It seems that everyone in Tasmania, and perhaps all of Australia, knows Bill McHenry. And to be fair, it seems every distiller in the country knows every distiller.
I keep running into this. “Oh, Bill is great. Tell him I said hi.”
I do, and Bill tells me how he met whoever said that, and everyone I talk to says that.
And not just other distillers. I’ve been all over the southern peninsula of Tasmania, in the area around Port Arthur, and everywhere we go, everyone knows him. That’s an easy one because it’s a very small town and everyone probably already knows everyone.
But it goes on to paint a picture of who this guy is.
He picks up trash.
We’re walking through a parking lot so I can get some groceries for my life in The Bothy for a couple of weeks, and he stops randomly to pick up a chip bag.
We’re on that bluff where I shot some video of folks paragliding and, of course, he knew them all; he paraglides as well and has a big scar on his arm from crashing in the bushes, and as we went to leave, he picked up a plastic water bottle and asked if it belonged to someone. It did, and he set it back down.
Little things like that tell you a lot about a person.
We went out on his little aluminum boat, which he calls a “tinny,” to clean mussels from a boat mooring, and he’d be careful to pick up the little crabs that were part of the mussel ecosystem on that mooring line and toss them back into the sea. Most wouldn’t care. Some would stomp on them. Bill sends them home.
Some people think about the rest of the universe and try not to screw it. And, of course, some people couldn’t care less.
Personally, I like the people who care. If we had more of those, we’d all be happier.
But that’s Bill.
Everything about this place speaks of him, and no matter how successful McHenry Distillery will ever become, he won’t get puffed up about it.
Sure, he jokes that everyone wants to know a guy who owns a distillery.
In much the same way, everyone will like you if your name is Elvis.
But he takes that in stride and is always busy doing something.
And you get the feeling that he’s just so damned happy to be alive and part of this little part of the planet that he wants to give that gift to everyone he meets. Not go get something from people, but to just give.
Pretty damned refreshing.
So I’m here for around two weeks. I’d stretch it into 20 years if I could get away with it. Living up in The Bothy is a royal treat, especially once I figured out how to turn the water heater on and how much wood to put into the potbelly stove to warm the place above the damn it’s cold zone.
I’m getting acquainted with the world of McHenry Distillery, and it is a world. Over 120 acres that climb up Mt. Arthur, which I’d, in my obnoxious American way, rename Mt. McHenry. It rambles all over with big sections of forest between. The Bothy is way at the top, and below me is a stunning, ultra-modern cabin, off-grid like this one, but ultra nice with big windows overlooking the most inspiring view one can imagine (I’ve attached photos so you don’t have to hurt yourself imagining). There are other buildings, event centers, the distillery buildings, an office, a tasting room with a big outdoor patio and tables, and other various outbuildings. All of them work together nicely.
And somehow, he figured this all out while living in The Bothy during the week and driving home to Hobart on the weekends.
And, managed to make some damned fine whisky in the process.
At the very moment I write this on my boat anchor-sized MacBook Pro, I’m sitting by the fire, sipping a glass of his 10-year-old single malt whisky and boiling water on the fire for some pasta. The only light is the fire and the laptop, and the only sound is the fire and the occasional weird bird flying by in the dark.
How’s that for some “write The-Great-American-Novel in The-Perfect-Writers-Cabin” stuff.
Damn. Best job I ever had.
By the way, I stole that line from the movie Fury. A World War II tank crew constantly getting shot at and almost dying, that somehow keep going and keep saying “Best job I ever had.”
So, The Cellar Door.
This seems to be an Aussie thing. All the wineries and distilleries I’ve encountered call their restaurant/bar/tasting room “The Cellar Door.” Makes sense to me.
McHenry’s has a nice one. Clean, elegant design. A big bar with all their hundred thousand products (yes, I’m kidding) and a long, central table, a big patio with picnic tables and the whole wall opens up.
It’s a great space, but two things really stood out to me.
The first was the acoustic panels on the high ceiling.
LISTEN UP, RESTAURANT DESIGNING UNIVERSE! YOU’RE MODERN AND HIP ARCHECTURE IS FULL OF HARD SURFACES AND IT’S SO FREAKING LOUD THAT YOU CAN’T HAVE A DECENT CONVERSATION!
I feel better, thank you.
I asked him about the acoustic tiles on the ceiling, and he, of course, knew why they had to be there. “It’s all hard surfaces, cement floor, so we put those up to quiet it down a bit.”
Why aren’t there more sensible people like this on this planet?
It works. You can talk.
And the other thing, other than the huge collection of beers, gins, and whiskies, is the table.
Maybe (and you’ll dig how I’m thinking in Australian measurements already) this table is ten meters long. That’s thirty feet to my countrymen.
It’s long and somewhat narrow, made from unvarnished wood.
I took one look at that table and threw out an idea.
“Let’s put out felt pens and let people sign the table.”
When you can leave a little something about yourself in a public space, you feel like it’s your space.
Think of those old bars with a thousand hats hanging from the ceiling, or dollar bills, or bras.
Signing a table in a monumentally cool place like this is monumentally cool.
He agreed. Let’s do it.
So today, he was off doing stuff, and I sent him a text.
“You good with letting people sign the table?”
“Of course, let’s do it.”
So I did. And Scotty behind the bar (and even if you didn’t want a beer or a flight of whisky, it’s worth coming to The Cellar Door just for Scotty. Scotty rocks,) brought out a cup with a half dozen sharpies and I wrote my piece (I challenge you to find it) and I went and told everyone in the bar that it was a new policy as of today and please go sign the table.
A half hour later, there were thirty signatures, little notes, little drawings.
It started today. It’ll be a work of art that becomes more work of artness over the years.
I rode a BMW GSA (big, strange-looking motorcycle) around the country for a while and had aluminum panniers on the back, and I’d had people I met feel a pin to write their favorite saying about travel. They ended up covered in brilliant sayings, and perhaps my favorite came from my long-suffering wife, Loree.
“Those who do not move do not feel the chains.”
Wonderful.
So that’s starting here.
But back to Bill.
He’s open to the universe. He finds joy in everything, and he doesn’t stomp through life turning everything into his thing.
Which is what you might expect from someone who runs a successful distillery.
We had a long talk about the Australian labor laws, which are radically different from those in the USA. Back home, the minimum wage is appallingly low; nobody can survive on it, but tough titty, suck it up, poor people. No doctor for you, no food or rent you can afford because you’re all leeches, and we need to make sure our wealthy overlords have new leather on their jet seats.
Things are a lot different here, and he pays a lot to employees, and they get real vacation time and healthcare, and they can afford to live.
He didn’t bitch about it. It was tough and didn’t leave him Learjet profits, but he’s good with that. Everyone wins, and everyone should win.
Sure, his little tinny, his boat, is small and tippy, but easy to move around, and he can launch it himself in the dark to check the cray pots, so it’s fine.
Some people seem to find a pleasant path through life and flow with it. And some turn everything into a shit-show drama.
Bill flows.
And when you look at the operation he built, you’d assume he had to be some Generalissimo type that kicked ass and took names because those people get shit done, but that’s not him.
I’d posted the first story about the distillery on an Australian Distiller’s Facebook page and quickly got a comment from a gentleman called Crafty Field.
Real name, Craig Fields. But Crafty fit, so he kept it.
He’s a distiller near Sydney, and we got into a conversation, then a WhatsApp call, about distilling, the wacked-out universe, politics, and, of course, Bill McHenry.
When Crafty was first aiming for distilling as his new vocation, he called Bill, and Bill gave him everything he’d learned without hesitation.
Crafty couldn’t say enough great stuff about Bill.
And of course, he knew everyone at every distillery I had on my agenda for the next few months.
Remember, they all know each other.
And I was beginning to be welcomed into this wonderful fraternity.
Distillers are my tribe.
I honestly don’t know about The Big Guys. The giant corporations that make the juice you probably end up buying are the ones whose label and name are familiar. Maybe those folks are as genuine as these folks.
Maybe not.
But the alchemists/sorcerers/distillers I’ve met have all been the kinds of folks who don’t do it for the money. They do it for the magic.
Bill does it for the magic.
If you learn anything from anything I write, it’s to do what you do for the magic. Not just the money. Money will come, but making money without the magic is a hollow existence.
