Geraldine’s Humdinger Gin bottles have arrived home covered in awards.

Co-owner Andrew Lewis said every gin the business entered in the 2026 New Zealand Small Batch Gin Awards returned home with a medal.

The award he and wife Saskia were most proudest of “wasn’t about what’s in the glass”, Mr Lewis said.

Their business was named Sustainable Distillery of the Year.

The award was down to multiple factors: one of those was the distillery’s roof being fitted out with solar panels.

“As many as we could fit.”

The rooftop solar generated more electricity over the year than they used.

During the day they put excess electricity onto the grid, and the distillery pulled power from the grid at night, he said.

The award recognised the way the team made everything, including distilling processes which reduced their water use to under 2.5 litres per litre of bottled gin.

While a lot of distilleries had invested in water reuse, the team had “optimised their process”.

That was in part down to their well-engineered German-made still.

Water used to cool down the freshly made gin was collected to use for cleaning the following day.

Their sustainability did not end there, with a bottle refill programme at the cellar door and locally grown fruit and botanicals added to the gin, like the sloes that were grown and hand-picked at an orchard of more than 1000 blackthorn trees near Geraldine. 

Mr Lewis also provided help to other distilleries around the country — tapping into his engineering background, he gave out advice and tips for free.

While others might not give free support to their competitors, he did it because it was “the right thing to do”.

The business had been going for six years; the beginnings had been interrupted by the arrival of Covid-19, which had made them divert into selling hand sanitisers.

The distillery’s dry gin took gold for the second year running, the sloe gin also took out gold and their citrus gin returned with a silver, while their pink gin, rum barrel-aged gin and pekapeka gin received bronze.