Hello and welcome to behind the bar with me Cara Devine.
If you've subscribed to this channel there's a very good chance that you like your whiskey,
but there's an equally good chance that when you think of whiskey you're
not thinking of Australian whiskey. Well let's see if we can't change that!
As my expert today I'm joined again by Fred Siggins, who you may remember from our American
whiskey episodes, to introduce you to, and look as a Scot I do find this quite hard to say,
some of the world's best whiskey. Apparently.
For those of you who don't know Fred, what qualifies you as an expert in Australian whiskey?
Well I've worked in the hospitality and drinks industries for over 20 years now
um, I was a bartender for a while and a manager in some whiskey bars and cocktail bars.
That really got me interested in whiskey as a category and so I started teaching
whiskey master classes and doing some freelance writing about whiskey for various publications,
but most recently I've spent the last four years
as the brand and strategy manager for Sullivan's Cove distillery down in Tassie,
a job that I left recently and that's really one of the premier Australian
single malt whiskey distilleries, so definitely learned a lot about whiskey there as well.
So it's not just that you drink too much of it?
I mean that's mostly why.
So where would you like to get started?
Well I'm really excited to talk to you about Australian whiskey today because it's a super
exciting category we're in a really amazing time for the Australian whiskey industry,
but before I get into that I would just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the
land that we're filming on today, who are the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin nation
and pay respect to their elders past and present because I don't think that you can really have
any discussion of Australian history or the things that we make here in Australia without
acknowledging, really the world's oldest living culture.
And I'm excited to talk to you in a little bit about some of the ways that that very ancient
culture is starting to have an influence on the Australian whiskey industry as well.
Yeah, I think that's really cool. Where did whiskey come into it?
Well, whiskey really came into it with European colonization of Australia which started in 1788 so
about you know 200 and something odd years ago. And a lot of those
people who were part of that first wave of European colonists were Scottish and Irish-
So it's actually still our, you know it still comes from us, this good whiskey.
Absolutely, and they obviously brought with them quite a lot of distilling knowledge from
Scotland and Ireland, and I think that it's important to remember that making
whiskey was a pretty standard part of agrarian lifestyle, of rural lifestyle 200 years ago,
so a lot of those folks um coming from rural areas of Ireland and Scotland would have been
growing grains and then turning them into whiskey as part of the sort of standard farming lifestyle.
It's just a way of preserving it.
Yeah.
Exactly, so when they got to Australia and started planting grains in Australia to feed themselves
they also started making whiskey pretty early on in the piece. And we actually know that because
within 10 years of the establishment of the colony at New South Wales, governor John Hunter
who was the governor of New South Wales at the time was writing letters back to his patron in
England complaining about the fact that some of the convicts the Scottish and Irish convicts were
illicitly distilling whiskey, and he was complaining to his patron because they
were using grain that should have been used to feed the sheep and the colonists
and they were turning into hooch instead.
That sounds about right.
Yeah, so yeah that's that's really where it all starts and and again you know as soon as
people start growing grains they're taking whatever they can to to make
themselves a little bit of something extra on the side, whether or not it was legal.
What happened? Did he end up banning it? Because like everyone thinks of
the Australian whiskey industry as being quite young that obviously sounds like it
has this kind of longer history, but was there a bit of a kind of gap in there?
So the really interesting thing is that there was plenty of whiskey being made in Australia in the
colonial period on that sort of small farmhouse scale, especially down in Tasmania which is really
kind of the renaissance of the Australian whiskey industry within the last 20 years,
but back in the 1820s and the 1830s when Tasmania was settled by europeans they discovered that the
land down there was really really good for growing barley and so they still-
I mean it looks like Scotland,
like I was definitely struck by that when when I visited there.
Absolutely, misty mornings and rolling hills, and all that kind of stuff. It's good um and yeah
some amazing barley growing land, so they started making beer and they started making whiskey right
away and I actually think that if that had have continued from the 1830s right through to today
that Tasmania could well have ended up as one of the great whiskey producing regions of the world,
you know like Kentucky or like the highlands of Scotland, but down there there was a governor
who took over in 1837 by the name of John Franklin and he didn't like booze so much-
I'm getting the impression that these governors wouldn't have been much fun at a party.
Yeah, probably not to be honest. And so he actually placed a ban on spirits production
in Tasmania that lasted from 1838 all the way until 1992,
so there was a huge gap of 150 odd years in Tasmania in particular on whiskey distillation.
Right.
On the mainland it did continue though. There was sort of small-scale farmhouse distillation
happening from the colonial era all the way through to Australian federation when Australia
became a country as opposed to just a colony which was in 1901, especially you know here in Victoria
during the gold rush era and the colonial eras there was lots of illicit distilling, basically
moonshine running, that was happening all over the hills of Victoria. Then in 1901 they passed a law
that basically said that if you were gonna make booze you had to do it on an industrial scale,
and this was basically to stamp out that sort of small illicit kind of farmhouse style of stuff.
I feel like you've seen that story repeated in quite a lot of the whiskey areas, like obviously
basically people are like well, people are drinking them I want to be making money off
this you know and I guess you know and a more charitable thing might be that they also want
to make sure that it's done safely and all that kind of thing but absolutely it's the taxes yeah?
It really, it really comes down to taxes because it's much easier to collect taxes from one big
centralized distillery than it is to try to pop around to every farmhouse and do it that way
and because distilled spirits have been so popular basically since their invention
there's a lot of whisky being made or whatever other kind of hooch is happening
and so yeah the government definitely wants their cut.
But throughout the 20th century we do see quite a lot of large-scale distillation happening in
Australia including in whiskey there are a few big distilleries here in Victoria like Corio
and Federal distillery, as well as big commercial whiskey distilleries in Sydney and in Perth.
And was the whiskey good?
Some of it was apparently pretty good some of it didn't necessarily have a great reputation,
but they were producing really really large quantities of whiskey and it would have
been the primary whiskey that Australians were drinking, sort of, especially kind of 1940s 1950s.
So was there actually not as like not. I guess I just always thought it was all being imported
at that point, but there were like you know people servicing the domestic market.
Yeah, I think it's important to remember that in general the 20th
century was not a great time for whiskey globally.
Yeah
You know we had a depression we had two world wars, there was a lot of distilleries closing
all over the world, not a great amount of interest in whiskey through the 80s and 90s-
And a lot of-
It was also the blends that kind of kept you know that people were drinking
a bit more of there there was kind of lower end ones right?
Like yeah exactly, you know it's your Johnnie Walkers and your Jamesons-
And that's actually what kept a lot of distilleries open,
which we're thankful for now but-
Absolutely, but I think that what you saw in Australia was probably
closer to what happened in Ireland rather than in Scotland because in Scotland you
still had those distilleries that had been around for 200 years and that had
at least enough of a local market share to supply to the big blending houses to stay afloat,
the big thing that really killed the big commercial distilleries here in Australia
in the late 20th century was improvements in shipping internationally that came in
sort of in the 70s and 80s and it made the imported stuff a lot cheaper and easier.
Because it's pretty easy to forget now, but Australia is far.
Yes it is, it is very far away.
You know yeah like in time when shipping and stuff would have taken
you know I don't even know how long it was, months and months and months to get here.
Yeah exactly and you also had the conglomeration of a lot of big beverage companies like Diageo
and Suntory and those kind of people sort of like making these big international
conglomerates that made it, they were able to discount their shipping and discount
their whiskies and stuff like that to sort of really take over the domestic market here.
Yeah, so Australian whiskey is dead in the water.
So the interesting thing is just as those big commercial distilleries are really dying out
in the late 20th century, down in Tasmania a guy by the name of Bill Lark is having
this sort of spark of inspiration that really starts the Australian craft distilling movement.
He didn't know anything about making whiskey in particular, he wasn't part of that sort of
commercial whiskey production and probably didn't even really know that it existed.
He was a home brewer, a lot of Australians like to sort of make beer at home playing around in
the in the back shed, just making his his whatever he felt like drinking himself,
but the story goes that he was on a fishing trip with his father-in-law
in the highlands of Tasmania in the late 1980s and you know standing waist deep in some frigid
Tasmanian stream trying to catch a trout, as you do, and and having sips off of his
hip flask because he loved sharing a single malt scotch with his father-in-law.
So he had this epiphany, where he thought we've got this amazing land with all of this
beautiful crystal clear water and some of the best barley land in the world,
why aren't we making single malt whiskey here right?
So he actually got himself a little hobby still and started playing around in his back shed
and came up with a product that he thought was pretty good, and he thought to himself
well I may as well bottle this and and see if anyone wants to drink it.
But because that was down in Tasmania he realized that
that prohibition on distilling that came into place in 1838 was still in place.
Just like nobody had ever thought to look at it again?
Yep, nobody had ever thought to have a go and then on the federal level there was also that rule
that said that you had to make spirits on a large commercial scale so there were a couple of things
that were sort of getting in his way of making craft whiskey in Tasmania, but he actually went to
his local politicians and they took it all the way up to the federal government and he got the rules
changed and was granted the first legal license for distilling whiskey in Tasmania in over 150
years in 1992, and that's really the inception of the modern Australian craft whiskey movement and
over the last 30 years there have been some really amazing things happening in that whole space.
Well that sounds pretty delicious but I think now that we've covered
all of the history we might take a little break here and look at the modern face of the
Australian whiskey scene in our next episode. So if you haven't already then please hit the
subscribe button and the notification bell so that you don't miss that when it comes out.