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Five minutes with Hamilton Lowe, Carmosina Holdings & Vitoria Regia gin

The impetus for the cachaça was twofold. One was, having worked for seven years in marketing, I wanted to get closer to creative control. My best friend from school – now my business partner – and his family have been making cachaça for well over 100 years. And he said: ‘I’d love to build an international brand.’ I was 28, at a crossroads, so I said ‘let’s give it a go’. We wanted to elevate this national spirit of Brazil to what we felt was its rightful place among great spirits categories.

Having done quite well with cachaça, it seemed logical to look at gin. We are a British-Brazilian company, and we felt it’d be fun to do the British side of things. Also, the gin boom hadn’t hit Brazil. It felt like the right timing, and we have become the number one premium-selling gin in Brazil.

We wanted this to be a Brazilian gin because there’s no point making a gin that tastes like a London dry. We have a South American flavour profile that starts with a sugarcane base. We liked the idea of having slightly more delicate base alcohol, which allowed us to have a more simple botanical offering, with South American flavours representing a Brazilian profile – yellow fruits, red fruits and citrus fruit. This makes a slightly more delicate gin, so if I put it in a bar in London, it will stack up and offer something different. Bars and pubs have Italian, French, US, Japanese and British gins; we want to take the space of the South American gin.

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