How to Make the Perfect Gin and Tonic at Home (An Australian Guide)

How to Make the Perfect Gin and Tonic at Home (An Australian Guide)

Here is a genuinely controversial opinion: most people get a gin and tonic wrong. Not because they use bad gin. Because they use bad tonic.

The tonic makes up about 70-75% of your glass. It is, by volume, most of your drink. Yet people will spend $80 on a boutique Australian gin and then pour it over the cheapest, flattest, most aggressively sweet tonic water they could find at the servo. And then they wonder why it doesn't taste amazing.

We make handcrafted tonic water in Margaret River, Western Australia. We have been thinking about this for a long time. Here is everything we know about making a gin and tonic that is actually worth drinking.

It starts with the tonic, not the gin

We are not saying the gin doesn't matter - it does. But the tonic is the variable most people ignore, and it's the one that makes the biggest difference.

Standard supermarket tonic water is loaded with sugar, artificial sweeteners, and synthetic quinine flavouring. It is sweet, flat, and aggressive. It fights the gin instead of working with it. The botanicals in a good gin - juniper, coriander, citrus peel, angelica - get completely drowned out.

A good tonic water is dry, lightly bitter from real cinchona extract, and lightly carbonated. It lifts the gin's botanicals rather than smothering them. The difference in the glass is significant.

The ratio

This is where most home bartenders go wrong in the other direction - too much gin.

The classic ratio is 1 part gin to 2 parts tonic. So for a standard 30ml shot of gin, you want 60ml of tonic. For a double (60ml), use 120ml of tonic.

A gin and tonic should not taste boozy or heavy. It should be crisp, refreshing, and aromatic. If it tastes like straight gin with a splash of tonic, you have used too much gin and not enough tonic.

The glass

Use a highball glass or a copa balloon glass. Both work, for slightly different reasons.

Whatever glass you use, chill it first. Pop it in the freezer for 10 minutes or fill it with ice water while you prep everything else. A cold glass keeps your drink colder for longer and improves the carbonation.

The ice

Use lots of it. This is counterintuitive but important.

More ice means colder temperature, which means the ice melts more slowly, which means less dilution. A glass with one ice cube will dilute your drink quickly as that single cube melts. A glass packed with ice stays colder for much longer.

Use large ice cubes if you have them - 25-30mm is ideal. They melt more slowly than small cubes because they have less surface area relative to their volume.

Fill your glass to the top with ice before you pour anything.

The pour order

This matters more than most people think.

1. Fill your chilled glass to the top with ice

2. Pour the gin over the ice first - let it chill for 10 seconds

3. Pour the tonic slowly down the inside edge of the glass, not straight down the middle - this preserves the carbonation

4. Give it one gentle stir - just to combine, not to mix aggressively

5. Add your garnish last

Pouring the tonic down the side rather than straight into the glass is the single tip that makes the biggest visible difference. Your drink will be noticeably more carbonated.

The garnish

The garnish is not decoration. It changes the flavour of the drink by adding aromatic compounds that interact with the botanicals in the gin.

The rule of thumb is to match your garnish to the botanicals in your gin. Check what your gin is distilled with and use something complementary.

A few drops of citrus juice - lemon or lime - also brightens the drink and rounds out the bitterness of the tonic. Not everyone does this but it's worth trying.

Why the tonic water matters even more in Australia

Australia has one of the most exciting gin industries in the world right now. Margaret River, the Barossa, the Yarra Valley, Tasmania - distilleries all over the country are making genuinely world-class gins with complex native botanical profiles.

But a lot of these gins are still being mixed with the same mass-produced tonic water that was designed to go with a London dry gin made in the 1800s. It's a mismatch.

Australian gins tend to be more delicate, more floral, and more complex than their European counterparts. They need a tonic that stays out of the way and lets those flavours breathe - not a sweet, assertive tonic that bulldozes them.

That's why we built Waves & Caves Indian Tonic Water the way we did. Handcrafted in Margaret River with real cinchona extract, pure local rain water, and a deliberately restrained sweetness. Crisp, clean, and dry enough to let whatever gin you're pouring actually taste like itself.

Indian tonic vs dry tonic - which should you use?

We make two tonics and the difference is simple:

Both use real cinchona extract and Margaret River mineral water. Neither contains artificial sweeteners.

The full recipe

A few more tips from the people who make the tonic

Never use tonic that has been sitting open in the fridge for more than a day. It will be flat and your drink will taste dull. Our 330ml bottles are the right size for two drinks - use the whole thing.

Temperature matters more than most people think. If your gin and tonic tastes off, it is probably because something was not cold enough. Cold glass, cold gin, cold tonic, lots of ice.

If you want to go lower sugar, use our Dry Tonic and top up with a splash of sparkling water. You get the length of a full G&T with less sweetness and fewer calories.

And if you want to make this the easiest possible thing to do at home, subscribe to our tonic water and never run out.