The Adventure in the Glass: Our Family's Story, Since 1879

In September 1879, a seventeen-year-old apprentice named Alfred Maurice Lewis stood on the deck of the full-rigged ship Lady Jocelyn and watched the Thames carry him out of London. He'd paid an agent named Barker five pounds for the introduction, and after Barker vetted him with the ship's captain and chief steward, Alfred signed on to work his passage to Auckland as Pantry Boy — wage: one shilling a month. Eighty-four days later, land to land, he stepped ashore in New Zealand with three shillings in his pocket and a certificate of good conduct. He was the first of his family to leave home, and, four generations on, the reason there's a Geraldine Distillery at all.

We're Andrew and Saskia Lewis. We founded Humdinger Gin — and it's now the first of three brands under our distillery in Geraldine, with Picnicker fruit cups and Rambler dark spirits joining it. Alfred was my great-great-grandfather, and everything below comes from his own handwritten memoir, written from memory in 1945, the year he died. We didn't set out to build a brand story — we just kept finding out how much of what we do, he did first.

An apprenticeship, then an ocean

Alfred's trade in drinks started young. He left school around twelve for a five-year apprenticeship with a friend of his father's who manufactured aerated waters — six shillings a week, six in the morning to six at night, six days a week. It taught him the trade, but by the time it ended he wanted the world more than he wanted London, so he made his way to the East India Docks and found a ship going somewhere, anywhere, abroad.

The crossing reads like an adventure novel: seasickness in the Bay of Biscay, a King Neptune ceremony at the Equator, a twenty-six-foot shark hauled onto the deck, a fellow passenger buried at sea. He arrived in Auckland in January 1880 and, within hours, bought and ate an entire basket of peaches from a wharfside trader — his first taste of New Zealand fruit, and, by his own account, a genuine mistake he didn't repeat.

Finding the trade again

There was no opening in aerated waters in Auckland, so Alfred spent 20 months working in a general store before heading south to Wellington, where he finally got back into the business he'd trained for — as a machinist at Strike & Fairlie's Soda Water Works. They sent him to run the branch in Nelson, where he stayed on for about a year as manufacturer even after the company sold its local interest, training his own replacement before he left — but keeping his formulas to himself the whole time. It was also in Nelson that he got engaged, to a Miss Brown, though he wanted a better position secured before marrying.

How Thomson Lewis & Co. actually started

Alfred didn't set out to found a company so much as become the person everyone turned to when one was failing. Called back to Wellington to be with his gravely ill fiancée, he took a job as Working Manager for the very firm he'd first worked for as a machinist — by then a struggling public company. When it went into liquidation, the Colonial Bank asked him to keep it running on their behalf. He did, for nine months, until the bank offered to sell him the business outright. Soon after, Alex Thomson — a former business rival from Alfred's time in Dunedin — bought in for a half share. That partnership, built out of someone else's collapse, is where the name Thomson Lewis & Co. comes from.

The proof was in the bottle

By 1898, the business Alfred had rebuilt was good enough to enter a Non-Alcoholic Brewed Table Ale into open competition at London's Agricultural Hall — against 33 manufacturers from around the world, after the bottles had already survived a trip through the Tropics. He won: Gold Medal, first prize, beating the next-best entry by 28 points. You can still see that same medal stamped onto the ginger beer bottles we've kept from the business — proof, if we needed it, that he wasn't exaggerating.

A nose for water

Thomson Lewis & Co. grew into one of Wellington's major soft drink producers, turning out Thomson Lewis Lemonade, Soda Water and the well-known Camroc Dry Ginger Ale from its Tory Street works. Convinced there was pure water running beneath the street, Alfred hired a diviner named Bill Brogden to find it, then had it bored down 497 feet until they struck it — artesian water so clean and constant it supplied the business for more than fifty years. (The bore's still flowing today — Moore Wilson's reopened it as a public drinking fountain in their Tory Street piazza, right where the works used to stand.)

What we carry forward

Alfred's son later bought the business from him outright, and further down the line it was sold to Central Bottlers, who held the New Zealand Coca-Cola franchise — the beginning of a chain that, as far as we understand it, eventually folded into Oasis and then Coca-Cola Amatil, roughly a century after Alfred first walked into a Wellington soda factory as a young machinist.

We still have pieces of that century on our shelves in Geraldine — stoneware ginger beer bottles, a cobalt-blue soda siphon etched with the Thomson Lewis name.

When we run every batch we distil through our own exacting protocols, we're not inventing a tradition out of nothing. We're the latest people in this family stubborn enough to keep one going.

Alfred crossed the world at seventeen with a trade, a few shillings, and no plan beyond "abroad." He built something that outlasted him by a century. Next time you pour a Humdinger G&T, that's the adventure in the glass.