘us’ style, we decided to do something completely different. Elwin had actually experimented with spearmint while he was doing his distilling course and the instructors told him not to do it, as it’s a very difficult flavour profile to balance. Of course, that made us want to do it even more,” she laughs.
Balancing the botanicals in a gin is a very precise and calculated process and, because they wanted the spearmint and cardamom to be the dominant flavour profile, theirs is a contemporary rather than a traditional London Dry gin.
All the botanicals in the gin are grown on an organic farm in the Cape. It has grapefruit, lime and lemon peel, as well as juniper, coriander, calamus root, cardamom and, of course, fresh spearmint leaves.
Text: Leah Shone
