Canned cocktails are the hot buzzword in drinks right now and Four Pillars has joined the party with a Rare Dry Gin & Tonic RTD.

According to Four Pillars, RTDs were a bit pedestrian until recently. But, much like Hollywood celebrities realising TV isn’t too bad after all, everyone in the drinks business is keen to get on the cans.

Four Pillars noted: “A couple of years ago things started changing. Better brands, better spirits, smaller formats, cleverer combinations. And it got us thinking. Could we replicate the gustatory sensation of a truly made Four Pillars Gin & Tonic in a simple, perfectly sized 250ml can? The answer is yes, we can.”

The distiller believes the key to getting a RTD right is getting both the gin and the tonic right.

“For the gin we started at the obvious place, with our Rare Dry Gin, and realised that if we were to make a can with ONE standard drink, we needed our gin component to pack a whole lot of punch. Not alcohol punch but flavour punch. So, we made a hyper-concentrated Rare Dry Gin using essentially twice as many of the exact same botanicals.”

Distiller Cam Mackenzie added: “It’s Rare Dry Gin on steroids. We set out to make a gin and tonic, not a tonic and gin, so the ratios were really important. We had our hyper-concentrated, flavour-packed Rare Dry Gin and we needed a tonic that complemented but didn’t dominate it. So, we made a tonic inspired by a few of our favourites that did just that.

“Then we tinkered and toiled and tasted many, many times because we wanted it to be as good as we could possibly make it.
“So that’s what we hope we’ve made. It is our Rare Dry Gin & Tonic, ready to go. Delicious, clean, refreshing and just the right balance of sweet, sour and bitter.”

If you want to be fancy, Four Pillars suggests pouring it into a glass with ice and an orange slice, but it’s also designed to simply be drunk icy cold straight from the can.

Four Pillars Rare Dry Gin & Tonic cans are RRP $27.99 per four pack. They are ABV 5.1%. and available from the gin shops at the Four Pillars Healesville Distillery and Four Pillars Surry Hills Laboratory and at Dan Murphy’s, BWS, Liquorland, Vintage Cellars, Ritchie’s and any good liquor store from October 2021.

As Patrón Perfectionists winner Harrison Kenney noted to Drinks Digest earlier this week, canned cocktails are the most exciting trend in mixology at the moment.

“RTDs are the future,” he intoned.

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