Local meadery, Rachelle The Rabbit, has recently branched out to distilling spirits under its new umbrella label, Compendium. Its debut comes in the form of two surprising flavours one would never imagine to be rendered into gin — chendol and rojak.
These Singaporean hawker classics have been transformed into clear spirits that encapsulate exactly how the dishes taste. The use of minimal ingredients to achieve both the chendol and the rojak gin makes the final product that much more wonderous, given how each expression is a composition of just four elements.
The silky-smooth, dessert-like Chendol Gin uses juniper berries, coconut and pandan leaves as the main botanicals, re-distilled with a base spirit made from fermented gula melaka. Eschewing a neutral grain spirit made from cereals as the base for the Chendol Gin is a stroke of genius, as even when neat, the spirit is creamy and free of the alcoholic bite one would expect from the average gin.
Rojak seems like an exceptionally challenging dish to transform into liquor, but Compendium manages to nail the combination of syrupy sweetness and aromatic spice through the use of distilled mead as the base, as well as a generous amount of torch ginger blossoms as the main botanical. Lemon peel and juniper berry both enhance the fragrance of the overall drink.
Compendium’s innovative gins are now available for purchase at Temple Cellars or the Rachelle the Rabbit website, priced at S$98 for the Chendol Gin and S$108 for the Rojak Gin.