Archie Rose’s Dave Withers – Supplied
Archie Rose is one of Australia’s most ambitious distilling companies. With award-winning spirits across a range of styles, and an enormous following throughout the country, the company has cemented its spot as a leader of the industry.
Dave Withers has long been the driving force behind Archie Rose’s production. Since his time in charge, Withers has helped Archie Rose take out the industry’s highest accolades, sometimes before the product’s even officially released, as was the case with the newly launched single malt.
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In fact, the single malt underwent a complete redesign four years ago, when Withers, founder Will Edwards and the distilling team decided it didn’t fit with the broader Archie Rose philosophy.
To find out more about that philosophy and what’s been driving Dave Withers, we caught up for a chat to get his thoughts on grains, whisky regulations, even red gum casks, and tried to squeeze him for info on the new distillery, which, by all reports, will be totally epic when it’s completed.
Below is an edited version of our chat. (Withers warned us he’s occasionally prone to ‘epic rants’, but don’t worry, we kept most of them in.)
Firstly, congrats on the new release. It must be pretty exciting to finally get it out there.
Mate, it’s been a long road. We’ve been doing a lot of experimentation for quite a while now, so to finally share some of the stuff we’ve laid down, yeah, it’s pretty awesome. We’re really excited with the result as well.
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I know it was a journey to get here. Maybe you could start by telling us when the current malt profile for the single malt was initially developed, and what was influencing you at the time?
We started working on the six malt about four years ago. And really, the origin of it all was that we’d started making a pretty traditional Tasmanian style single malt using a brewers malt. After a little while I really was just questioning, what is this whisky about? What is Archie Rose? And is this the very best flavour we can deliver?
So we did a lot of experimentation, and a lot of that stemmed from the fact that the Australian industry predominately uses pale malt, a brewers malt, for whisky, that’s pretty much the classic choice. And I said, well, you know, this is crazy. If there’s value in using a brewers malt, then how far can we take that? What is the intensity of character we could get from this?
That took us on this massive bender of experimentation, looking at how far we could really dive down the rabbit hole. At the time, there was maybe the Glenmorangie Signet and the guys at Westland in the U.S. exploring similar ideas. And then the fact that in Australia we have so much barley – we’re one of the largest barley growing countries in the world, and we have access to amazing malts, so why wouldn’t we leverage that?
After a little while I really was just questioning, what is this whisky about? What is Archie Rose? And is this the very best flavour we can deliver?
One of the first experiments we did was actually for the rye malt whisky. We did a chocolate rye, and that worked really well. So we ended up doing all of these individually distilled malts, and working out the balance and how that would deliver a really complex, rich flavour. Then it developed from there.
Tell us about those ‘six malts’. What sort of flavours do they inject into the Archie Rose single malt?
We use a pale malt, a basic sort of high yielding malt, that gives a nice fruity, herbal character. We use an amber malt, which gives us a sort of biscuity, short bread flavour. An aromatic roasting malt, and I get an almost amaretto, nut liqueur character from that. A crystal malt which adds sweetness and more fruit. A chocolate malt, which gives you that lovely espresso and chocolate. And finally, the Scottish peated malt, which adds that back palate length to it.
The malts have sort of evolved for us over time. We’re working pretty hard with the guys at Voyager in Griffith, NSW to see how far we can push this. We have some pretty spectacular malts that they’re working on for us, and that stuff gets me really excited.
Because when I first got into whisky (and this is one of my rants, so you’re forewarned!), the one thing I never really understood was that every presenter would get up and say – there’s three main ingredients to whisky: water, yeast and barley.
Water, you know, your classic Scots will tell you it’s an important ingredient. Yeast, everyone talks about the 1960s whiskies being amazing because the yeasts they used were different back then. And then I’d often hear that barley, the third ingredient, which, by weight, is the most important one, doesn’t matter, and that always struck me as weird.
Why wouldn’t malt matter? If it doesn’t matter, then why are you making whisky from barley? Why wouldn’t you just make it from sugar or beets, use whatever was cheapest?
My background’s with wine, so I’ve always thought, why wouldn’t the individuality of the malt, where it comes from, how it’s treated, how it’s grown, all of that stuff, play into the ultimate flavour profile of the whisky?
We’ve gotten so used to the same malt, as in the same barley, being processed through a range of different distilleries that you’ve got no way of really seeing the difference. And these malts have been bred and genetically grown to deliver to some pretty similar flavour profiles.
If you look at Australian malt versus Scottish malt, I challenge anyone to say they’re the same ingredient. I mean, barley that’s grown in Australia in ochre ground, harvested in 40 degrees under a big blue sky with eucalypt trees nearby, cannot be the same as barley that’s grown in a wet and rainy Scotland.
Voyager Craft Malt. Photo – Nathan Dyer
So once the mashbill was settled, how did that change your approach to maturation? You’re then dealing with a pretty flavourful new make, did that make you rethink the sort of casks you were going to throw at the spirit?
That’s a really good question. I think, for us, the focus has always been on understanding the climate in Australia, which is hot. So, the moment that spirit’s in the cask, the clock is ticking.
You’re not going to see a 20 year old single malt from Sydney any time soon. So once we’d decided on a blend of malts, what we said was, we need to generate a spirit that is flavoursome yet clean.
So we made some modifications to our spirit still at Rosebery to induce more reflux in the distillation. That’s given us a cleaner flavour profile, so when the spirit goes into barrel and then sits in Sydney in 40 degree heat, in a very short space of time we can end up with a good, clean, well-rounded whisky that doesn’t have that bite, doesn’t need extended aging, but also has some guts and character to it as well.
More broadly then, to Archie Rose’s journey, to the progression of the Australian whisky industry, do you feel like we’re getting a better understanding of conditions here? That the industry’s really starting to progress and mature now?
I think we’ve now got a much more solid understanding of what happens here in Sydney, that’s for sure.
In terms of where the industry’s going, I see the industry getting bigger, and some distilleries are growing. Obviously Starward’s just expanded as well, and over the last three years we’ve also been working on another distillery.
I think the industry is definitely maturing. The world of whisky is definitely maturing, and I think you’ll start to see that maturity in the spirit that’s in the bottle as well.
We’re firm believers that just because you make something and it’s good today, doesn’t mean you can’t make it better tomorrow. We’re not tied down to any specific tradition, where it has to taste like this or go into this type of barrel. We’re free enough to make our own traditions now. And for us that evolution of flavour is really important.
I think you’ll see that this single malt that we’re launching is pretty tasty, but I think that it’s only going to get better.
What about Australian single malt more generally, as an idea, as a style. Are you happy with the regulatory environment around Australian whisky and single malt? That Australian ‘single malt’ actually means something?
It’s an interesting one, right. Because the legislation is, it has to be aged in wood for two years, and has to have the flavours and general attributes ascribed to ‘whisky’.
I think it’s a pretty interesting rule, and I kind’a like it, because it leaves enough room for the fact that, if someone does anything too rogue, you can use that definition to challenge them. But at the same time, it allows you enough flexibility to go out and also challenge a few assumptions.
One of the things that we’ve been working on for a little while is Australian native timbers. Now, if we we’re in Scotland, that would be a minefield trying to figure out what we could use. For instance, we managed to find some amazing ex-sherry/apera red gum casks a while ago.
Cool!
Yeah, they’re pretty cool. And I don’t know if people know this, but my family were all in wine. My grandfather was a winemaker, my dad’s a winemaker. My dad was actually a winemaker with McWilliams making fortifieds for a few years, based out in Griffith originally.
We’d heard about these red gum casks at McWilliams, and I called my dad and said ‘hey, what’s the story on these?’ And my dad says: ‘you’ve got to grab them. They’re a piece of Australian history.’
So we have about 30 red gum casks laid down with spirit that were used to age sherry. My dad believes that they would have originally been made in the 1930s.
Wow!
Yeah. So, in Australia in the 1930s, you couldn’t get French oak, you couldn’t get Spanish or American oak, so a lot of coopers turned to native timbers. They’re a great little piece of Australian history, and the whisky in them is kicking along nicely.
So, to kind of loop back to your question, without the legislation being what it is, we’d never be able to use casks like that.
I also wanted to touch on the fact that there aren’t many distilleries in the world producing multiple styles of spirit and doing it really well. Probably the Zuidam Distillers in the Netherlands are the best examplars that come to mind, where they pretty much nail everything they produce across a bunch of different styles. I think you’re on the same trajectory, but have you ever thought, geez, wouldn’t it just be easier to focus on one or two styles? Are you constantly hungry to keep exploring and making new things?
We’re always hungry, right, that’s kind of who we are as a company. We’re always thinking, what’s next, what’s interesting, what’s cool, what’s the next challenge. That’s always been so important to us.
I don’t really think that spirits are mutually exclusive. A lot of distilleries become dedicated to one style, but again, to fall back to the wine example, if you talk to some of the great wineries, they don’t just make one wine. I think in the spirits world we kind of believe one distillery should only focus on one product, whereas I think there’s a lot to be gained from letting different traditions inform the production of a spirit.
We’re always hungry, right, that’s kind of who we are as a company. We’re always thinking: what’s next, what’s interesting, what’s cool, what’s the next challenge.
So in our whisky blending, we use techniques from Cognac. In our white spirits, techniques from rum. There’s a lot to be gained by being open to different ways of doing things through production methodologies. But mainly, and this is the easy answer – we all like to drink a different range of spirits.
There are days when you feel like a whisky, days when you feel like a G&T. We all have that, right?
Definitely. So with everything starting to grow and build so quickly, is the international market starting to come into focus? Are you starting to think more about Archie Rose overseas? Or is that still a few years away?
We actually maxed out our Rosebery distillery a little while ago, and we weren’t even really supplying the entirety of Australia. So the new distillery that we’ve been working on for the last three years is really going to provide us with that additional volume and we can start to look to export.
But we want to make sure that Australia’s well serviced first, so we’re not in any hurry.
Archie Rose distillery, Rosebery. Supplied
Finally, to the new, much-talked about, top secret distillery at Botany. Can you tell us anything about it?
It’s going to be pretty exciting. Needless to say, there’s a few world-firsts in what we’ve done there. We’re really trying to push the envelope. And I mean, I’m biased, right, but I feel like this site kind of defines what Australian distilling can be.
I think we’re really trying to see how far we can push technical expertise and I think with the volumes we can make there, which are fairly substantial, we want to challenge the big guys. We want to challenge Scotland, we want to challenge England, we want to challenge the Caribbean, we want to challenge all of the classic, established producers.
But at the same time, we’ve got a lot of flexibility there to be more artisanal and more craft than we were at Rosebery. We’ve got a lot more control, and more ability to just go the whole hog. So it’s going to be pretty exciting when we can take the wrapper off and show the world what we’ve been up to.
Can’t wait. Thanks to Dave for his time, and if you missed out on the first release of the single malt, expressions of interest for the second batch are now open.