THE GIN PASSPORT ATLAS - DISTILLERY STORY- PINNED ON THE MAP - OCEANIA
PAPA SALT COASTAL GIN, Australia
Papa Salt is the sort of celebrity gin that makes you slightly suspicious before you even pick up the bottle. Margot Robbie is on the label story, five friends are behind it, and it comes from Byron Bay with a bottle designed to look like sea glass. So far, so lifestyle brand. Except the further you get into the story, the more it looks like they actually did make the gin themselves — or at least refused to let somebody else make the decisions for them.
The five founders are Robbie, her husband Tom Ackerley, their friend and LuckyChap colleague Josey McNamara, Regan Riskas and her husband Charlie Maas, who brought rather more drinks-industry experience to the table than you might expect from a group of film people. Maas's family has a distillery in Wisconsin, and he had already spent years working in the drinks business.
The idea started with a fairly simple problem. They all loved gin and had spent plenty of time drinking it together in London, where there was no shortage of good bottles to choose from. After moving to America, they found themselves missing the sort of gin they wanted to drink. Rather than simply complain about it, they started experimenting.
Robbie apparently had her own solution for a bad G&T: a rooibos teabag. It became one of the early ideas they explored, along with plenty of other botanicals and flavour combinations. The trouble was that the more adventurous they became, the further they moved away from the original brief. They wanted something that worked with tonic, made a good Martini and could simply be topped with soda without becoming boring after one drink.
They went through around 300 experiments and 59 formal recipes. One version was apparently good enough that a friend who judged spirits thought it would do well in competition, but when everyone sat around drinking it, nobody reached for a second glass. It was too distinctive, too specific, and therefore failed the actual test. Back to the drawing board.
Eventually Charlie Maas secretly entered the 59th recipe into the 2022 LA Spirits Awards. It won Best Gin in the competition, which conveniently provided the five of them with a very good reason to stop fiddling with it. The gin subsequently picked up Gold at the 2024 San Francisco World Spirits Competition too.
The name has nothing to do with the recipe and everything to do with a man they met in Sri Lanka. Robbie, Ackerley and McNamara encountered a larger-than-life Australian called Papa Salt at a beach bar. He was from the Gold Coast and had apparently travelled the world before ending up on that particular beach. They spent a long day drinking and swapping stories, then went their separate ways. When they were looking for a name that captured the sort of carefree coastal life they had in mind, Papa Salt kept coming back.
The gin itself eventually found its home a long way from Hollywood, at Lord Byron Distillery in Byron Bay.
The choice wasn't simply about having an Australian address. The distillery is family-owned, operates on renewable energy and has a zero-waste philosophy, which appealed to the group. Maas already had a personal connection with its owner, Brian Restall, and during Covid, when international travel was impossible, Restall sent samples through the post. The first one was tasted by the group together in the garden.
That Australian connection carries through into the recipe. Papa Salt uses native botanicals including roasted wattleseed, pink peppercorn, wax flower, hibiscus, citrus peel and ginger. The original recipe also included oyster shell, used during distillation to bring a little salty minerality to the gin. It was an unusual choice, but one that fitted the whole coastal idea rather nicely.
There is now a small but rather interesting footnote to that ingredient. In 2026, London bars and restaurants began raising concerns about the practicalities of serving a gin containing mollusc-derived material to customers with shellfish allergies. The science around distilled spirits is more complicated than simply assuming that an allergen survives distillation — proteins generally don't travel across with the alcohol vapour — but the hospitality issue was real enough.
Papa Salt has confirmed that it began removing oyster shell from the recipe in Australia in 2025, with the transition to an oyster-free version in the UK due to be completed by the end of 2026. So if you have an older bottle, the recipe may not be quite the same as the one that eventually replaces it.
What will replace it has not yet been announced, so it will be interesting to see whether the team finds another botanical way of keeping that coastal character or simply lets the existing wattleseed, peppercorn, wax flower, citrus and ginger do more of the work.
My best guess would be seaweed or kelp, or perhaps a native Australian coastal plant that brings a little of that salty, mineral character without introducing another allergen. More obvious, and perhaps more in keeping with the name, would be sea salt, although that might just be a little too easy. Either way, replacing something that actually came from the sea without losing that sense of the coast should make the next version rather interesting.
The bottle is another deliberate part of the story. Its aqua-blue glass is intended to resemble sea glass, with a softened, almost frosted appearance rather than the polished look of a conventional gin bottle. It is very much designed to belong on a beach, which is handy because that is essentially the world Papa Salt is trying to bottle.
"From a Sri Lankan beach bar
to Byron Bay"
Show me a bottle and
I'll tell you a story.
