'The Tasmanian Whisky Makers Producing Award Winners' by Augustman Publication, Singapore.

The below is an excerpt from an article originally published in Augustman online. See full article here. 


Tasmania is home to a growing cadre of distillers who have turned the island into an unlikely whisky powerhouse, each with their own ideas about how the spirit should be made.




THE ESCAPEES

Others came to whisky with their eyes wide open, turning their backs on past careers in favour of something more intoxicating.

After serving as Head of Production at Lark and Head Distiller at Overeem, two highly respected Tasmanian distilleries, Tim Polmear also wanted the freedom to make whisky his own way. Together with his wife Bec and brother Rob, he built Waubs Harbour Distillery inside a former oyster hatchery. The site is extraordinary. Sitting just metres from the ocean, it doesn’t merely overlook the Tasman Sea; it incorporates it into the production process. Cold seawater is pumped straight from the bay into the stillhouse to cool the condensers, while the salt air permeates everything, giving the resulting whiskies a wonderfully briny character, both in taste and in story.

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Bill Lark has long been famously open and collaborative with eager upstarts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a major craft distillery in Australia that hasn’t benefited from his help—and that includes every distillery mentioned here. So the next time you pick up a dram of Tasmania’s liquid gold, don’t just taste it. Ask where it came from. Get curious about the madcap dreams that made it possible. Chances are, the answer is better than the whisky—and the whisky is already so, so good.

Written by Charmian Leong for Augustman Singapore.

Explore our range of small-batch maritime Tasmanian whisky here.