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Tuesday October 13, 2026 
12 October 2026
St Leonards distillery Finders has won a gold medal at the 2026 Sydney Royal Distilled Spirits Show, the latest achievement for husband-and-wife founders Kyle and Georgia Ford.
Before he was crafting award-winning spirits, Kyle Ford was enjoying a successful career in a very different field.
“I originally grew up in Gloucester, New South Wales, moved to Sydney, and then worked in the Air Force for 10 years before starting Finders,” Ford recalls.
The idea of starting a distillery emerged during a two-year trip around the world with his wife Georgia, who was working as a fashion buyer at the time.
“On that trip, we visited breweries, distilleries, wineries all over the world. That wasn’t the intention, but we saw how rice wine was made in China, sake in Japan. We did the bourbon trail in the US, saw how pisco was made in South America, and did the whiskey trail through Ireland and Scotland. We saw how booze was made everywhere.”
What began as leisurely visits gradually inspired a career change.
“About halfway through the trip, we thought we could do something like this in Australia. Let’s start a craft alcohol brand. Wouldn’t it be great if this is what we could do for our careers when we got home?”
Ford had long enjoyed gin and already had ideas about the styles he wanted to produce. The challenge was learning how to make them.
“When we started toying with the idea of starting a distillery, I knew expressions that I would like to make already, but had no clue how to do it,” he says.
“There was no push to take that leap until I got a mentor who knows how to distil. He simplified things for me, showed me how to do it, and gave me and Georgia the little push over the edge to go, ‘Okay, this is the idea, but now we actually have the means to do it.’”
Ford threw himself into studying the craft, even paying a Melbourne distillery to allow him to work alongside its team.
“In Melbourne I was observing a lot and in the background. Every time they were doing something, I had all these ideas I put in my notebook … all these ideas just started filling the notebook,” he says.
“We took about a year and a half to create our first recipe, and a lot of that was me learning the skills of the trade.”
Bringing craft distilling to the North Shore
When it came time to choose a location, Kyle and Georgia looked close to home. Living in Wollstonecraft, they saw an opportunity to establish a craft distillery on the Lower North Shore.
“You’ve got these pockets in the Inner West and Brookvale, but there wasn’t anything here. People said we had to go to those areas so customers could find us, but we looked at it from the opposite way: let’s bring it here so that we have this amenity in our area instead of having to go somewhere else to do it.”
There was another advantage.
“Not to mention in this industry, it’s very good to live a 10-minute walk from work. There’s a lot of taste testing involved!”
The couple established Finders in a modest warehouse complex at 6 Herbert Street, St Leonards.
Ford has since become an enthusiastic advocate for the area, whether it’s walking up to Crows Nest for dinner and drinks, watching the North Sydney Bears or enjoying the harbour views from nearby bushland.
“The view from Berry Island and Balls Head looking across the harbour of the city. We travelled for two years and went to a lot of places, but nothing beats that,” he says.
“Walking up the hill to Crows Nest, having incredible bars and places for dinner … who needs to go to the city when you’ve got all that?”
Finders launched in March 2020, just one week before Australia entered its first COVID-19 lockdown.
“We actually have a joke that in the first batch of Finders, there’s no gin, it’s just tears, the secret ingredient,” Ford laughs.
Despite the unfortunate timing, Finders survived the pandemic and gradually built a loyal local following.
Its spirits are now stocked at neighbourhood venues including Small Bar, The Hayberry, The Foxtrot, Lu-ho, Flat Rock Brew Cafe and Green Moustache, as well as independent bottle shops.
An award-winning collection
Finders has developed a range of spirits built around carefully sourced ingredients, small-batch experimentation and traditional distilling techniques.
Its ingredients range from wild Macedonian juniper to locally foraged Australian botanicals.
The collection now includes several distinctive gins, vodka, limoncello and an Australian-made agave spirit.
Australian Dry Gin
Finders’ flagship spirit recently won a gold medal in the London Dry category at the 2026 Sydney Royal Distilled Spirits Show, scoring 90 points.
Made with nine botanicals, the gin combines traditional ingredients with Australian native flavours.
“The first five give us a really classic dry gin base profile,” Ford explains.
“What makes us unique is we build on that with chamomile and orange peel, and then native gum and ground and roasted wattleseed. Chamomile lifts everything in the recipe, adding this beautiful, delicate sweetness. Wattleseed gives us incredible middle-palate intensity and depth of character.”
Vodka
Originally developed for small-scale tastings, Finders Vodka has also achieved international recognition, winning a gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Ford says its purity comes from an unusually slow distillation process, followed by extensive filtration.
“We distil it exceptionally slowly and remove all impurities, but then we also cycle it through coconut husk carbon for about six hours,” he says.
“It releases highly volatile alcohols and purifies it, giving us a really pure sipping vodka. Nowhere to hide in vodka. It’s got to be spot-on.”
Native Red Lime Gin
Designed for Australian summers, this citrus-forward gin uses native finger limes and red limes alongside more familiar lime flavours.
“It features Australian native red finger limes and Australian red limes as the hero ingredients, along with lime zest and lime leaf, four types of citrus in total,” Ford says.
“Served with a light tonic water, it makes this super refreshing summertime gin and tonic. I’ve always drunk gin and tonic with lime, and I wanted to make a big, citrus-intense gin that just amplified that.”
Blackberry Gin
Finders’ Blackberry Gin began as a technical challenge after Ford was warned that blackberries were difficult to use in a stable spirit.
“A couple of people in the industry said, ‘Don’t use blackberries, it’s too hard to make it stable.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do that then. That’s my challenge.’”
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The solution involved steeping fresh blackberries directly in batches of dry gin, with vanilla bean, cinnamon and cassia bark adding depth.
The result is a clear, deep-purple spirit with a rich fruit flavour.
“We’ve got this beautiful blackberry pie flavour in that spirit,” Ford says.
Barrel Aged Gin
A whisky enthusiast, Ford has also developed a limited range of barrel-aged gins, experimenting with casks previously used for sherry, rye whiskey and maple syrup.
“It’s a very simple gin recipe with four botanicals, earthy flavours like cassia bark and juniper that match the profile of barrel ageing,” he says.
“I seek really, really high-quality barrels … Some releases in this series we’ve done seven months on oak, some have done two years. It’s a constant experiment.”
Limoncello
Alongside Native Red Lime Gin, Finders’ limoncello has become one of the distillery’s biggest sellers.
Made from fresh, hand-peeled lemons, it uses a distinctive extraction process to produce a smooth texture while retaining an intense citrus flavour.
“All hand-peeled lemons, intensely lemon, but we do a different extraction that means it’s really velvety, a delicate, velvety limoncello with big bold lemon flavours,” Ford says.
“We’ve yet to have someone who doesn’t enjoy it!”
Desert Haze Agave Spirit
Finders has also ventured into agave spirits, drawing inspiration from Mexico while producing its own Australian interpretation.
“We get ingredients from Mexico, but we make the spirit all here in Australia, hence the reason it’s called agave spirit and not tequila.”
Ford says the production process emphasises the roasted agave flavour.
“We really lean on that heavily and get this beautiful, big roasted agave flavour,” he explains.
“You can sip on it neat because it doesn’t have that harshness of the alcohol.”
The Blanco expression is suited to traditional margaritas, while a chilli-infused version has developed its own following.
“The chilli enthusiasts have found us and people are drinking it neat because it’s got this beautiful mouthfeel and texture … but you chuck that in like you would normally make a margarita and there’s your spicy marg.”
Keeping it hands-on
Despite its growing collection of awards and the potential to expand production, Finders remains committed to the hands-on approach that has defined the business since its beginnings.
From experimenting with botanicals and carefully selecting barrels to applying labels by hand, the Ford family continues to take a close interest in every stage of production.
Six years after launching in a St Leonards warehouse at the beginning of a global pandemic, Finders has established itself as an award-winning Australian craft distillery with strong roots in the Lower North Shore community.