Following on from yesterday’s look at the history of whisky distilling in Australia, today I’m going to focus very much on the present (and future) and have a chat with three people from different spheres of the whisky industry; Niko Devlin, President of the Australian Whisky Appreciation Society (and the man responsible for this blog piece!), Frank McHardy, Chief Whiskey Advisor at the Whipper Snapper Distillery in Perth, Western Australia and Mark Coburn, who is currently in the process of building the Coburns Distillery in New South Wales. 

First though, let’s take a wee look at what is happening with whisky today. Fortunately things look a lot rosier than where we left it yesterday! The birth (rebirth?) of the modern Australian whisky industry is pretty much credited to one man - Bill Lark. In 1992 Lark fired up his small still at the Lark Distillery in Hobart, Tasmania, making him the first person to hold a distilling license on the island for 153 years. No mean feat, since in order to do so, he first successfully lobbied the Minister of Agriculture to change the 1901 Licensing Act requirement that stills had to be a minimum of 2700 litres. This change in law presumably paved the way for the plethora of small craft distilleries currently springing up all over Australia. 

While the number of distilleries has increased dramatically since Lark was established, the volumes produced nationwide remain very small. It would certainly seem that the current crop of Aussie distillers are focussing very much on quality over quantity. According to Deloitte, Australia currently produces around 360,000 litres per annum - that’s less than is currently produced in Campbeltown’s 3 distilleries (Springbank, Glengyle and Glen Scotia) and Campbeltown ain’t exactly a powerhouse in terms of Scotch whisky production volumes!

Why did you decide to start a distillery and why now? 

The seed was planted in me 14 years ago when I visited a small distillery in Queensland. The distiller had been an early business partner of Bill Lark, the grandfather of the Australian distilling industry. The distiller had moved from Hobart to the hinterland behind Queensland’s Gold Coast and was making flavoured liquors. I was fascinated by the process. Over the last ten years I have been working towards making the leap to setting up my own distillery. Along the way I came up with the idea that I wanted to be drinking my own 20yo single malt by the time I was 70. This year I turned 49, so it was now or never. 

It has taken me a while to work out where my love of distilling comes from. Note that it’s the distilling and not the whisky that came first. To put it into context let me explain; I believe that one of the sincerest ways to show love to another person is by cooking for them, I refer to it as 'putting love on the plate'. Whether it is a 36 hour slow cooked leg of pork or a breakfast omelette, I love cooking for family and friends. I am always looking for new techniques that will create a more enjoyable eating experience, regardless of the extra time or effort the process will take. Distilling comes into context when you learn that my other great passion is steam engines. I am a avid model steam locomotive enthusiast who loves to build and run working model steam engines. The thought occurred to me a few years ago that whisky distillation is the intersection of food and steam. 

Why did your choose the Southern Highlands of NSW as the location? 

First off, I live here! The area has rolling countryside with a proper four seasons which you don’t get in most of Australia. 
The distillery site itself covers 15 acres (6.2ha), of which 3 acres (1.5ha) is peat bog. It’s the only Australian distillery with their own onsite peat for smoking the barley. There are two types of amazing water onsite: Peat filtered lake water and four pure water springs. It’s a warm north facing site for those cold winter days, 725 meters above sea level with average summer temperatures of 14-24C, average winter temperatures 5-13C (100mm of snow last winter) and average rainfall of 700mm.

As a visitors centre is an important part of the business plan, we needed to be easily accessible to nearby towns and major cities. The site we have selected is 12 minutes from Bowral, Mittagong & Moss Vale (25,000 population), 1h 45m drive from Sydney, New South Wales, 1h 45m drive from Canberra, Australian Capital.

Where are you in the process?

The distillery site is being purchased now. Currently we are working on a round of capital raising through barrel sales. We filled an early round of barrel sales and now we have a limited number of barrels in our second offering via our 'Barrel Investment program’ 

​Very soon we will be producing product at another site while we wait for planning approvals for our new distillery to be granted. We will have licensing and planning approvals for on-site production within 12 months. The plan is that we can be releasing our first small cask whiskies by 2020-21. 

Do you have a particular style of whisky in mind and how will you achieve that?

We are planning to start by putting down five expressions that will represent the four seasons of the New South Wales Southern Highlands. 

Coburns Distillery will distill a triple distilled spirit. Our spirit will be produced in three separate 5000ltr stills, each still built to capture different characteristics. The three still concept is designed to give our distillers and blenders a broad range of flavour profiles in the new make spirit to then create desired style of each expression. To clarify, by having the option of a larger spirit still we hope to have the ability to cut the hearts cleanly into early, mid and late hearts thereby having the ability to be able to make distinct expressions from the new make. 

Our goal is to create a single malt that captures the essence of our region. In the process, I hope to create a way of life to hand over to my two daughters in the future. Not to mention the dream of sitting on my balcony over looking the distillery drinking my own 20 year old malt. 

Where do you see yourself and your whiskies in 10-20 years time?

We hope to have a substantial visitor centre trade to promote our region and add to that some international sales (and recognition) would be the dream come true. 

As I am now discovering, many new distilleries have started up in Australia in recent years - do you see this as an advantage or a disadvantage for you? 

We hope that we can inspire and help many more distilleries to open in this area. Joadja Distillery is the only other whisky distillery in the area, we hope to work closely with the owners Elisa & Valero Jimenez to build the region’s whisky profile. The goal is to be able to have the Southern Highlands of New South Wales defined as it’s own whisky region within Australia.

How will your whisky stand out from the crowd?

By being exceptional in every aspect of what we do. From our cellar door hospitality, to our product branding & presentation, and most importantly by making an exceptionally well-crafted spirit we hope to let what we do speak for itself. 

A few months ago I got a facebook message from a guy called Niko Devlin, who is the President of the Australian Whisky Appreciation Society, which went something like, “Hey, I like your distillery maps of Scotland. You ever thought of doing one of Australia?”. Now, I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even thought there were enough distilleries in Australia to fill out a whisky map! I knew there were a few in Tasmania, but turns out that was a bit of understatement. There are currently 11 whisky distilleries in Tasmania and 24 in mainland Australia. Who knew? Not me. So, with a LOT of help from Niko and a fair bit of jiggery pokery with distillery locations (there being a total dearth of distilleries in that top middley bit of the very big country that is Australia) I did up a distillery map of Australia.  

When you think about it, it’s not really surprising that Australia has a thriving whisky scene. In fact, I think Dave Broom summed it up pretty well in his ‘World Atlas of Whisky’, “The most surprising thing about the Australian whisky boom is that it’s taken so long to happen. This, after all, is a country that was widely settled by Scots, is rich in malting barley and culturally is known to like a drink”.  ​

You could say that the history of spirits and distilling in Australia dates back to the arrival, if not of the First Fleet in 1788, then certainly of the first free settlers in the 1790s. Rum and brandy appear to have been the spirits of choice; Sugar plantations were established in Queensland in the mid 1800s and rum production followed shortly afterwards. Maybe the taste for rum was brought over by the British Navy with the First Fleet? It would appear to be a lasting taste too; in the 1995 book ‘Classic Spirits of the World’, rum is quoted as being, “Australia’s second drink to beer, with the leading brand, Bundaberg, outselling Johnnie Walker by two to one”. (Incidentally in the same book, Australian whisky didn’t even get a mention!). Brandy making grew from a need for a grape based spirit to produce fortified wines (much more popular at the time than table wines). The knowledge of wine making as well as presumably brandy distillation had been brought over by early European immigrants. The number of brandy distilleries grew throughout the 19th century and in 1901 the first laws were drawn up to regulate the burgeoning industry. 

Despite the large numbers of Scottish and Irish immigrants though, and the wide availability of grains and beer, whisky distilling (of the legal type at least) didn’t really seem to gain a major foothold. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that whisky distilleries didn’t exist. They did. In fact, the first legal whisky distillery in Australia was established way back in 1822, in Tasmania. That’s 2 years before the Glenlivet, the “distillery that started it all” in Scotland.  However, unlike in Scotland, legal distilling in Tasmania was to be a very short lived affair. In 1839 the Distillation Prohibition Act banned colonial distillation altogether and it was to be another 153 years before anyone was granted a distilling licence on the island.

By 1954, Corio was apparently the largest distillery in the Southern Hemisphere, having produced, in its first 25 years of existence, some 12 million gallons (about 48 million LPA) of whisky and 5 million litres of gin. This accounted for two thirds of the total Australian whisky trade and half the gin market! 

Quantity does not always equate to quality though, and it would appear that, certainly latterly, Corio’s reputation was questionable at best. One description I saw compared it to motor oil, another described it as “rot-gut” and apparently instructions from HQ (that would be DCL) were to produce something “no better than the worst scotch whisky”. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. The distillery continued in production right up to the 1980s though, when it was closed following massive financial losses.  It’s reputation not withstanding, the Corio distillery, through its comparative longevity if nothing else, clearly had an important role in the history of the Australian whisky industry. The article I read described the Corio brand as “leaving behind a twofold legacy; firstly, it was proof positive that whisky could be made in Australia, and on a large scale, and; secondly, that if it was ever to be done again the focus would have to be on quality rather than quantity. Thankfully that’s exactly what those in the present day industry have realised.”

So there you have it. I’m still none the wiser as to why the Australian whisky boom took so long to happen but I am slightly better informed as to the history behind it. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at the rebirth of the Australian whisky industry in the 1990s and what’s happening now. 

This wee series I've been doing on new distilleries has made me realise that my map design could really do with being updated! So while Mark has been away 'working' at the Spirit of Speyside Festival, I have done just that. 

For my next ‘newbie’ focus, we are heading to Scotland’s industrial heartland - Glasgow and the Glasgow Distillery Company Limited (not to be confused with the Glasgow Distillery project by Morrisons Glasgow Distillers Ltd, which as far as I am aware is still in the early planning stages).

​While Glasgow sometimes gets a bit of an unfair reputation from those that don’t know it, personally I love the place - I lived there for many years as a student so have a fairly in depth knowledge of the consumption of alcohol there, if not the making of it! 

As Scotland’s largest city, and industrial and trading hub, Glasgow has a long history of blending and bottling whisky and many of the big names (Chivas, Diageo, Whyte & Mackay, Dewars, Edrington) still have some kind of presence there. According to Brian Townsend, in his book Scotch Missed, historically Glasgow “was a city of many distilleries with colourful names” but the last malt distilleries closed down in the early 1900s (apart from the short-lived Kinclaith distillery, within Strathclyde Grain Distillery, which ran from 1958 to around 1975). 

The CEO of Glasgow Distillery Company Ltd, Liam Hughes, very kindly took the time to answer my questions (yep, same ones as last time - that was the plan remember?) before heading off on holiday. Here’s what he had to say;

Q. Where is your distillery located, and why in that specific location?
Glasgow Distillery is the only Single Malt Distillery in a city in Scotland and was chosen because we wanted to build a distillery on the basis of its city location and logistical practicality after visiting the Brooklyn Distillery who had done something similar. ​

Q. Why did you decide to start producing whisky? And why now?
​We were always going to make Whisky – Glasgow hasn’t had a Single Malt Distillery since 1902 so it seemed a gap that needed filling.

My quest to become better informed about all the new Scottish distilleries has begun! My plan is simple; contact all the distilleries and ask them all the same questions so I (and therefore you) can firstly, learn more about their experiences, philosophies and future plans, but also (hopefully!) explore the differences between them. ​

First up is Ardnamurchan Distillery, owned by the independent bottler Adelphi Distillery Ltd. Now  independent bottlers acquiring distilleries is nothing new; think Signatory and Edradour, G&M and Benromach and Ian MacLeod and Glengoyne/Tamdu to name a few. As far as I know though, Adelphi are the first independent bottler to build their own distillery from scratch (Although Wemyss followed suit with the Kingsbarns Distillery a few months later). 

I seem to have been writing about J & A Mitchell quite a lot recently, but since last weekend marked the 12th Anniversary of the opening (re-opening?) of Mitchell’s Glengyle distillery, I figured that warranted another post. At least it is about Kilkerran this time rather than Springbank!

At the time, it was quite a novelty - it was one of the forerunners in the wave (now practically a tsunami) of new Scottish Distilleries, and the first distillery to open in Campbeltown in well over 100 years. The original Glengyle distillery had been founded in 1872 by William Mitchell, who ran it until 1919, when it was sold. It closed its doors a few years later in 1925. Although all the distilling equipment was removed, and the stock sold off, the distillery buildings themselves remained pretty much intact over the intervening years, being used first as a rifle range, then as an agricultural depot.  

The story goes that Mr Hedley G Wright, current chairman of J & A Mitchell Co Ltd, during one of his visits to Springbank, had noticed that the buildings were for sale and commented, “Hmm, my great-great uncle used to own Glengyle. I think I should buy it.”  I may be paraphrasing slightly but you get the idea! Buy it he did (in November 2000), and the ambitious plan to create a brand new distillery within the walls of the old one began.

The first time I saw the soon to be new Glengyle distillery, in 2002, it was an empty shell. A very large empty shell!  Over the next couple of years though, I, along with all the other staff at Springbank, gradually watched the new distillery come to life under the direction of Mr Wright and Frank McHardy, who was Springbank Distillery Manager at the time. ​

The stills and mill were sourced second hand - the stills from Ben Wyvis distillery and the mill from Craigellachie - although the shape of the stills was altered somewhat to give the distillery character they wanted. The rest of the equipment was new though - the very large stainless steel mash tun was brought down by road (I’d have hated to be stuck behind that lorry on the way down to the town!) and fitted by Forsyths of Speyside. I vividly remember watching the washbacks be built on site - now that was impressive! If you’ve ever been to a cooperage and watched them building casks, it was like that but on a much, much larger scale. The noise of 5 or 6 guys hammering the huge hoops into place around the newly installed washbacks was something else! I also remember the first time the new washbacks were filled - and the water just poured out the bottom!  They do that apparently, until the giant staves absorb enough water to expand into place and make them watertight. That’ll be why they were filled with water first then, won’t it? (That’s also why wooden washbacks are kept full of water when not in use, so that they don’t dry out and start leaking).

For some reason our copy of the 4th Edition of Scotch Missed by Brian Townsend arrived some 10 days before the official release date so thought I’d do a wee preview review for anyone out there considering buying it. When I say ‘our’ copy, I really mean my husband’s copy (but what’s his is mine, right?) - he is a total whisky geek and has had this on order for months now. We already have the first edition in the house so I admit I was initially skeptical about why he needed two copies of the same book. Having perused the new 4th Edition over the last couple of days though, I can see why as it is not the same book at all!

I’ll rephrase that. Parts of the book are the same. It is after all a book about Lost Distilleries so once they are closed, there’s not really anything else to add. There are however a number of striking differences between the two editions (I should point out here that I haven’t read the 2nd and 3rd editions, published in 1997 and 2000 respectively, so cannot include them in my comparisons. Don't know why they are missing from our whisky library, Mark must have slipped up somewhere!)

Firstly the design and layout is so much better! (I’m interested in design ok, I like things to be aesthetically pleasing). Divided into geographical sections, the lost distilleries are accompanied by a very eclectic mix of images; old and new photos, bottle shots, old marketing postcards and posters. Most of the distillery entries also have a picture of the old OS map showing the location, which I love. I would love it even more if the maps were zoomed out a bit more so you could situate the distilleries better in comparison to existing roads etc but that’s just me being very picky.

Secondly the content has also been updated. Yes, as I already mentioned, a lot of the content is the same but there is quite a lot of new stuff too - some 30 extra distilleries have been added since the first 1993 edition; from Brora and Port Ellen, two iconic closed distilleries mothballed in the 80s which I would have expected to be included in the first edition but weren't (maybe they were still classed as mothballed rather than lost) to the half dozen mothballed in 1992/1993 and the more recent closures such as Caperdonich and Port Dundas. However there are also a handful of very old (ie closed in the second half of the 1800s) distilleries which have been added and three ‘lost and found’ distilleries which have risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes since the first edition; Annandale, Glengyle and Imperial/Dalmunach.  Interestingly over half of the new additions have some connection to Diageo, or UD/SMD/DCL as was, so I would imagine the author has had access to the Diageo archives since the first edition!

My only criticism, and this is me being very picky, is that I would have liked to see more photos from the present day to compare with what was there before. Admittedly this is not very interesting when the buildings have been completely razed to make way for a supermarket or housing scheme but when there are some vestiges, or indeed complete buildings, left of the original distillery it would be interesting to see. A wee photo of the new Annandale, Glengyle and Dalmunach distilleries would have made a nice addition I feel. As would one of Parkmore, which is described as, ‘externally the most perfect survivor of the late 1890s boom in distilleries’, but there is no photo showing how it looks now. (Incidentally, local chat in Dufftown, where I used to live, attributed the closure of Parkmore to problems with the water supply, possibly due to the limestone quarry nearby, but this may just be local gossip). As I say though, this is me being picky, and there are limits to how many photos one can reasonably fit in a book. 

All in all, a very enjoyable read, written in an accessible, engaging style. One for the history buffs rather than the casual drinker though. And definitely worth buying even if you already have the first edition! 

Inspired by the book, I had a wander round Campbeltown this afternoon and took some photos of our lost distilleries. Some are more recognisably still distilleries than others!

Okay, so admittedly a housing scheme and a supermarket don't make for the most interesting 'lost distillery' photos. Let's try again...