With so many new and exciting gins hitting the shelves every week, it can be easy to get a little overwhelmed - we’ve all wondered, just which gin really is the best one out there?

Of course, Craft Gin Club does a lot of the hard (well….“hard”!) work for our members, by filtering out and hand-selecting only the very best artisan gins from around the world to go into our Gin of the Month boxes.

So we are thrilled to see that one of our very own partners, whose gins we have featured not once, but twice, in our fabulous gin boxes, has just won the biggest prize of all: the title of International Gin Producer of the Year 2019!

Yes, the world’s biggest spirits competition, considered the ‘Oscars’ of the drinks industry, took place at a super-swanky awards banquet held by the prestigious International Wine and Spirits Competition in London on 28 November.

Now in its 50th year, the IWSC received more than 3000 entries across categories including gin, whisky, rum, fortified wine and champagne.

Trophies and medals were handed out to a number of the world’s finest gin producers.

However, the golden gong of the gin world was reserved for one distillery only:

Four Pillars!

The Four Pillars x Herno Dry Island Gin that featured as our August 2018 Gin of the Month

Officially now named as the best gin producer on the planet right now, this Australian-based distillery is one we have been thrilled to work with on two separate occasions in the last two years - first, as our Gin of the Month in November 2016, and then again in August 2018!

Wow - we couldn’t be more delighted for Four Pillars and to have helped support them on their journey to the top! It’s wonderful to see one of the small, truly craft gin distilleries we love working with getting the recognition it deserves. (It feels pretty good to know we’re getting it right, too!)

The Four Pillars team celebrate their win! Source: Instagram.

Four Pillars was founded in 2012 and is the first Australian distillery to be awarded International Gin Producer of the Year at the IWSC.

In a delighted Instagram post, co-founder and distiller Cameron Mackenzie expressed his amazement and excitement at having received the honour, saying it was beyond his “maddest, wildest dreams” and "really, truly, bloody incredible".

““Never in our wildest dreams did we think while we were making test batches back in 2013 that just shy of six years old we’d be claiming this title on the world stage!””

— Distiller Cameron Mackenzie, Four Pillars

“The award is not for a single one of our gins but for the whole of our gin business and that's what makes it so incredibly special," explained Mackenzie.

A huge congratulations to all the team at Four Pillars from everyone here at Craft Gin Club - we’ll be raising a toast to your success and many more to come! Cheers!

Want to try some of the world’s best gin? Well, if you are a Craft Gin Club member, you can!

Visit our Members’ Store and you can get your hands on a bottle of the Four Pillars X Herno Dry Island Gin that was produced in collaboration with Hernö Gin (another previous winner of the International Gin Producer of the Year award, cough cough!) and which Craft Gin Club members were the first in the Northern Hemisphere to try, back in August 2018!