Fairly ■■■■■ description of the drop, but I’m sure it was acceptable to finish a decent meal.
I love it and hate it at the same time. Sometimes it tastes good and others it tastes like chemicals:
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Santa’s little helper a.k.a my son decided I needed yet another whisky (smart lad this one, just finished his BSc. in Psychology) .
Very Merry Christmas to me.
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I am a fan of their Apple Pie Moonshine.
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Excellent drop
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Kempton Distillery is a nice spot on the Midlands Highway if anyone comes off the ferry and heading for Hobart. Had a tasting paddle a few weeks ago. 4 shots and a beer. I had the first one, very nice. Lady comes out and is a bit peed off that I started without waiting for the chat about the whisky. Then she tells me I’ve started from the wrong end. So she gets another 4 shot paddle and goes through her routine and tells me to enjoy the freebies.
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I may be wrong, but that looks like a win to me.
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Was and it wasn’t. Felt obliged to upgrade from the Christmas special to the top of the range. Bit over 200 smackers with a 10% discount:smile:. Comes in a nice tin though. The bottle that is.
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IMHO Australian whiskey is grossly overpriced.
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I think you definitely pay a premium at the moment, but I think a lot of that is a) taxes (currently the excise tax sits at about 30%) and b) economies of scale. The entire annual production of Australian whisky is roughly 400k litres. Scotland runs at nearly 400 million. Glenfiddich alone produces nearly 14 million litres per year.
Having said that, some of the current crop of Australian whiskies are very good, and worth the money you pay. The local product is still a maturing industry, but the best of them are quickly gaining recognition outside of Australia and demand will grow, much like what has occured with the Japanese whisky industry.
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How is it that Australia and Japan can simply produce top quality product after a couple of decades, when the Europeans have been doing it for hundreds (?) of years?
Well, in Japans case they literally bought the old Scottish stills and employed Scots to make their whisky for them while they learned the craft. They then apply all that Japanese fastidiousness about what they produce. Near enough is never quite good enough. I am sure there is a Japanese term that describes it, but I don’t know what it is.
As for us, we have both the best and the worst when it comes to climate. It is far too hot in most of Australia for whisky production, in the sense that we lose in 3 years from the barrel what the Scots do in a decade through evaporation. Makes it very difficult to produce truly long term maturation, without incurring ridiculous expense to air condition a warehouse for twnety years with no return in the meantime. T
The advantage we have is some of the cleanest water on the planet. We have almost no pollution in Australia when compared on a global scale. We also have some of the cleanest/healthiest/best crops in the world. This means that the starting ingredients are incredibly high quality to begin with, making the end product that much better.
I tried a bottle of Starward about 5 years ago and wasn’t overly impressed. I taste tested some Nant about 8-9 years ago, and it was one of the smoothest whiskies I have ever tried. Unfortunately the original owner ended up selling whisky he didn’t have such was the demand for his product, and it caught up to him eventually. I tried some Limeburners just the other day and it was also very nice. Our whisky scene , whilst it has been around for well over a century, is realistically only 20 odd years old. We are definitely punching well above our weight class, but to be honest we are not quite to the level of consistency of the Scots or Japanese yet. But it is coming.
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Got a little bottle, 200ml, called 'The Remnant ’ for Christmas. Drawing of an owl on the label and written underneath it says ‘Fly by night’ It’s the whisky that was left at Nant distillery when the owner done a runner. A few people were conned and lost a lot of money. Then he done the same with cattle!
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Cattle are easy prey for conmen as they have little idea about investing money wisely.
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The other big handicap the Australian industry has (or had since the last time I checked) is that they are charged tax on alcohol EVERY YEAR it is in production. This obviously makes producers sell products earlier than they should. In the old days, wineries would not sell red wines before 3 years or so, now they sell them the next year. Ageing fortified wines or whiskies for years or decades is prohibitively expensive in terms of taxes
And when Honest Johnny brought in the GST — which he and his minions claimed was supposed to replace other taxes — he brought in yet another tax to whack wineries/distillers further.
Yet another further thing to thank the Liberals for.
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Very nice @Aceman. That Founder’s Reserve is a nice uncomplicated drop that is easy to drink, haven’t tried the other and have never developed a taste for wine but at least it’s good for cooking.
She fell in love with Glenlivet when we did did a tour and tasting session over there several years back. She has most of their range but those two are her favourites. The Shiraz is also a very nice drop and probably a bit too expensive to cook with 
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Oh sheet. Just looked up St. Henri Shiraz and yeah, probably a bit much for the cookpot. Just shows how little I know about wine, I thought they might have been like $20 a bottle. That was like an old boss told me to go out and select a nice wine (and rattled off half a dozen different types of wine like Cabernet, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio or Moscato) as a parting gift for someone leaving and I just looked at him funny and asked, are they red or white? I then proceeded to tell how stupid it was to send me for that particular task for reasons already expressed. Never asked me to look for wine again, I’ll give you the nod.
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As someone in the industry I partly agree. Australia has a bit of maturing to do with regard to…….well……maturation. In most parts of Scotland a spirit will extract flavour and aroma from the barrels over the first three years and then after that extraction phase maturation begins. Maturation takes significant time and it’s the oxidation of the compounds that are present after extraction that increases quality. This is a simplified description but it’ll do. In Australia the extraction phase is much quicker because of our higher average temps, much like it is for bourbon production. That results in brown spirits that have a lot of oak that needs even more time to settle into a good end spirit in bottle. The problem is putting spirit in barrel and holding it there is expensive. It’s similar to building a tech company where you’re spending almost constantly and your returns are largely nonexistent for years and years. As a result a lot of Aus whisky is immature and unrefined.
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