our story
Get To Know Us
Some years back, Paul bought himself a small home use still and experimented with distilling alcohol. Angela enjoyed turning the alcohol into liqueurs. This hobby grew into a dream of making local gin, with a commercial still, and growing as many of our own botanicals as possible.
Of course, none of this happened quickly. Life is happening all the time and it took considerable prodding backside by our friend and positive life force Shelley to get us moving. But we wanted to do the job as well as possible, so we invested in a state-of-the-art still in order to help us produce the highest quality gin we can.
To that end we are constantly experimenting with flavours and different techniques to extract those flavours from plants.
Matahui Distillery was founded in 2023 with a simple goal: to create the highest quality, deliciously tasty products using the best locally sourced ingredients.
In this way, we can make products that are truly of their place, here in the beautiful Bay of Plenty.
Adventurous spirit
Our story of how we came to be the Matahui distillery and where it is today began a few years back - with a passion, a dream and a vision. Our goal is to produce flavoursome spirits and liqueurs from the freshest local ingredients, as sustainably as possible. So the research started and the vision began to take shape. The search for the perfect location, the dream of being able to grow our own citrus and herbs and every botanical possible to put into our product started to come alive.
Anything we can’t produce on site, we source as locally as possible and with strict standards. We care about the environment and take great care to ensure only the purest alcohol and most natural botanicals go into our bottles.
We are a team with genuine heart and passion, and we are truly proud of what we have created. We've only just started our adventure.
All our luxury spirits and liqueurs are made with 100% natural ingredients. At the heart of this is our 'gin garden' where we have planted hundreds of different potential botanicals. Using permaculture principles we are growing our botanicals in harmony with nature as much as we possibly can. We don't use intensive sprays and pesticides, we hand harvest and we distill, bottle and label everything on site.
Get in touch with us today.
