Richard Campbell (131:45)
So this is the end of the story that started at the MVP summit in March. So in when I was at the summit I was given a number of bottles of whiskey, many of which have now shown up on the show. Going back to the hard cut, the the 12th Hawaii distillers, dark Harmony, they're all part of that, that crazy burst of whiskeys that I've gotten. But when I, and then when I got To Australia. I ended up with more, more Australian whiskey because I was down there and you saw me talk about the highwaymen. And then I received another whiskey, which is this last one that I want to talk about the lime burners, but I wanted to bring it home and I don't travel with opened bottles. So that's why we slipped the diljura in there while I was in New Zealand to avoid that problem. But this is a dip from a different region of Australia. This is from what the. The province is called Western Australia, but we're actually talking about the southwest corner of the Australian continent. So the vast majority of the population in, in Australia lives in the southeast and up the east coast, basically between Brisbane and Melbourne. That's the bulk of the population of Australia. From what is very tropical up in Brisbane down to what is much more like Los Angeles. Down in. In New South Wales, you're getting down to 33 degrees south, sort of the equivalent of the Los Angeles San Diego kind of space. But if you move over to the southwest corner, you've got this other strip of green. Like most people think about Australia as a desert, which the interior definitely is, but you have these areas that are lush, that grow well. Now Western Australia is very sparsely populated and most people only know of one city, Perth. But that was not the first place for Europeans. The first place was actually this place is now called Albany. So we're talking about this distillery called the Great Southern Distilling Company, which is in Albany in the far southwest. Now, as we mentioned when we were talking about Tasmania, Aboriginal Australians have been in this area 50 to 70,000 years, so predating the last Ice Age. And they stayed in through the Ice Age. We do know the name of the area is known, is called Kinjarling by the Minang Newgate tribes, which used to use that area summer season. They're still there, of course. Well, there were several European sightings of the area. The naming code comes from Captain George Vancouver from the HMS Discovery during a survey of 1791, where he identified the harbor as an excellent harbor called a King George III Sound, now just called King George Sound. And then within that is the Princess Royal harbor, which is actually where Albany's position positioned. And that was the became the first European settlement of Western Australia. So the Europeans, specifically the English, use it as a penal colony in the southeast. But in 1826, a Major Edmond Lockyer landed in that area with 20 troops and 20 convicts and six months worth of provision, created a place they called Fredericktown in honor of Prince Frederick The Duke of York and Albany, the second settlement on in Western Australia was called the Swan River Colony, oddly because it was positioned on the Swan river, but today, you know, it is Perth. And within a couple of years Swan river was growing quickly and so became the, the titular government head for the region. And so the convicts and soldiers of Albany left and it became a free colony down there. That's when they renamed it Albany. And it remained important for a key reason which was that the Swan river, while an excellent river with good growing areas and so forth, did not, it was exposed to the Indian Ocean and it did not have a good port. And so Albany remained the good deep water port. Now this is a time of wooden hull ships and the early steel hulls and so forth and there's no real docks or anything, you're just anchoring out and the sound and, and, and the Prince Royal harbor were way better ports. And so they're 400 kilometers apart, like 250 miles apart. So they tend to ship supplies in the little town of Albany, even though Perth was the bigger, busier area. And so very quickly in the 1850s there's a, they try and improve the road there and there's a bunch of roadside inns and so forth until finally by 1897 sufficient engineering is brought into black cast out the rocks and shoals at the mouth of the Fremantle where the Swan river is, so that Perth can build their inner harbor and make this less relevant. And so Albany remains kind of a backwater in that spence. But for 50 or 60 years it was the main harbor for Western Australia. And of course Australia becomes Australia in 1901 when Queen Victoria proclaims the Six Colonies to be the Commonwealth of Australia. So we're talking about a part of world that's what they call a Mediterranean climate. So warm, dry summers, mild wet winters. There's only Even today maybe 35,000 people in the whole area. And but it's the right conditions for making whiskey. And so Cameron Syme, who was by profession an accountant and briefly a lawyer, but always a big fan of whiskey, growing up and living in Queensland, which is where Brisbane and so forth is, is decides I want to get into whiskey. He's scouted all of Australia, decides to set up in Albany to create the Great Southern Distilling Company. They started distillation in an incubator facility in 2005, got their first release done in 2008, typical three year cycle. And in that time he'd raised enough money that he actually built, he built a second facility on the Margaret river, which is in between Albany and Perth. Very nice wine growing region. But he also created the Margaret River Distilling Company, but that's where he made gin called a Jennifer Gin. And then in 2007 they built a larger facility in Albany and then in 2015 scaled the whole thing up with the Margaret River Distillers and another facility called the Poren Gurup Distillery, which is after the Pouring Mountain range further in the interior in Western Australia. So now they have the gin distillery on the coast at Margaret River. They have the whiskey distillery down in Albany. And then Pouringorup is a mixed grain distillery. So that's where they make other kinds of whiskies. They named them Tiger snake and Dugite, which are both venomous snakes of Australia. I know you're shocked, but that's where they do mixtures of like corn and rye and wheat and barley and tritical, which is a hybrid of wheat and rye, not typically used in distilling. So what's made in Albany is specifically what the line Lime Burners line, which is their single malt line, which they've been making since 2005. You may wonder what the heck a lime burner is. A lime burner is someone who burns limestone to make lime. So a lime kiln operator. So this is when you turn calcium carbonate, which is into. Into quick lime or calcium oxide. Lime, of course is dangerous stuff. It's very caustic. Don't play with it. The normal thing you would do with lime is then you would make it into calcium hydroxide by adding water to it, which makes it explode. So do carefully. It pits and fusses. It also spits out a lot of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, which is a good way to get yourself killed. If you're a lime burner, why did they call this whiskey Lime Burner? Because the location where the Albany Albany Distillery is near Lime Burner Point and Lime Kilns Point, which is where they used to make lime for that part of the world. Lime is an old product. We have evidence of it being used in construction as back as far back as 6000 BC and even kilns from Mesopotamia found. But it's what you use to make concrete, so that's why the name comes from. But it is a single malt whiskey, this super local stuff. So the waters from an aquifer in the. In the immediate area in the peninsula, there's barley grown around Perth, it's malted. At Porongorup they have their own malting using a 16,000 rotating drum. They also make a peated malt using local peat which has a very different flavor. This is not peated but because it's different trees that make the peat you and the different plant life. Of course it has a different smoke flavor. So their peat is distinct. They use stainless steel fermenters to make a typical 8% wart and then tiny, tiny stills. The wash still is 1800 liters and the spirit still is a thousand liters. So a tenth the size of your large scale liters. They only make about a hundred thousand liters of whiskey a year. They do aging index bourbon primarily Heaven Hills, Four Roses, Jack Daniels and Old Forester. All relatively inexperienced barrels to acquire. And then their lime burner lines tends to have a finishing in various things. Wine, port, sherry, both Australian and European versus versions. And there's about 20 different whiskies in the lime burner line of which you will not find this one, the Albany Tawny cask. This was given to me by a fellow that I met in Melbourne, Josh, who I when I went and got that highwayman whiskey from, from the wine shop with Juan. After that day, that afternoon that we had a lot of fun together, he sent this to the hotel. And the reason you can't get it is that it is a Barrel Lane whiskey club release. So Barrel Lane is an Australian whiskey club that gets custom bottlings done. And this is one of those aged next Berman and finished in tawny port. So a port finished whiskey. So this is a 700mil bottle instead of a 7,750. But that's pretty typical in Australia. 44% about what you'd expect expect for a proper single malt if you want. The only way you would get this would be to be a member of Barrel Lane. They are out of it. So you won't. You can't get it anyway. And the way you become a member of Barrel Lane is by signing up to their club. It's $135 Australian a month. That's about 90 bucks U.S. now what have we got here? Well, we've got lots of color, very much in the amber rather than a dark red. The nose is slightly. This is a young whiskey. So you definitely smell the alcohol. Little, a little light, no punch up front. That's nice. It drinks really well. Definitely a port like you can taste that. That's a port finish whiskey. You know it right away. Oh, lots of heat. I really warm going down. I did, I did test this yesterday evening, so. So it was a good test. This is super Drinkable. It's just pricey for what it is. I mean granted it's a, it's a club whiskey, so that's hard to come by at the best of times. What's.
