Rob, Tim and Bec Polmear. Photo – ideasbanq
Waubs Harbour Distillery’s recently launched single malt range has certainly captured the attention of Tasmania’s whisky community. The distillery, located right on the water’s edge in Bicheno on Tasmania’s stunning east coast, was founded in 2018 by Tim Polmear, his wife Bec and Tim’s brother Rob.
Before establishing the distillery, Tim and Bec Polmear worked across a number of business areas, predominately in start-ups, brand building and marketing. Their most prominent creation, via their Founded Ventures company, was Flat Tummy, the detox tea Instagram brand the pair founded in 2013 out of their home garage. Less than three years after its founding, the pair sold Flat Tummy to Canada’s Synergy CHC Corp for $10 million and went on to create other lucrative online brands for the company.
The creation of Waubs Harbour whisky is something of a change-up from their previous endeavours, and also much closer to home for the Tassie-raised pair. As you’ll find out below, Tim’s brother Rob, who was previously Lark’s head of production and Overeem’s head distiller, was the catalyst in sparking the Waubs Harbour whisky project, and the trio have now created a compelling package for whisky fans to explore.
I recently had a chat to Bec and Tim Polmear about the journey to now and what to expect from Waubs moving forward. Below is an extract of that chat edited for clarity and brevity.
Waubs Harbour Distillery. Photo – ideasbanq
So, where did it all start for the Waubs team when it comes to whisky?
Bec: It really started for the three of us back when Rob started working at Overeem Whisky. That was in the early days when it was back in Casey’s shed at his house. We were whisky drinkers before then but Rob got particularly excited by it at that point. He’d come around and be like ‘taste this’, ‘get into this’, so he got us more interested at that point, particularly Tim.
Tim and I had businesses together in the past, and then it was just one of those things where we recognised this talent in Rob. We could see how passionate he was; he was busting to do his own thing. He’d worked as head of operations at Lark at this point and then left and said I want to do my own distillery.
We naturally got talking and for us the timing was just right. We’d just had our first son, and it was just one of those fortuitous things where we got talking and thought we are all really get excited by this. We love whisky, we love Tassie, we would love this Tasmanian maritime vision. We’re ocean lovers ourselves, and that’s where it all began.
Waubs Harbour Distillery. Photo – ideasbanq
What were some of the things driving the decision to establish your distillery in Bicheno right on the coast?
Bec: The reason we’re in Bicheno first and foremost is for the maritime location. The concrete posts at the bottom of our distillery are literally a couple of metres from the ocean. That’s why we’re in the building that we are because we wanted to make this truly Tassie maritime whisky.
But we’ve also got a very personal connection with Bicheno. We grew up spending a lot of time on the coast fishing and diving and things like that. We had a house here previously and so we knew of this building which had been vacant. It was an old oyster hatchery and the day we walked through – it wasn’t even for sale, we just approached them – the day we walked through we went, this is perfect. We had chills and the three of us went, this is it, this is where we need to be to make the whisky we want to make.
Photo – Fiddle & Spoon
So from there, what were some of your influences in designing the whisky and getting the distillery up-and running? Who were the people, the whiskies and the distilleries both in Tasmania and overseas that inspired you?
Tim: Back home here in Tasmania, we were heavily influenced by our love for the Overeems especially. We’ve known them since well before we got into whisky, and seeing what they’d done and the quality of product that they had created, I mean the Overeem Port Cask at cask strength was one of my early loves of single malt whisky from Tasmania. Casey, Jane and then Mark definitely had a solid influence on us here in Tasmania.
Looking overseas, we were absolutely looking at the greats of Scotland: Old Pulteney, Talisker, the Islay distilleries as well, such great heritage, such character that they’ve been able to build into their whiskies utilising that maritime environment.
Another influence from home that we had early on and who was super humble, something we found with the entire Tasmanian industry, was Patrick Maguire. He was very much into what we were up to, and I think he’s a sailor through and through himself and he has that sort of mariner streak in him. We were on his yacht only a month or two ago and that guy can get around a yacht like a monkey!
He’s been a great supporter of ours, coming up to the distillery many times over the years. Loves the detail, loves getting into the conversations about cultivating yeast with Rob. So between the Overeems and Patrick especially, and then idolising some of these amazing whiskies over in Scotland, that was a fair bit of inspiration to have.
Waubs Harbour whisky launch. Photo – Fiddle & Spoon
I’d love to ask about Wauba Debar as well, your Indigenous heritage, your connection to Bicheno and the history of that area, it’s an incredible story. How has that influenced your approach and the development of the distillery?
Bec: I guess to start, the story of Wauba Debar. Waubs Harbour, our distillery name, is actually the old town name of Bicheno and it was named after Tasmanian Indigenous woman Wauba Debar. We really wanted to pay homage to her with our distillery name and respect the history of our town.
She was an incredible Tasmanian Indigenous woman. The story is a little hazy, but it was back in the 1830s. She swam out and saved two drowning sailors from about a kilometre offshore. These men were thought to be her husband and another man. You say husband, but at the time they were her captors, she was enslaved to them.
Part of the story is, one, that she was strong enough to swim and save these men one at a time – she swam out and saved the first one, came back and then swam out and saved the second one. But two, the way she would’ve been treated by these men was absolutely horrific, yet, she risked her own life to swim out and save them.
As a result, she was the only Tasmanian Indigenous person at the time to be honoured by the European, by the white man, and she’s got a grave stone up in Bicheno in the park which still stands there. For her to be honoured in that way at that time was absolutely huge.
In Bicheno, there’s Waubs Esplanade, which is the street address of our distillery, there’s Waubs Bay, Waubs Beach, Waubs Court, so there’s lots of touch points that still honour her. But over the years of course it diminishes, and so we felt really passionate about her story, which was amazing, and Tim and Rob both have the Indigenous connection through their family so I’ll let him speak on that.
Tim: We have a family connection with Aboriginal heritage and it’s a little while back, but I think that really gave us an instant connection with this story of Wauba Debar. She’s said to have lived in the area where our distillery is, and to name the town after her a couple of hundred years ago when they were treated well less than good was quite an amazing story. I think in this day and age it’s more important than ever to try and be culturally aware of this stuff and to continue telling these stories.
And it sort of really ties it back to the maritime nature of the area, her swimming out in a wild storm, it just all came together, and for us it’s about paying respect to this ocean that gives us so much. This ocean is the very thing that makes quite a difference with our whisky, and it’s just nice to pay homage to it and really connect to that.
Photo – Andrew Wilson
So when it comes to whisky, how do you think those salty, maritime qualities actually get into the whisky? Have you designed elements within the distillery to focus on that?
Tim: There’s a couple of things we like to talk about with that. Firstly, it’s the climate itself – it’s very stable here. In Australia, often it’s quite celebrated that when you’re maturing whisky in a tin shed you’re getting these high fluctuations in temperature that forces the spirit in and out of the staves making the whisky mature faster.
You talk to the Scots and their philosophy is sort of the opposite. They’d rather low temperature and slow maturation conditions. There’s no right or wrong, that’s one of the beautiful things about whisky. But here, and it’s definitely Rob’s belief, we’re looking for low and slow maturation.
When you’re right next to the ocean, you’re sort of buffered by that temperature, so we don’t get cold temperatures and we don’t get hot temperatures. You can have a frost a kilometre inland and the paddocks are covered in frost, but down on the oceanside, where you’ve got this 12-15 degree water in the middle of winter, it stops the temperature dropping. It’s the same in the heat of summer. We’ve all experienced 35 degrees somewhere in Tasmania, but often not at all down at the beach because again you’re buffered by that ocean climate. We find that stable temperature base ideal for maturing whisky in.
Photo – Andrew Wilson
The second thing is that saline, salty air that we can’t escape from. It’s destroying our distillery – we’re painting our silo for the fourth time at the moment. Our boiler, our expensive, beautiful boiler, looks like it’s been there for centuries because that salty environment strips away at everything. It works its way into the building, you can see it all over the metal barrel rings: on top they’re just completely rusted, underneath you can rub your finger along that metal and it’s quite clean, so that salty environment sits on everything.
A barrel is a living, breathing pressure vessel, sucking in and pushing out air. Just as you’re losing a fair quantity to the angels share, proving it’s breathing and porous, that also sucks in that salty environment which ends up making its way into the character of the whisky by adding a little bit of a briny note.
That brininess, and it’s probably different for every maritime distillery, can be identified as a straight brininess but it can also really add, accentuate or enhance flavours in the whisky. We often think of it like roasting vegetables – you’re adding salt and seasoning but you’re not after a salty carrot. You’re using salt to bring out flavours or characters in that carrot. So we see caramel or toffee characters coming out of our American oak cask whiskies coming through with more of a salted caramel flavour.
Photo – Andrew Wilson
And the cask types you’re using. You definitely have some traditional Tasmanian takes on maturation with Australian apera and tawny casks – there’s some fun, rich, juicy extractive flavours coming through there. But then you’ve got ex-Bourbon casks in there as well, especially in the Waubs Original, so I guess you’re trying to strike a balance in terms of letting the spirit express itself as well?
Tim: There’s two sides to that. What we’re trying to create first and foremost is a truly Tasmanian whisky. And Tasmanian whisky kind of has a signature about it. It’s got this oiliness, it’s got a rich and viscous feel to it, often by utilising some beautiful old fortified casks. We’re still true to that, we love that side of Tasmanian whisky. But we also like using American oak ex-Bourbon casks because you get less of a flavour hit from the cask and a lot more of that maritime influence without the masking of the tawny.
So we use both American oak casks, where we’re seeing more of the spirit coming through and showcasing those briny notes. But we also love using fortified casks, and we’re using a lot of Australian tawny casks – we’re only after high quality casks.
It’s one of the nice things about being a small craft distillery. We can be fairly selective, we don’t have to go and order hundreds of casks at once and be limited by the type and quality we can use, especially in this current market condition where the demand for casks is increasing.
Rob Polmear. Photo – Andrew Wilson
I’ve also been hearing a lot about Rob’s experimentation with different yeast strains and even local peat as well. Can you tell me about where he’s at with that and how that’s developing?
Tim: Sure. Rob’s unique in that he’s got a heavy science background. He did a Master of Marine and Antarctic Science at university, so he’s use to looking down the microscope and challenging these things. He’s a real craft guy. When we were growing up, he was the kind of guy growing his own mushrooms, making his own cheese, he had his own bees, he’d make his own cream cheese for the homemade pizza that he’d smoked the salmon for. That was Rob, he was a craft guy.
And so, when it comes to the yeasts used in whisky, we use a lot of classic distillers M-1 yeast, but Rob also likes to experiment with the flavour by cultivating his own liquid yeasts. There’s a couple of things you can do there. Mostly yeast is about efficiency of alcohol but also about flavour profile. By experimenting with these different yeasts, you can match up different barrels, and so Rob’s got a bunch of different yeast strains in barrel these days after having made new make with them and it’s really interesting.
By experimenting and cultivating his own yeast, he can do two things: one, he can import yeast in liquid format from almost anywhere in the world which you can’t get in dry yeast form and then grow it. So you can get a little pouch of it sent over from somewhere in Europe that you normally cannot get. It’s a great way to really play with flavours.
Photo – Andrew Wilson
Secondly, he can go and swab different things in our area. It could be grapes in a vineyard nearby or seaweed out on the rocks, which he’s done, and experiment under the microscope. Through smaller five litre stills, he does trial runs before committing to the big scope. It definitely gets a lot of whisky fanatics and industry guys like Patrick Maguire interested. When they come in they love trying the different new makes.
Bec: When we were renovating the distillery, which took a few years, we custom-built a lab right in the middle of the distillery and that’s Rob’s base where he can do all of these experiments. Everything’s been custom-made to allow him to do all of this, which was a big part of him making the whisky that he really wanted.
Tim: And you touched on peat there. Peat is really a provenance-based craft we’re trying to build here. We’re not into creating a peated whisky by importing grain that’s been peated in Scotland, which is fairly common. We’re about creating a truly maritime whisky from our area in Tasmania, so we’ve got this peat bog that’s quite different.
Peat is classically from the highland areas, broken down sphagnum moss, etc. Down here on the coast we don’t have those highland areas but we do have low-lying saltmarsh lands which create peat but out of very different organic material. It’s local tea trees, it’s melaleuca, it’s salty succulents, even coastal reeds broken down, so quite different organic matter and it gives a very different smoky profile for that reason.
We haven’t done a huge amount yet, because it’s hard work to do, to actually smoke grain, which we do post-malting, we don’t malt it ourselves. We’ve just been doing it in the last two days for instance. In one run of whisky in a brew, we use 600 kilos of grain. To smoke 600 kilos of grain, Rob’s built himself this big kind of contraption to do it, and it takes two days worth of time to smoke 600 kilos of grain. It’s very time consuming, but we’ve got lots of peated whisky in barrel, not as much as we’d like, but over time I reckon we’ll probably ramp it up.
Waubs Harbour core range: Waubs Original, Port Storm and Founder’s Reserve – Supplied
And what are some of the things you’re most excited about moving forward?
Bec: It’s definitely an exciting time. We started in 2018, we released the Preview Series early 2022, and we’ve just launched our first release so we feel like this is only just the beginning. But we do feel like we’ve already made an impact on the industry. We’re getting really great feedback on our whisky, and we’re genuinely feeling this amazing support from industry. We’ve got a bunch of loyal supporters who buy everything we’ve ever put out, lots of emails, lots of customer support.
We’re really excited to have a whisky out that was completely made, matured, bottled, everything at Waubs, and to have more volume and be able to share it more broadly. We’ve been in such a building phase in terms of renovating but also building the brand for such a long time. Now we’re excited to just get in there and see all of our hard work finally come to fruition, and to really get out there and start seeing our whisky spread more throughout Australia.
Tim: Another cool thing, now that we’ve got a core line of whiskies out, we’ll have limited releases as well. So we’ll have the peated release that we were talking about before and several other limited releases. We’re planning on doing some events with these releases and that will be a lot of fun going forward, so it’s exciting times.
Thanks to Bec and Tim for their time, and you can check out our review of the first Waubs Harbour whisky releases here.