Imbue Distillery: Spirits with a story

Nikki, Luke, Mel and Mick from Imbue Distillery

At Imbue Distillery in Melbourne’s north-east, every bottle tells a story. Founded by hospitality veterans Mel and Mick Sheard, Imbue is a small-batch distillery known for its inventive use of local, foraged, and often overlooked ingredients—like prickly pear, damson plum, and yuzu.

“We’d been looking for ways to do our own thing for a long time but nothing really made sense number wise and then, sort of on the side, we’d started playing around at home with homebrewing and a little bit of distilling…and we thought, ‘Maybe this is the thing.’”

What began as a home experiment quickly became something more. After ditching their first “awful” batches, Mel and Mick went all in. Imbue officially started selling gin in 2019 and they were soon joined by friends—another chef and baker couple, Luke and Nikki.

While gin was their first product, the team never planned to stop there. Today, Imbue’s range also includes gin liqueurs, vodka, agave spirit, brandy, and a growing whiskey program, with around 200 barrels currently maturing. All are made using a grape-based neutral spirit sourced from South Australia—chosen for its soft mouthfeel and compatibility with Imbue’s complex botanicals.

“We love using things that get wasted… we do tend to use more obscure fruit and flavour combinations,” says Mel.

Their Suburban Gin, for example, draws inspiration from Mick’s childhood in Hurstbridge, combining wild fennel, blackberries, and foraged prickly pear. Other products have come about by chance—like their damson plum gin, which started with a neighbour who “couldn’t make that much jam” with the fruit and offered it to the distillery. 

“We definitely like to use locally grown, whether we pick it, whether we forage it, we know the farmer, or if it’s being wasted,” explains Mel.

Like their flavours, Imbue wanted their packaging to be different from the norm. “We went with that square bottle initially because there was nothing really on the shelf in that format,” says Mel. “We wanted to be visually different straight away from that standard round squat bottle that a lot of producers use…just because of how competitive the market is and because of that really short amount of time that you actually have to get a customer’s attention before they move onto something else.”

While their square bottles and colourful labels are immediately recognisable, what sets Imbue apart is the philosophy behind every spirit. “Our little tagline is ‘Spirits with a story’ and that’s what we try to keep in our heart - there is a story behind everything we’re doing.”

From local fruit to local friends-turned-customers, Imbue’s approach makes every sip personal. “My favourite thing is when it makes them [the customer] stand still for sec and go, like, ‘Oo! What is that? What am I tasting? What am I smelling?’”

Imbue may have started as a side project, but it’s grown into one of Victoria’s most distinctive craft distilleries—one bottle, one flavour, and one story at a time.

Find out more and shop the range at www.imbuedistillery.com

Read more about Imbue Distillery in the summer issue of frkd. magazine. Subscribe here for free so you don’t miss out!