I was running around the McHenry Distillery today, taking photos and video.
Bill was a whirlwind of activity, doing all sorts of things. Hammering the rings on casks, picking things up, moving things… Scotty was a blur with the forklift, moving heavy things, and climbing on top of things. Sammy was filling whisky bottles, carefully and meticulously applying labels.
All straight.
He’s done this before.
Everyone knows what needs to be done.
So I’m taking pictures of it all, and I notice something.
Behind all that industrial-level equipment. Behind those rooflines. Behind the stacks of barrels and containers…
Are trees.
Huge trees. Ancient, huge trees.
This is an industrial-level production facility like you might see next to a freeway or an airport or set against other industrial-level production kinda places, but this is in the middle of a forest.
On the side of a mountain.
Down a long, windy dirt road, curving around other ancient, huge trees, with wallabies and wombats and echidnas hopping about, and if you drive that dirt road in the evening, go slow because it’s a bloody petting zoo.
This is not like the other places. At all. Anywhere.
They make dozens of things here. Beers, ales, porters, gins, whiskies, and bottle and can and package and put on palates and wrap and put on trailers and on trucks as one might expect, but they do it in the middle of a bloody forest on the side of a mountain at the bottom tip of Tasmania.
And it’s all because of the water.
That water that I drink all day and wake up in the dark hours and drink more and wake up in the morning and drink more, and every time I drink it, I think to myself, damn, that’s good water.
So I take a lot of photos of those trees creeping over the tops of things. Rooflines, equipment, industrial-grade stuff, and the busy people.
There is a forest here, and it’s all around us, and we’re guests.
How the hell did this happen? This place is not like the others, and hardly anyone knows about it. I suspect a lot of people in Australia know about McHenry Distillery, but beyond these shores? Who knows? I will take it on as a sacred duty to tell people because it’d be awful of me to hoard this secret.
I spent the day taking photos, videos, taking care of business, and such, and when it was time to wander up the hill, I hopped into the little truck with the steering wheel on the wrong side and a manual stick on the wrong side and drove up the steep single-track road, up through that forest to The Bothy. That little, unassuming two-room cabin at the top of the known universe.
I doubt anyone could ever get used to the view.
If you lived here a hundred years, coming up through the dense forest to that open clearing, curling around to the right, bouncing along the short-cropped grass with ferns arguing for sunlight, over bumps and rocks and make that hard right through an opening in the fence and the hard right to see the back of The Bothy and holy hell, the whole universe.
The little building sits there, day after day, looking out at that world. It’s one little window seeing what few people will ever see and patiently sharing its view with some lucky SOBs here and there.
The sunset was sunsetting, so I pulled out The Comfy Chair and the laptop, intent on writing this thing, and I got distracted and stared out at the cut-paper-ever-so-pastelly mountain ranges.
I was talking to an artist the other day about art, and we both liked art that said something. Art that kicked you in the head and shook you up at the foibles of our meager existence… And not so much those beautiful sunsets, like the one I was seeing.
Could anyone ever, anywhere, reproduce what I was seeing right then at that place?
Natch.
And even if they could, they couldn’t.
You might look for a long time at a masterpiece of a well-painted canvas of this very sunset I was getting distracted by, and it would never be the same as being distracted by that real sunset, that was only going to happen this one time, and maybe I was the only SOB lucky enough to catch it.
And that’s OK.
At least I got to see it, and maybe I really AM the center of the universe, and nothing is cool until I say it is.
But that’s not how it is. I’m a gnat-fart of a spec of matter in a spec of time, but I’m a damned lucky gnat-fart that I got to see that sunset from this weathered porch in this comfy chair on this particular mountain.
It’s jazz.
Sometimes some musicians get together and make some magic in a smoky bar on a street in a town on a night after closing time and it’s the most perfect music you could possibly imagine but you weren’t there and there was no recording and it’ll only happen once and if you WERE there, it becomes part of your DNA and you can never describe it with the power and majesty it deserves.
But at least you were there.
I was here for this.
And some day I won’t be here for this.
But while I can be, I’ll be here for this.
And I’ll make a feeble attempt to describe it, but my description will suck but maybe I’ll make a bigger point.
Go be there.
Go put yourself in those places and pay attention and remember, and then try a feeble attempt to describe it to someone and maybe inspire THEM to go be there.
I’ve come across a lot of one time, one place magical events since getting to Tasmania.
It’s just one of those places.
It tastes different.
If you grew up here, these flavors might seem familiar, but to me, they’re totally new sensations.
And today, at the forest-embedded-inconvenient distillery, I got to go on a very cool journey.
Larissa has been here at McHenry for a half dozen years, and she does everything. Everyone here does everything because there is a lot to do and not a lot of people to do it.
So, Larissa, “My friends call me Larry,” asked if I want to work on a gin profile.
How quickly can one say yes?
Yes.
They’d infused cherry juice with a spirit and let it linger for four years.
That’s a long time to loiter. I’m pretty good at loitering, but that’s above and beyond.
So, I tasted it, and it was pretty cherry-like. Some had some infusions, some had sugar, some not.
We walked to the top of the facility to the blending studio, and there were several dozen clear glass bottles with labels full of local botanicals.
Of course, my favorite is Pig Face. Also known as Pig Weed.
To me, it’s called Ice Plant.
It’s the ubiquitous green plant that covers the embankments of every freeway in Los Angeles.
Ice Plant. If you’ve ever driven the 405, you’ve seen it.
You can’t kill it, it flowers, and it’s green, and apparently, it’s edible and quite tasty.
I’d never thought about where the ice plant came from, but it comes from Tasmania. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how it got from here to there.
Well, Larissa/Larry gave me the lowdown. You can eat it. You can eat the flowers, and they are a great flavor ingredient in Tasmanian gin.
So, our assignment was to pull these flavors down, pour a little into jars, and use syringes to measure out quantities into the base cherry gin and experiment.
People get paid for doing this.
We spent a wonderful part of an afternoon fiddling with the base juice. Adding pig face, ginger, cassia, cinnamon myrtle, sea grass, cardamom green, and dozens more to the base cherry juice. We added sugar and tried it without sugar. Some flavors added a bite at the back of the mouth, some lingered, some changed and evolved. And all flavors and scents I’ve never encountered before.
Fascinating.
I tried a gin that they’d made called Federation Gin. They made it for the government to celebrate all the states of Australia, with natural botanicals from each state.
What a concept. What a gin. What a bunch of complex, unique flavors you can only find in Australia. Mix it with some of the McHenry Mandarin Tonic and Holy Hell, That’s A Bingo.
It was wonderful.
It was unique and new.
It was that sunset I just watched for most of the poor saps on this planet because you can’t get it anywhere else.
This is why you endure 24-hour travel on planes and trains and blah, blah, blah.
To see that one singular sunset, taste that one singular cocktail, meet those people, and hang out in inconvenient distilleries where people make magical stuff in the middle of a forest. And then you do a lousy job of describing it to people who will probably never go to there.
But maybe you’ll inspire them to go try.
And maybe a few will go to there and say to themselves, “That Still Life Guy was right. I’m glad I came.”
And I am right. Go there too. I mean, go there also.
