There are distilleries all over the planet. In deserts, tiny islands, huge cities, remote villages, boring suburbs, basements, busy tourist centers, and in forgotten backroads. I’ve seen a lot of these places, and there are some recurring themes.
Copper things.
Bulbus copper things that heat the fermented juice up to evaporate ethyl alcohol through a tube into a mason jar or a giant stainless vat.
That’s the alchemy/scientist/sorcery/chemist part of the equation.
And honestly, to me, that’s the boring part. Some distilleries have stills the size of a building, and some have beautifully polished works of art, shining like a fire engine in a town that never has fires.
It’s hardware. Tools. And maybe some do a better job than others, but a hammer and saw are only as good as the hands using them.
I was in a massive distillery in Scotland last year. There was a line of semi-trucks hauling tons of barley to get fed into the machine and turned into Scotch. The still was four stories tall. Massive mash tuns. Pipes everywhere, steel stairs, and a few people in hard hats and orange vests. It was an impressive operation, cranking out massive piles of oak casks of whisky that were stacked six-up, put into millions of bottles, and generating massive piles of dollars, pounds, euros, and yen.
Meh.
I’m fascinated by the scale, but it was such an efficient machine that I felt… Well. Nothing.
Meh.
Writing this, I’m reminded of my favorite quote ever. That quote from On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Required reading for any middle-class college kid from any comfortable middle-class little world who yearns to take a dangerous quest that scares them into doing a dangerous quest.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
The Mad Ones.
They’re the ones for me.
And it’s The Mad Ones that build distilleries in mad places.
“Build it, and he will come…”
It’s a smart business decision to build a beautiful distillery in a well-traveled, touristy place. The water could come from a spigot from a reservoir on the other side of town, and it might make perfectly good whisky. And there could be a restaurant and merch and tours and spokespeople and event spaces, and that’s all fine and good, but not really mad.
And remember.
“The only people for me are the mad ones…”
So that’s why my month here at McHenry Distillery has been rather monumental. And I wish I had the Hemingway/Vonnegut/Thompson skills to really paint the picture of this green, little corner of the universe.
This is a mad place.
At the very southern tip of Tasmania, which is south of Australia, which is in the southern hemisphere.
That’s a lot of south.
“Keep Going South.”
And the place is at the end of a dead-end dirt road through a dense forest of giant gum trees and a petting zoo of fluffy, cute animals that hop and waddle in front of you when you come in at night, so you cut them slack and stop multiple times for possums to waddle out of the way, or wait for the wallabies whomping all around you to dash across your headlights.
It’s between Port Arthur and Nubeena on the Nubeena Road, which is a loop so you can’t get lost.
I drive Nubeena Road every day, it seems, and never, not once, has there been a car going either way when I came to the crossing. I appreciate this because I’ve had to relearn to drive on the other side of the road. Turn left to Nubeena, stay on the left. Right to Port Arthur, cross over to the left lane.
It was surprisingly easy.
I haven’t crashed once into a school bus full of nuns.
But it shows how mad this place is for a distillery.
There’s nobody here. And twenty years ago, when Bill McHenry bought the land to build his distillery, it was even madder. There are very few people here now, and it hasn’t changed much since, and it’ll probably never change. All of Tasmania has more hopping creatures and open vistas and mountains and trees than people.
Which is wonderful, but not if you want a hundred tourists taking distillery tours on the hour every day from noon to six.
This place is mad.
I’m up in a cabin at the top of the hundred acres, and the sun is out, the wind is blowing, the giant gum trees are singing a tree choir, and I can see a hundred miles away on dozens of mountains and glimpses of ocean bays full of crayfish waiting for a well-baited pot.
And it’s really hard to find this place, so Bill didn’t build it to be a tourist joint with a gift shop, nightclub, and fine-dining experience.
He built it here for the water.
Oh, that water.
A mountain, Mt. Arthur, is completely covered by a national park and a thick forest of giant trees. And the mountain is made of great columns of ultra-hard rock, dolerite, or as we call it, Whisky Stone.
And that water flows down to a layer of sandstone and takes a hard right and flows out of the ground on the property at such a rate that everything on the campus is getting great quantities of the best water on the planet.
THAT’S why you build an inconvenient distillery in an out-of-the-way place on a dirt road between two tiny towns, that’s at the end of every Australian highway if you just keep going south. And that’s why the beer, ale, porter, gins, vodkas and whiskies are all so marvelous. It’s that water. McHenry Distillery has all the proper equipment, big copper stills, column stills, big stainless vats, pipes, buildings, canning, bottling, labeling, aging building where the casks sleep to the night birds and stars instead of trucks and streetlights. That water is why everything is so memorable. And I think the surrounding forest helps too. Maybe beautiful, remote, untouched places are healthy for fermenting things. These places are better for people, why not yeast?
Some tourists do come. A few here and there. They come to the cellar door and do tastings and lounge about on the tree-covered patio and sign the long table inside or sit by the fire and try sample boards of whiskies or gins or have a tall, cool ale.
But it’s not busloads.
And the folks that do come love it.
I’ve spent time at the cellar door, meeting people from around the planet and some from here in Tasmania who ventured down to the end of the dirt road and loved the place. Some take a tour with Bill. But most are just happy to be here and felt the venture was well worth the venture.
Keep Going South.
“The only people for me are the mad ones…”
Go to there… www.mchenrydistillery.com
