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Old twist on tonic water served up by St. John's company

Liquor is known to get better with age but two St. John's entrepreneurs are hoping more bartenders and home mixologists will integrate the old with the new — at least when it comes to gin and tonic.

The Third Place Tonic started selling bottles eight weeks ago and has already surpassed the profit expectations that its creators set for its hand-made batches of artisanal tonic water.

"We sort of set a goal for sales one year out," said Kris Smith, The Third Place Tonic co-founder. "We've already exceeded that."

The product is quite unlike tonic water that's sold in cans. It's rich, flavourful and light brown in colour — a reflection of the ingredients that go into a concoction that has had mixologists swooning, including some outside the province.

To make their product, Smith and co-founder Dan Meades go back to the root of tonic water making. They import cinchona bark from Peru and boil it down.

"We tell people if your gin and tonic is clear, it means you're drinking a lot of chemicals," Meades told the St. John's Morning Show.

"Think of tree bark: if you boiled some tree bark, it would be brown."

On offer at local eateries

The aromatic product is now featured at higher-end St. John's restaurants, including the Merchant Tavern and Mallard Cottage.

"We've been really fortunate that some of these local businesses I think decided, 'Hey, there's a local product, it's original, why don't we give it a try?'" said Meades.

"That would get us through the first sampling. That would get us through the door but it certainly wouldn't get them to reorder at the rate that they've been reordering."

The Third Place Tonic, which takes its name from sociology and a phrase that describes social environments apart from home and work, is also now for sale at a couple of local stores.

To mix a gin and tonic, an ounce of Third Place's tonic is mixed with two ounces each of sparkling water and gin.

The beverage can be a bit pricey: a bottle of The Third Place Tonic retails for a little over $20, although it contains enough for eight strong drinks.

Plenty of flavour

There's much more The Third Place Tonic's ingredient list than bark. The amber-coloured liquid is infused with plenty of flavour.

"We seep it for days and days and days with stuff that tastes delicious in cocktails: lavender, cardamom, lemongrass, citrus peels, green tea, kaffir lime and allspice," Meades said. "Then we cut it with a bit of sweetener to make sure it's not too, too bitter on your pallet and this is what we came up with."

Meades had the idea to go back to tonic-making basics about a year ago after contracting a disease while abroad.

One of his treatments involved the cinchona tree, the main ingredient in The Third Place tonic.

"I'd lived in west Africa for a long time and had malaria a couple of times" he said.

"Some of the locals there will make you chew on the cinchona tree which now grows in west Africa to help as an antimalarial if you're not close to a major metropolitan area. I thought it would be really interesting to try and make tonic the way it was made hundreds of years ago instead of fill it with sugar and chemicals and put it in a can."

Small batches from a small company

The Third Place Tonic is a small operation.

"We brew every single bit of this ourselves in a small kitchen here in the city. We bottle every bottle. We hand batch number and sign every bottle" said Smith.

"We really like that the product is very much our own and that we're intricately involved in every single batch that we make."

But the plan is to expand. "Scaling up is the next thing we have to try and sort out — we want to be able to move off island."

The Third Place Tonic shipped its first out-of-province order to Halifax last week.