This article was first published by NZ Entrepreneur.
From a makeshift lab in a garage in Auckland, a quiet revolution in spirits distillation began taking shape. It started, as many breakthroughs do, with a simple frustration. Mark Eltom, a Canadian-born chemist and founder of deep-tech startup Reactory, was tired of watching his favourite whiskey climb beyond reach in price. Rather than complain he built a machine that could replicate years of barrel ageing in a fraction of the time.
The first prototype wasn’t much to look at. “It basically lived inside a garbage bin,” Eltom laughs when recalling those early days. But when he and a few friends first tasted the liquid from that experimental reactor, the moment was transformative. “We just looked at each other and thought, ‘This is actually good. This works!’”
From that crude experiment grew Reactory, a company now in trials with some of the world’s largest spirits producers to bring modern science into one of humanity’s oldest crafts.
At its heart, Reactory’s technology accelerates the natural chemical processes that transform raw distillate into mature, complex spirits. Traditionally, the transformation takes years in oak barrels, tying up inventory, space, and capital.
Reactory’s proprietary reactors do it in days or weeks, with results that consistently win blind tastings against traditionally aged products. In nearly a thousand such tests, Eltom says Reactory’s samples have prevailed roughly 90 percent of the time.
That success has earned the Kiwi startup a pilot partnership in Europe with one of the world’s largest spirits companies.
But Eltom is careful to point out that this isn’t about undermining tradition but understanding and improving it. “People forget that the spirits industry wasn’t born out of luxury,” he says. “It was built by moonshiners, rum-runners and mad scientists. The whole thing started as experimentation. We’re just continuing that legacy.”
