Food & Drink
Spirit south west of the
Hand sanitiser, gin, and rum; there’s nothing Bunbury’s first distillery haven’t tackled in their first year of operation. By
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MONIQUE CECCATO.
FOUND | Issue 07
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t all started over a few frothies at the local. “Mike is a man of many ideas. We’d always go out for a few beers at the pub and he’d just keep mentioning this distillery idea. Then, one day, he just said to me ‘do you want to help run it?’". Rory Binnie, the man on the ground at Cuprum Distillery, had no prior experience in distilling. But, an eagerness to
‘do something good for Bunbury’ saw him take a punt and come on board as the distillery’s operations manager. Along with the owners - his dad, Stewart Binnie, and Mike Honeybell - Binnie spent almost two years educating himself on all aspects of distilling before opening the doors to the venue in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We went from zero to 100 pretty quickly,” said
Binnie, who ended up putting his newly acquired distilling skills to use on producing bulk quantities of hand sanitiser before he even entertained the idea of playing around with juniper and botanicals. “We had someone from the Bunbury Port come in and ask if we could do hand sanitiser and we were like ‘yeah, we’ll give that a crack’. We made GWN news with our hand sanitiser production visitbunburygeographe.com.au