Photo – Manly Spirits Co.
Manly Spirits Co. have entered the Australian whisky market with Coastal Stone Sherry Cask Whisky, the first in a series of five single malts that will progressively be released over the next 12 months.
Since its founding in 2017, the distillery, located near the popular beach-side suburb of Manly in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, has produced a successful range of gins, vodkas and liqueurs.
But making a single malt whisky was always one of the primary goals for founders David Whittaker, a chemical engineer, and Vanessa Wilton, an experienced marketer and designer. The pair have called Manly home for decades (Vanessa’s a Manly local), and as you’ll hear below, they’re attempting to bottle up a taste of the area with their single malt whiskies.
To find out more about the journey to now, what the Coastal Stone single malt brand is all about, and what to expect from the distillery in future, I chatted to David and Vanessa over the phone on the day the whisky was launched.
They were pretty excited with the milestone, and below is an extract of our chat, edited for clarity and brevity (there was a lot of excitement).
Photo – Manly Spirits Co.
Congratulations on the release. It’s obviously a big moment for you both, but thinking back on the progression of the whisky over the last five years, what are some of your overriding feelings?
Vanessa: David, would you still do it if you had your time again?! [laughs]
David: Bloody oath I would.
I mean, it’s an interesting time to be talking to us, because today we put up the ballot and that’s the very first time we’ve sold a bottle of whisky, which is exciting.
So here it is, a bit over four years since we launched, and we’ve now got a product which we can sell in a beautiful bottle. So we’re very excited to have got to this stage.
Vanessa: I’m excited, because I think the whole Australian whisky industry is starting to really stand on its own two feet. The Tasmanian’s have done a lot of ground work and they’ve been fantastic. And now there are all these whisky distilleries around Australia, and that can only be good for the industry.
Making whisky is a passion project, because there’s no quick turn around like there is with white spirits. So you have to be in it for the long haul, and be prepared to go through a bit of pain along the way.
David: Yep, one of the biggest pressures we had was to release at two years because whisky’s legal in Australia at two years and one day.
We could’ve released then, but we haven’t. We’ve waited till double that, and that’s still on the shorter side of things. But these are smaller barrels and we think they’re ready.
The hard thing is being able financially to delay that long. But we waited four years to let the barrels mature along the coast here and we’re happy with where the whisky is now.
The road to release during the pandemic, obviously it’s been a tricky period, how have you found it? I know it can’t have been easy.
Vanessa: At the beginning, we all pivoted. We were one of the first crews who pivoted to sanitiser production. On the Northern Beaches, no-one could get sanitiser. We did a batch and we gave it away to all the community groups. And then we thought, hang on, there’s opportunities here. And the next batch we went bigger into mass sanitiser production supplying all the big names, even Woolworths.
So we were really busy, and then we pivoted out of that because our distillers hated making sanitiser.
Manly Spirits Co. stills – Oz Whisky Review
David: We actually stopped making whisky for six weeks or so during that period. It was so all-encompassing that we had to stop our normal spirit production.
But through this recent lockdown, we’ve maintained our whisky production and we’ve been blending whisky and getting it ready for sale. The marketing team have developed tastings kits as well, so there’s all sorts of things that have been more important this time.
So tell us about Coastal Stone? How did that develop?
Vanessa: Yep, so this year we developed the bottle and the brand Coastal Stone. That in itself has been a bit of an adventure.
For many years we tried to get a distillery location in a national park – what were we thinking! There were a lot of changes to government regulation and big Senate inquiries and they finally put out their draft plan and totally changed what they want to do with this area, which basically shut the door to us being there [right on the coast].
So North Fort, our previous single malt spirit brand, was shelved. But I’m a strong believer that when one door shuts usually it’s because a better door opens. So that made us sit down and think.
Our Manly Spirits & Co. white spirits have done really well, and we didn’t want people to get confused with our whisky. And David and I had a bit of a re-evaluation… Suddenly it was like, what are we all about? Manly spirits, we’re distilled by the sea, we’re matured on the coast.
And then we decided to design a sandstone stopper, and you might say, why sandstone? With the bottle, I wanted to capture where we are as a whisky producer.
We’re right on the coast, and it’s all about Sydney sandstone, which is all along our coastline, and the gateway to Sydney is all sandstone cliffs. So the bottle that we designed, all those little bumps, are reflecting where we are.
For me, a block of sandstone is like whisky. It starts off just being plain and ugly, and then with time, it becomes like a beautiful work of art. It’s the same with whisky. You can’t make it over night like you can with gin. And whisky is like a work of art in that you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out.
The Element Series. Photo – Manly Spirits Co.
So the ‘Element Series’. Give us a bit of an idea of what the series is and the thinking behind these first five whiskies?
David: The Element Series is about everything we talked about before with the bottle, the sandstone, erosion, etc. It consists of five different expressions, and we laid most of these casks down in the very first month we made our whisky, so June/July 2017.
They were re-coopered 100 litre casks, shaved and charred from Tas Cask Co. cooperage. The ‘Lark’ style of barrel, if that makes sense; the casks Tasmanian whisky’s become famous for.
They produce a really full on whisky, where the cask is very forward. And with the heavy charring, they’re full of flavour.
So we laid down four of each of them: port, sherry, Bourbon, pinot, shiraz. And we did some new American oak as well. Those four are the backbone of this Element Series release.
These whiskies are very special to us, and they’re one-offs. Basically, we’re tipping our hat to the way Australian whisky kicked off again and using that kind of style.
Since then we’ve been filling full-size Bourbon barrels, 300 litre ex-sherry, ex-port and charred wine casks. So our normal program is much larger format barrels, where the balance of spirit versus oak is more skewed to the spirit.
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And making whisky, distilling and maturing in Manly. Is there anything particular to that location that you’ve observed or discovered?
David: The conditions here are buffered by the sea. So we don’t get as extreme temperature variations as you would if you went ten kilometres inland. Where they might get 45 degrees on a really hot day, we get 35. Where they might get 5 degrees overnight, we might be at 10 or 15. So the temperature still rises and falls, to give you that pushing and pulling inside the barrel. But it isn’t quite so extreme, it’s more of a gentle maturation cycle.
We still do observe the barrels weeping a bit on those really hot days, but humidity and temperature cycles are different here.
Vanessa: We’re also surrounding by breweries. There’s probably six breweries around us now. We’ve learnt a lot from the breweries. 4 Pines were great, they helped us with fermentation, and with mashing in particular. We do all our own mashing, and it’s such an important part of your whisky production.
David: Brewing is bloody hard. All the sexiness is in your copper stills. But the hard work is getting all those lovely sugars and flavours out of the grains. Using the right yeast and fermenting well and out to the right level. The experience has been, yeah, that’s hard, but we’re very glad we do it.
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And what can we expect from your whiskies moving forward? Will you continue to release limited bottlings like the Element Series, or are you thinking about a core, consistent offering as well?
David: Next year, we might release whiskies from those bigger format barrels where it’s more spirit forward, and a bit more, well, ‘conventional’, more like what you’d expect from a Scottish whisky.
With out 4 Pines relationship, we’ve also got ginger beer casks that we’re maturing spirit in. We’ve even got COVID-beer whisky under maturation, where we distilled some 4 Pines Kolsch.
Vanessa: We’ve also done crazy things where we were trying to get a peated feel to some of our whisky, and we smoked some barrels with seaweed and wild mushrooms.
David: That was a fun weekend, smoking weed and eating mushrooms! [laughs]
Vanessa: Great, smoking weed and eating mushrooms, quote that one in the interview. Everyone will go, ‘That’s those Manly Spirits urban hippies’. [laughs]
David: But our main maturation program has formed in three parts. It’s ex-Bourbon, just like your classic single malts in 2nd and 3rd fill American oak casks, we’ve laid down a fair few of those.
Ex-fortifieds, Australian, where we can get them – ex-apera, tawny, etc. – for that lusciousness, and all in a larger format.
And the one I’m most intrigued about, is charred ex-red wine casks. Not wet red wine casks, but charred. So we’re laying down a fair few of those in large hogshead format. The taste of those is really interesting. They’re kind of half way between a sherry cask and a wine cask, and we’re watching them keenly over time.
The whisky quality will tell us whether or not we blend or go single cask release. We’ll look at the whisky and decide whether it stands by itself or needs to be blended. Then we’ll put them out and see what happens.
A big thanks to David and Vanessa for their time. Head to the Manly Spirits Co. website for further details on upcoming whisky releases. A tasting of the Element Series is also being run by The Whisky List, with tickets going on sale Sunday 29th of August.