When most people think of the coupling of gin and music, more readily to their minds probably comes an image of drinking gin while listening to it. But Rogue Society Gin has come up with another idea, partnering up with Loop Recordings Aot(ear)oa, distilling gin while music is playing to create the “world’s first music-infused gin”. Part-PR stunt and part-absolute madness, even the makers themselves can’t tell us whether the gin actually tastes any different.
Remember Rogue Society Gin? We’ve written a bit about them here at StopPress – the three guys (Richard Bourke, Daniel Mclaughlin, and Mark Neal) who launched a distinctive Kiwi gin brand back in mid-February 2014.
Now we wonder if they’ve gone completely mad (and points off for the lack of apostrophe in their main ad).
Their latest batch of their gin has been distilled with New Zealand music playing on repeat all around it 24/7. And not just any old music: Wellington band Electric Wire Hustle’s soon-to-be-released EP Aeons, to be precise.
Which apparently means this brew will have its molecules infused with the grooving tunes of the EP.
Quoting controversial Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, who believed that water was “a blueprint for our reality”, and that the energies and vibrations of music could change the structure of water, the Rogue Society guys say they decided to “blend” music into gin.
Does it make any difference to the taste? We suspect not one iota. When we asked the (we thought obvious) question, no one at Rogue Society seemed prepared to answer.
Who cares? Research suggests that the better the story you spin around your product, the more customers genuinely believe it tastes good.
Meanwhile, music-infused gin certainly isn’t the first rodeo in wild ideas – Prince Charles isn’t the only person that believes talking to plants helps them grow; there’s that age-old thing about playing music to unborn babies; and what sane person would really start a TV station (or in Auckland a radio station) for dogs?
Meanwhile, Electric Wire Hustle, which is poised to release the Aeons EP next month, is using the gin stunt as a marketing gimmick of its own. The band decided that with the way the music industry operates these days, a simple digital download would no longer cut it.
So it paired up with Loop Recordings Aot(ear)oa, which spawned out of multi-platform Loop magazine (which closed in 2001), and got together with Rogue Society for the limited edition gin – and a special bottle designed by the band.
Loop media spokesperson Dan Clist says the collaboration is about providing something different to both gin drinkers and music lovers.
While Clist says Loop can’t guarantee that music will change the chemical makeup of the gin, they do believe that there’s a certain element of truth in Emoto’s research.
“And it’s a world first. People have done this before with beer, but nobody has done a bottle of gin,” Clist says.
Available for a New Zealand and Australia exclusive run, each bottle of gin will come with a download of the EP, containing five new tracks and a collection of remixes.
In this way, early-adopter customers will not only receive the EP more than a week before the rest of the world, but will also receive an instant download of the track ‘Golden Ladder’.
The Rogue Society music-infused gin will be shipped around August 19, while the Aeons EP will be released digitally on August 28.
- This article originally appeared on Idealog.
