Richard Campbell (134:05)
So I picked Tasmania. Yeah, neat. This is a Tasmanian whiskey. We've talked Tasmanian before, a few times. Starward, Hellier, you know, we've had a few, but. And I kind of felt bad because Lark, Lark is the original Tasmanian whiskey. It's a bit mythological how original it actually is. Like this man, Bill Lark, who's still around today, although he's largely retired these days, his company's not his own anymore. Supposedly put, you know, Tasmanian whiskey on the, on the, on the map and it's not entirely true. Like all mythologies, it comes from more complicated things than this. We've talked about Tasmania before. You know, they, they named for Abel Tasman who was a Dutch explorer, went through there in the 1600s, although he didn't name it after him. He named it after the governor of the Dutch East Indies whose name was Diemensland. And so it was long for a long time. And even the British called it Van Diemen's Land. And I told a little bit about the William Bly story as well. When Bly was a navy man, he was always a navy man, but when he was actually doing surveying, he surveyed Tasmania in 1792. And then when he became the governor of New South Wales he was. That was the only coup that ever happened in Australia because Bly was that kind of guy. And at one point he actually went to Tasmania for a couple of years waiting on his ship, trying to find a way to get his governorship back before he finally went to England in 1810. The original town more or less for, for Tasmania's Hobart Town in the southeast in Sullivan's Cove, which is actually the name of one of the whiskeys there. And of course this is back when it was a colony operated by prisoners. So there were 19 crimes that could get you sent to Australia and this was one of the places there. But being the southernmost piece of land in Australia, it has very good weather for growing barley and all the other ingredients to make good stuff. In fact, it even has its own peat. And so they of course were making whiskey there and every other kind of alcohol you do as, as well as beer, it's also safe to drink because we don't actually understand water. Walla quality. And a governor Lachlan Macquarie, this is the same guy, refused to help Bly back in the time, at the time of the coup in 1822, says well they're making everybody's distilling here anyway without any regulation so we might as well tax it. So he sets up a permission system, a licensing system and the first legal distillery in, in Tasmania is in 1822, which is a couple of years even before like Glenn Livid started it up. Because the excise tax in Scot is until 1823. So shortly there are dozens of licensed distilleries in and around Hobart. This eventually Van Diemen's Land becomes independent from New south Wales in 1825. And a few years further on the next governor in charge, a guy named Sir John Franklin, has a wife whose name is Lady Jane and in 1839, she famously says, I would prefer barley to be fed to pigs than be used to turn men into swine. And convinces her husband to, yeah, brilliant. It's brilliant. To outlaw the distilling of spirits. And so there is literally a full prohibition on making any kind of spirit on the isle of Tasmania from 1839 for quite some time. Okay, there was still Van Diemen's Land. It doesn't become officially Tasmanian until 1856. That rule will change a few decades on. In 1860, they start allowing whiskey production in there again, and it'll continue to scale up into the 1900s. The primary act of control is 1901. It's called the Distillation Act. And one of the rules that it had in the subsequently changed was that the minimum size of a still was 2700 liters, which is not huge in commercial standards, but it's big enough that it makes all kinds of home distilling a illegal right. You would never have a still that big. That's, that's, you know, even too big for a garage. It's massive. By the 1930s, the British distillers get heavily involved in making whiskey in and around Australia. And Australia has protectionist policies in place, which means importing whiskey gets really expensive. So this is how the British distillers get involved is they start doing blended whiskies in Australia specifically for the Australian market. But because there's no competition, because the imported whiskey is way too pricey, the whiskey is pretty bad. Like it's, it's a, it's cheap blended whiskey and it's kind of a mockery of whiskey for the most part. So that by 30 years on or so in the 1960s, when protectionist tariffs finally get lifted and imported whiskey gets a little more reasonably priced, nobody buys Australian Whiskey. And by 1980, literally there is no whiskey being produced in Australia at all. And that gets us close to the sort of famous story of Bill Lark, that while fishing with his father in law in 1992, he sort of wonders why nobody makes single malt whiskey in Tasmania. And he finds out about the 1901 restrictions. And he had been dabbling in making spirits himself. And he had a 20 liter still, which is far smaller than a 2,700 liter still will. And so he goes to the government to basically have the rule change. Now, he wasn't the only one. And again, this is where you get into this sort of mythological story. A few years earlier, there was another distillery called the Darwin Distillery, very small scale in 1989 that made a deal with the government to get a grant around barley production in Tasmania. Tasmania had their own strain of barley called Franklin barley. And so they were starting to distill that into whiskey even though they weren't licensed for large scale production. But it was those folks that with Bill Clark went to the government and said, hey, can we get rid of this restriction for 2700 liters so they can do small scale production. It really kicks off the craft whiskey production in Tasmania as a whole. Now part of their challenge here is the banks just don't like the distilling business. It's basically impossible to get loans. And so all these little distilleries essentially bootstrap. They start at very small scale, just what they can afford to pay for. Maybe they get a little bit of investment in. And so the whiskey business in Tasmania is really small scale. And Bill and Lynn Clark sort of earned their reputation as the godparents of the Tasmanian whiskey business because anybody who starts one, they're there to help. Help including working with Sullivan's Cove and a bunch of the other distilleries there while they're making their own whiskey as well. And again in tiny batches. I saw a photograph of the distillery in 2006 and every. It's truly rustic whiskey making. They're winning awards in the. By the late 90s. But small stills, open ferments. They wanted to make smoky whiskeys, but they didn't use peat to dry their malt. They did that through the brewery. So they would actually after the malt, then smoke it with peat. All their cuttings done by hand. No big controls over any of that. They're only aging in hundred liter barrels, tiny little casks, quarter casks essentially. And so typical production for distilleries including Lark at that time is in the hundreds of liters per year. Not barely even thousands of liters. It's just really small. By 2007, the families directly involved. Bill's daughter Christie is taking over general manager, will then become the master distiller and basically run the place. Which is good because by 2010, while traveling in Scotland, because Bill Clark had made all these relationships with these other distilleries, Bill suffers a stroke. He survives and actually recovers. But the writing sort of the wall on the wall at that point that he needs to step back. He can't push himself so hard anymore. By 2012, there's about eight different distilleries in whiskey in Tasmania making Whiskey. And in 2013, Bill and Lynn sell off 75% of the company to a group of undisclosed investors. This seems to be a common thing in Australia. Like they. It's all sort of quiet. Including the dollar amount, it was somewhere between one and five million dollars. Bill stays on. He's the brand ambassador, but he's not directly involved in production anymore. There's other folks involved in that, but they also figure out that because it's been such a small operation, even though he's been going for the better part of 20 years, he has about a thousand hundred liter barrels resting and it's just not a lot of whiskey. By 2014, they're making 17,000 liters a year. That's it, right? Like that's more than. That's less than what many Scottish distillers make in a day. You know, big distilleries make millions of liters, and here he was making 17,000. So they don't even have a lot to scale up with. But something important happens in 2014, and that is Sullivan's Cove, one of the other Tasmanian distilleries. Their French oak edition, which was finished in a wine barrel, wins world's best single malt at the World Whiskey awards. So while in general it was perceived that Australian whiskey was terrible, suddenly this is phenomenal whiskey. And like the eyes are on Tasmania and that also brings the money in a big way. And a group called Montech International starts acquiring shares of Lark from any investor they can lay their hands on and starts putting money into Lark. They scale up the operations a bit, put an 1800 liters wash still in a 600 liter spirit still. That's bigger, right? And then recognizing they just don't have enough whiskey from Lark himself, they acquire, with Bill's assistance, another distillery called Overeem Casey. Overeem and Bill Lark were friends, and it was about time that Casey wanted to step away from whiskey anyway. So it was an opportunity basically to get Overeem in there. That gives them more capacity. So they try and build things up. Montec in 2015 renames themselves the Australian Whiskey Holder because they recognize they got to keep doing more acquisitions. But they also start to take far more control. In fact, daughter Christy, who's now married Christie Booth Clark Lark is, quote, made redundant. Of course, her response to that is within a year she'll start her own distillery in Hobart called Killara, which is still going to this day. Things get really ugly in 2016 for this group, for AWH, where they've been acquiring other distilleries that are in distress that many of them have not not done things properly. And so they're angry investors and there's missing money. Like they kind of get them into a big scrape. And so that by 2019 there's almost nobody of the original Lark people involved with Awh. There are a bunch of serious fraud investigations on. It's like 10 to 20 million dollars missing. And it leads to a big battle at the board level and new leadership comes and takes control and starts to try and make things right, get investors properly compensated, sort things out, bring other money in. They also rename the company back to Lark Distilling. So sort of focus on their, their origins a bit more. The Overeem Distillery actually goes back to the Overeem family. Casey's daughter takes it over, but they still are battling with quantity and. And so having now invested or taken control of a bunch of different distilleries or having relationships with them, including Nant and so Sullins Cove and so forth. It leads to this particular whiskey or this line anyway, what they call Symphony. So Symphony is actually as much as Bill Clark founded Lark on the basis of why isn't there single malt whiskey in Australia? This is a blend and it's a blend of Tasmanian whiskies. And they started these in 2020. They've made a bunch of different versions and the label color changes each year. This is the gray label table and it's a blend of a bunch of different Tasmanian whiskies. The belief is that this particular version is made from Bothwell, Nant and Overeem. Each are aged about five to six years. Some are finished in bourbon casks, some in sherry casks, some import casks. The 2020 editions of these have gotten really precious and can sell for more than a thousand dollars. This particular one I picked up at a little liquor store not far from the apartment we were renting when we were in Coolangata for 160 Australian for a 500 mil bottle, which is pretty pricey. That's about 100 US for, you know, a bottle. It's that like half a third smaller. Well, normally they're 750s. Right. So we're about a third down.
