Richard Campbell (132:42)
@ some point you got to think maybe it's you. In 1806, William Bly. And again, he's a navy man, he's a captain at that time. Becomes the fourth governor of New South Wales. Now, New South Wales was the only state it was much bigger on the east than it is today. There's about 7,000 colonists. And they're struggling, of course, as any colony does. There's food shortages, the trade, things like stuff hasn't happened the way they were told it was going to happen. The army folks that they brought down under a guy by the name of Major George Johnson, they basically been told like, look, you're going to the New World. There's. You're close to the Southeast Asian trade route. So that's all the spice trade stuff. Like you're going to be rich men, but you're moving to a colony where they're just trying to make food. Right. You're not there yet. And so they're all a bit frustrated. And in comes this new governor and he's trying to run it like a naval operation. He's quite upset at the love. What's going on with rum. So he's trying to take control of it. He's restricting what ships can enter the harbor, he wants to charge taxes, all that sort of thing. And so eventually this escalates to the point where MacArthur, who is actually a private citizen because he got into trouble in the Navy, he's been fined for some of his activities, but he refuses to pay the fine and he refuses to go to court because the judge involved owes him money because of course, he's the rum guy. This finally escalates to Bly himself. Bly goes to the senior army guy, this Major Johnson, and Johnson's response is to appoint himself lieutenant governor and arrest Bly the governor, and wants him to go back to England basically in disgrace. And Bly refuses and stays under house arrest for an entire year and then finally boards a ship obsessively to go back to England, but doesn't. Instead he sails down to what's known as Van Diemen's Land, which we talked about on a previous show. That's actually Tasmania, which is run by a different guy, a guy named David Collins, who's a lieutenant governor down there. Collins doesn't want to help him because apparently nobody likes Bly actually. And so he ends up stuck in Tasmania for another year, stays in Hobart. By 1810 there's a new governor arrives, a guy named Lachlan McQuarrie. So Bly, in theory, his four years have gone by and this is the new guy. And so this is when Bligh goes back to Sydney and he finds out that both MacArthur and Johnson had already left for England the year before to plead their case back to the Crown as well. So then he sails for England. It doesn't go well for MacArthur and Johnson, I'll play MacArthur at that point was a civilian. So he does. He is ordered to be tried for treason, but in Sydney, on the other side of the world. And he manages to negotiate that down to I will go back to Sydney, but I won't face a trial, but it'll never be in public affairs again, like not be elected or anything so forth. So he goes home in 1870 and lives comfortably. Johnson is a soldier and is court martialed for his actions in the coup, but then also returns to Sydney in 1813 just as a settler. So interesting that these folks ultimately did go back to the colonies, right? They did have land grants and things, so it was a big deal. And Bly doesn't go back. He is, he is largely exonerated, like not entirely. And is eventually becomes vice admiral, dies in 1870. So there's the crazy. How big was rum in Australia? So I mentioned Lachlan Macquarie, which, you know, has towns and roads and things named after him. In 1811, Macquarie knows that they need a hospital for the convict and he has no money. So he makes a deal with three men, guy named Alexander Riley and Garden Blacksell and Darcy Wentworth, who was actually a doctor, to give them a short term monopoly over rum trade in Sydney. Up to 45,000 gallons of rum. In exchange for building a hospital. Ultimately, this is known as the Rum Hospital. By the way, that building still stands. It gets finished in 1816, so it takes about five years to build. Operates as a hospital until 18, 1848. Today, the south wing of that hospital is the mint because it was built on rum because they had no currency. So now the currency is made in the building. And the north wing of that building is the parliament house for the state of New South Wales. So as much as it was built on rum, it's a big important building, sort of wrapping up the rum side of the story up in this area. This, the Queensland is where most sugar cane is grown here. It's one of the crops that grows extremely well in this subtropical environment. Right. We're at about 31 degrees south. And so sugarcane has grown extensively here. And this area was not initially known as Brisbane. It was known as Morton Bay, which is still called Morton Bay. And it's where we get Moreton Bay bugs and so forth. There's islands and so forth in the area. And it was a secondary colony. It was built as a. As a place for sort of the worst of the worst of the convicts. So they moved them up here. But within a couple years, it was sufficient. It operated quite well. And by 1848, the Congress are gone. It's now a Brisbane town. It becomes a free settlement. More people move in. And ultimately, by 1859, the colony of Queensland becomes its own state, separates from New South Wales. And today, by. By 1863, they're growing sugarcane up. Today it's like 95% of sugar. Crane. 95% of what sugarcane grown in Australia is grown in Queensland, and the rest is like in northern New South Wales, just over here, where I am, very close by. Now, when you grow sugarcane is to arguably to make sugar. So you have to process it. And one of the byproducts of that extraction is molasses. And typically that's what you make rum from. Most rum is derived from molasses. But that equipment is fairly big and expensive. And in 1869, there's a. There's been now a few small sugar cane operations around Morton Bay. So there's this ship called the SS Walrus. It's a converted sailing ship, and they have a sugar mill on board, but they also have a still. And so they actually were licensed to do this for a few years. And it would travel around Morton Bay from sugar cane plantation, sugar mine plantation, in the harvest season, and they would process the sugar and make the molasses into rumors now by 1872 there are other distilleries being built on land and so they lose their license and they keep doing it anyway because it's very profitable. That eventually goes south as they're trying to flee from the authorities, they're trying to stop that. And the ship is ultimately salvaged in 1876 and eventually is dismantled in 1884. And that still is removed from the ship and becomes part of the Belay Been Lai distillery, which is still operational today and arguably is the oldest running distillery in Australia. Now clearly there were other operations before that because it was part of the reason that the SS Walrus was shut down. But Beeline today is still in business, which is pretty cool. It's not the most best known rum distillery, but it's still out there. In fact, there's 90 different rum distilleries in Australia. But we were going to tell about story about the husk distilleries, the one that I actually got to. And they call themselves a farm to bottle operation because this is Paul and Mandy messenger who own a sugar plantation. So they were already making sugar and they have cattle and so forth in an area called Tumblegum near Mount Warning in this is northern New South Wales. This is one of the few places not in Queensland that grow sugar. Mount Warning, by the way, is an old shield volcano. So this is very volcanic soil. It is awesome for growing. And it's only about 80km south of Beenleigh where the original rum distillery is. So this is, you know, you're close enough to the equator here that they, the sunlight doesn't vary very much. You know, the sun is up here at about 4:30 in the morning, which is why they don't have daylight savings time here because for what, like it doesn't do anything. So wintertime's about 10 hours of daylight, summertime is about 14 hours of daylight. The winters tend to be dry and they're relatively warm. It never freezes here really. And quite humid summers as we're starting to get into now, where it's pretty hot. Paul messenger fell in love what's known as rum agricole, which is the French name for rum. And that is rum made from the sugar cane juice which you would normally use to make sugar rather than molasses. Now, now that's not the agricola is not the only thing they do with sugar cane juice. This is cassacca, the Brazilian alcohol is maybe sugarcane juice. This is what you make a caprina from. But he wanted to make agricol, which is this Kind of specialized lighter rum. Instead of going from the dark stuff that comes from molasses, using the sugar cane juice. He made his first batches in 2012 using a column still and he had a small Spanish spot still as well and put it up in barrels to age and then realized, hey, I'm still years away from making good rum here. So he starts making a gin and kind of knocks it out of the park using local botanicals. And then he did a gin he calls the ink gin, which has got that. It's that purple gin. There's a few of them around there that changes color depending whether you put water in it or, or tonic and so forth. He made deals for aging his rum with Penfolds. He got Penfolds wine barrels, which they would. Then these are 300 liter casks that have been used for five or six years to mature wine. They're. They're European oak and they scrape them and char them and then use them to make their rum. And they got. So they've done so well on the rum side that they started cultivating other kind of sugar cane. Most sugar cane is grown to make sugar. And so you sort of, you use the species that make the most sugar and the blast is a byproduct to make rum from. Because they were making rum first, they actually have been switching up their species to a different cultivar called Bedilla, which makes a sort of murky sugar. Like you don't like it for sugar, but boy, it makes good rum. And while they're in. So a few years into this business, Paul and Mandy travel to Scotland and end up striking up a relationship with the Cardew Distillery. These are one. This is one of Diageo's distilleries. Really heavily involved in Johnnie Walker. They connect with the master distiller there, a guy named William Buzz Hutchinson, and, you know, get a, get a taste for what whiskey's about, even though they're clearly in the rum business and set up for that. But coincidentally, the following year in 2017, Cyclone Debbie, which is what they call hurricanes down here, and they do spin the other way because coriolis effect hits this area very heavily. Their farm is under 4 meters, 12ft of water. So the original distillery is destroyed. A lot of the structures and so forth, it takes them years to recover. But in the while that's going on, they'd been working with Cardu, so they order a 4 size still, the first Forsyth still in Australia. 6000 liter. This is from Rothes in, in Scotland. It's, you know, Meant for making whiskey, but it'll perfectly well to make rum. Pot stilled rum is a thing. And almost all agricole or cassacia is made pot still style rather than column still wise. And so that year, while they were still recovering and you know, the sugarcane harvest was messed up and so forth, they decided to make a whiskey using this pot still. Now they don't use barley, but they have relationships with the local breweries, specifically one called the stone and wood. And so stone and wood made a wart for them that they then distilled into whiskey. And that's what we got to taste while we were there. Distillery was all rebuilt in 2019. They built a much larger one. They have the bigger stills now. They built out in the next year a thousand barrel aging structure, a rack house and a great, great restaurant and viewing area. It's used for weddings and so forth. It's very, very beautiful. They've been through other storms and things since in 2022. So this edition, they call this sidetrack for a reason. Because they're not a whiskey maker, they're a rum maker. This is a sidetrack is a distraction. And they've done it every year since 2018, where just before the regular harvest of sugar cane, they get a run of wort and they make a couple of thousand bottles of whiskey as this sidetrack. So distilled in this copper pot still, the 4 size still. Then they put it into used rum barrels for five years. And so there's only been a couple of editions of it. And I got to taste the 2023 edition. That's about 85 Australian dollars, only 2,000 bottles of it. It's numbered and it t, it is very rummy. The fun part is I was also able to taste a 20 year old rum of husks that is aged in the beer barrels from stone and wood. And so you literally taste a rum that was aged like the beer and a whiskey that was aged in the rum. And I could tell the difference between them. It's very much a difference between a sugar cane made product and a cereal made product. But the woody flavors are in common and they're delicious. Hard to find. They said there's only 2,000 bottles. You probably have to come to Queensland or come to the hospitality to get it again. At 85 Australian, it is the craftiest of craft whiskeys. Only made once a year, limited release. And by the way, their rums are phenomenal. And you should, if you are a rum person and I am not. I mean, I Respect a good daiquiri. But, you know, when you. These. These guys also make very small batches of craft rum from sugarcane, from that, from that farm. They are literally farm to bottle in that operation right there. You're not going to find that in very many places. They can't make millions of liters. They make tens of thousands of liters. And it's a fantastic product. It was a great experience.
