Poor Toms Story

Jesse and Griff met on their first day of highschool. In 2013, both in their early twenties, they found themselves living together in a sharehouse in Newtown. 

A banker and an actor respectively, Jesse didn’t want to spend his twenties talking to rich grandmas and stock brokers, and Griff didn’t want to spend his twenties performing Shakespeare to jaded high school students.

Jesse and Griff wanted to build a community around something that brought both of them together – gin. At the time there were no distilleries in Sydney, and nobody was interested in craft gin. They wanted to change that. So they took the logical next step and poured all of their life savings into a deposit for still.

Poor Toms is one of the pioneers of the new-wave of Australian distilling. Our mission is to bring real pleasure to people’s lives with audacious and honest spirits, especially gin. 

Who is Poor Tom?

Poor Tom is an archetypal philosopher, fool, madman, dissembler.  Straight out of Bedlam (a medieval psychiatric hospital), he wanders the countryside conversing in riddles. In Shakespeare's King Lear, Edgar assumes the identity of Poor Tom, transforming from a landowning noble into a naked outcast.

We drink gin to transcend reality, to dissolve the adornments of our identities and become somebody else: to become Poor Tom. 

Also... Thomas is Jesse’s and Griff’s middle name.