Two school friends and a German still.

Poor Toms was started by two school friends, Jesse Kennedy and Griffin Blumer. The company says they met on their first day of high school and, in 2013, were sharing a house in Newtown, in Sydney’s inner west — Kennedy working as a banker, Blumer as an actor. Broadsheet, which described the pair in July 2015 as two Canberrans, reported that Kennedy had worked at Macquarie Bank and Blumer in theatre and behind a bar, and that the gin grew out of weeks of experimental distilling in a Marrickville share house.

The company says the two put their life savings into a deposit for a still. Broadsheet described a custom-made German copper still and reported that the recipe work was guided by Marcel Thompson, a distiller with 28 years in the industry, who insisted they change one variable at a time. They considered about a hundred ingredients and rejected some, kelp among them; Time Out, in March 2016, put the number they had distilled at 106 and described the distillery as an unmarked warehouse with a 200-litre German copper still and one large workbench. The distillery was set up in a whitewashed hall in Marrickville.

The first product, Sydney Dry Gin, was funded through a Pozible crowdfunding campaign that raised more than double its target, Broadsheet reported in July 2015. B&T, writing in December that year, dated the brand’s launch to 2014; the first gin reached the market in 2015.

Edgar’s disguise in King Lear.

The name is literary. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar, the son of the Earl of Gloucester, disguises himself as Poor Tom, a wandering beggar from Bedlam, the London hospital. The company’s own telling casts Poor Tom as “an archetypal philosopher, fool, madman, dissembler,” and links the idea to gin: “We drink gin to transcend reality.” It adds that Thomas is also the middle name of both founders. Blumer, the company says, had spent his time as an actor performing Shakespeare to high-school students.

The gins lean on Australian ingredients. Broadsheet reported in 2015 that the base botanicals were juniper, coriander, angelica, cinnamon and cardamom, with cubeb pepper and strawberry gum, a New South Wales eucalyptus, added. B&T described a gin made from Australian wheat spirit with green apple, strawberry gum leaf and chamomile. The company now lists Granny Smith apple, strawberry gum leaf, chamomile and lemon myrtle among the Sydney Dry Gin’s botanicals.

The range has widened since. Alongside the Sydney Dry Gin, the company sells a Strawberry Gin, made by steeping strawberries, young ginger and hibiscus in the dry gin; Fool’s Cut, a stronger, juniper-heavy gin bottled at 52 per cent; an amaro called Imbroglio; a coffee gin made in collaboration with Everyday Coffee; and a vodka.

Early marketing took the same playful line. In December 2015 B&T reported a campaign, credited in its headline to the agency VCCP, called “1800 GINSUS”: drinkers rang a hotline to confess their sins to a mythical figure named Ginsus, with the best confessions rewarded with a limited-edition pink strawberry gin. The campaign ran across social media, point-of-sale material, PR and specially tagged bottles in bars and shops.

Australian gin and its distillers.

The seven brands in this group are all Australian gin and craft-spirits names: Archie Rose, Never Never, Brookie’s, Manly Spirits, Ink Gin, Poor Toms and Applewood. They sit at different points in the trade, from small distilleries that still carry a founder’s name or a home town to brands that have taken outside investment or now belong to larger drinks companies, and a single gin can be sold at a cellar door, in a bottle shop and over a cocktail bar.

A gin’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a bottle, a label, a name and the place it promises, and in Australian gin that place is often spelled out through native botanicals and a named region or suburb. The company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its distilling or grown far beyond the shed or warehouse where it started, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirits are made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A distillery with a bar in it.

In 2018 Poor Toms opened a gin hall to the public inside the Marrickville distillery, Concrete Playground reported. The space was designed by a neighbour, Jack Dunbar, and a friend, Grant Wallwork, with hanging plants in custom pots, a chapel-like archway over the back bar, a custom marble-topped bar, and tables and chairs built from scratch, all at bar height. Blumer described it as an “oasis” in industrial Marrickville. Each gin had its own signature cocktail, and the menu included a negroni made with the house amaro.

The range has also moved into ready-made drinks. In September 2021 Broadsheet wrote about the company’s ready-to-pour Negroni Australiano, which combines the Sydney Dry Gin, the Imbroglio amaro and an unfiltered sweet vermouth from Maidenii. Sean McGuire, the company’s head of new products and drinks, told the magazine the team wanted “an all-Australian product that paid homage to its traditional form.” The article also mentioned a canned Negroni Spritz and a seasonal Christmas negroni.

Concrete Playground described Kennedy and Blumer as its owners in 2018, and the company’s website still names the two as its media contacts in 2026. The website, which now sits at poortoms.com, acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as traditional owners of the land on which Poor Toms stands. The brand’s earlier web address, poortomsgin.com.au, now carries unrelated content.

For a design guide, Poor Toms shows how a name borrowed from literature can carry a whole brand, from the product names to the tone of its campaigns. Compare Archie Rose, another Sydney distillery, and Four Pillars, the Yarra Valley gin maker. For this guide we use gum-leaf green, strawberry red and marble with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Poor Toms’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.