Most wasabi isn't actually wasabi.
Here's a sentence that will surprise most people: the wasabi served alongside your sushi almost certainly wasn't wasabi.
What you've been eating is horseradish, dyed green, sometimes with a small amount of real wasabi added for legitimacy. The actual plant (Wasabia japonica) is notoriously difficult to grow. It needs cold, clean, fast-flowing water and constant nutrients. Even in Japan, where the plant originates, only a handful of regions can grow it commercially. Outside Japan, almost no one bothers. Except, as it happens, the people just down the road from our distillery.
This is the story of how we ended up making a gin with real New Zealand wasabi, why it was harder than we expected, and what it tastes like when you finally get it right.
The salmon farm that started it all
The wasabi growing in our region didn't arrive by accident. It arrived because of fish.
New Zealand King Salmon operate a hatchery near Te Waikoropupū Springs, the spring system in Golden Bay with some of the clearest water in the southern hemisphere. The water comes out of the ground cold, clean, and remarkably consistent. The hatchery sits beside the Waitapu River and uses the spring-fed flow.
A salmon hatchery does something useful for any plant growing downstream. It adds nutrients to the water. A grower from Pure Wasabi put the two facts together - cold, clean, fast-flowing water meets nutrient-rich flow. That's almost exactly what wasabi needs. And so a small commercial wasabi operation now grows in the Waitapu River.
We're based ten minutes away. When we first heard about it, we didn't think long. We had to make a gin with this.
The part we didn't expect
We thought the hard part was sourcing the wasabi. We were wrong.
Real wasabi root has a problem. The moment you cut into it, it starts losing its pungency. Volatile compounds escape into the air. Within minutes you've already lost flavour. This is why traditional Japanese restaurants grate wasabi at the table, on demand.
We were trying to take a botanical with a clock running on it and put it into a distillation process that takes time. That's like trying to capture the smell of a freshly cut lemon by leaving it in a cupboard overnight.
It took a lot of trial and error. We cut, we distilled, we tasted, we adjusted. We failed in one way, changed the variables, and failed in a different way. Eventually we worked out a process that carries the wasabi character through into the spirit.
What's in the bottle besides the wasabi
A gin built on real wasabi can't stop at wasabi. The botanical is bold, peppery, complex, and needs companions that hold their own. Two New Zealand natives do most of the work.
The first is horopito, a peppery native shrub that grows wild across Aotearoa. As a botanical it brings a slow-building heat that sits alongside the wasabi rather than competing with it.
The second is dried Otago kelp, which gives the gin a salty, savoury finish. This is the part that surprises people. Most gins finish on citrus or florals. Ours finishes the way a good dish does, with a savoury note that makes you want another sip.
Together they give the gin a profile that drinks like food. It works with a tonic. It works in a martini. It works in a gimlet with cucumber. Some bartenders use it in a Bloody Mary in place of vodka.
Why we made it the hard way
We could have made a wasabi gin with paste from a jar. It would have been cheaper, faster, and less risky. We didn't, for the same reasons we make most of our decisions.
The taste is genuinely different. Real wasabi has a clean, vegetal heat that fades in seconds. Horseradish has a sharper, more punishing burn that lingers. They're not the same flavour. If you've only tried the paste version, the real thing is a surprise.
For a small distillery, doing the harder version of a thing is sometimes the only point of difference worth having.
One last thing
If you've tried our wasabi gin, you'll know it doesn't taste like anything else on the shelf. If you haven't tried it, you've got something to look forward to.
