Australian Spirits

This page collects everything on the site distilled in Australia, and the shape of it says something about the local industry. Gin leads it by a clear margin, whisky is second, and vodka and liqueur follow. That order is not an accident: gin can be sold the month it is made, and it has funded a great many distilleries through the years they spent waiting for whisky to mature.

Gin runs from Four Pillars, Archie Rose, Brookies, Never Never and Poor Toms through to smaller operations including Canberra Distillery, Nosferatu, Antipodes, Karu, Lobo, Ounce, Knocklofty, Taylor and Smith, Pot and Still, 5Nines and Spring Bay.

Whisky is covered in depth on its own page, with Bakery Hill, Archie Rose, Starward, Lark, Spring Bay, Cape Byron, Morris, Fleurieu and Backwoods all present.

Vodka comes from 666, Ambrosia, Antipodes, Hartshorn, Karu, Nosferatu, Canberra Distillery and Three Foxes, and several of those work from unusual bases rather than neutral grain.

Beyond the four big categories the page gets more interesting. Maidenii and Autonomy make vermouth here, in dry, sweet, classic and yuzu versions. Three Foxes, Autonomy, Pot and Still and White Possum make bitter and fortified drinks for the hour before dinner, several of them at low strength and a few with no alcohol at all. Marionette, Cello, Dolce and Brookies cover liqueur. Willie Smith's and Lobo both distil apple brandy, Karu and Canberra Distillery make rum, Dirt Road makes an agave spirit, and Tiny Friday makes a grape spirit in the pisco style.

The through line is native botanicals and local raw material rather than imported recipes.

Local distillers take up a good share of our whisky picks. The whole Australian whisky story is set out in our Australian whisky guide, and the vodka made here is covered in our vodka guide.

History

Australia distilled from the earliest years of European settlement, legally and otherwise, and Tasmania and New South Wales both had licensed distilleries in the nineteenth century. Almost none of it survived into the twentieth.

The reason was regulatory rather than commercial. Federal excise law from 1901 set a minimum wash still size of 2,700 litres, which meant a distillery had to be built at industrial scale or not at all. For most of the century the field belonged to a handful of large companies making fortified wine spirit, brandy and rum.

That requirement was lifted in the early 1990s, and the modern industry starts there. Tasmania took the first licences, and the pattern that followed has repeated in every state: a small still, gin and vodka to generate cash, and whisky laid down against a longer horizon.

The growth since the 2000s has been substantial, and it has produced a recognisable local style rather than a copy of an imported one. Australian gin leaned early on native botanicals, lemon myrtle, pepperberry, wattleseed, finger lime and river mint among them, because they were to hand and because they gave distillers something that could not be made anywhere else. Whisky went to the fortified wine barrels the country already had.

Distillers here also picked up categories that nobody expected, vermouth and bitter aperitifs in particular, and several of the bottles on this page have no obvious international equivalent.

How to drink it

There is no single answer for a page this mixed, so take it category by category.

Gin belongs with tonic or in a stirred drink. A native botanical gin usually wants a plain tonic and a simple garnish rather than a busy one, because the point of it is a botanical you will not find in a London dry, and burying that under citrus wheels and herbs is a waste. Serve it very cold, in a large glass, with plenty of ice rather than a little.

Whisky wants a tulip shaped glass, a small pour and a few drops of water, particularly the cask strength bottlings that are common in Australian whisky.

Vodka is better cold than neutral, either from the freezer in a small glass or as the clean base of a long drink.

Vermouth and the bitter aperitif bottles are wine based and lower in strength, between about fifteen and twenty per cent. They go in the fridge once opened and keep for a few weeks rather than indefinitely, which is the single most common mistake people make with them. Serve them cold, over ice, with soda or sparkling wine.

Liqueurs and apple brandy sit at the end of a meal, in small measures at room temperature.

Whatever the category, these are small batch bottles made in small volumes. They are better sipped slowly and thought about than poured quickly.