The name, Owl Man, is a play on the Mandarin pronunciation of Macau. Carried in most of the city’s hotel bars, Owl Man recently branched out by making a bottled Singapore Sling that is exclusively available to guests at Raffles at the Galaxy Macau. Here, the husband-and-wife duo tell us their story
New Zealander Dan McAulay, who is a pilot for Air Macau, took up beer brewing as a hobby during the pandemic. Brazilian-born Rebeca Fellini, though, isn’t as big a beer fan as her husband, and got him a gin-distilling kit as a gift. This soon turned into a business: Owl Man launched in 2022, and boasts its own distillery in Taipa, Macau. Fellini now does the majority of distilling, with McAulay pitching in when he’s not flying planes.
How did Owl Man begin, and how did you grow the business during the pandemic?
Dan McAulay: I was making gin on our balcony; we were years away from a licence. I thought, “We should build a website because we’re going to have a company.” I put up a website, and an hour later we had an email from Galaxy.
Rebeca Fellini: We work as a team. We have stations [at the distillery]: there is the washing station, the bottling station, the cap station, the seal station, and the labelling and boxing. We all know how to do everything. We now have four other people working here. I even hired my mum.
McAulay: I think the reason we’re growing quite quickly is that if someone emails us or calls us, we respond straight away. We’re quite small and we can make decisions ourselves instead of having to bounce it through lots of other people.
How do you infuse Macau into the brand?
Fellini: My background is linguistics; I love languages. We tried to play a little bit with the name so [everyone] can read and sound out Macau in Mandarin. If you say “owl man gin”, it sounds like “see you in Macau” [in Mandarin].
McAulay: We used the Ruins [of St Paul’s on the label design] because we wanted something that looked recognisable—if you see it on a shelf, you’ll know that’s made in Macau.
What’s the story behind the creation of bottled cocktails?
McAulay: Raffles invented the Singapore Sling a long time ago. So when they said, “Can you do [a bottled version of the cocktail] for us?”—that was a massive learning curve. The cocktail culture in Macau has grown massively. The younger generation is very much into Instagrammable cocktails. We like to sit at the bar, talk to the bartenders and learn about what they’re doing. We make alcohol, but we’re definitely not mixologists or cocktail specialists.
What’s next?
McAulay: [Our] espresso martinis will launch at the Andaz Macau. And then there’s an appletini and a bee’s knees, which is a lemon honey gin drink. We’re doing liqueurs—a coffee liqueur and maybe an egg tart one.
Fellini: Having an Owl Man bar would be really cool.