The first time I thought seriously about Ned Whisky was on a cricket field. I was playing in a proud but lowly league on a muggy January afternoon, when the opposition team (a team we hated for no obvious reason) strode out of the pavilion wearing a sponsored shirt with Ned Kelly’s head atop ‘Australian Whisky’.
Huh?! Firstly, how the hell did the team we hated get a goddamn sponsor? And secondly, why would a whisky associate itself with the mediocre shambles that was our club cricket competition?
It was even stranger that I, someone who’s meant to know a bit about Australian whisky, knew hardly anything about the brand. I was found out a minute later when one of my teammates asked what this Ned Whisky’s all about. I told him, slightly embarrassed, that I didn’t really know. I’d heard it was made in the northern suburbs of Melbourne and that it was owned by a bunch of gazillionaires.
Like most people, I’d come across Ned Whisky RTD cans on bottle shop shelves after they were launched in 2015. I then started seeing the logo pop up on the Australian motoracing circuit: on the hood of a Porsche in the Carrera Cup, on Holden utes and trucks, and on the revealing shirts of Ned Whisky pit girls. Clearly, the brand was intent on appealing to the Aussie ‘bloke’: the battler, the grade cricketer, the true blue motorhead.
That tactic and the early social media posts certainly didn’t ingratiate the brand to the modern Australian whisky drinker (women were completely overlooked). But in 2019, we started to get more detail about the larger Ned Whisky project. News articles detailing Ned’s lofty ambitions emerged, images of the Ned Whisky distillery in Campbellfield in Melbourne’s north seeped out, and the powerful investors behind the whisky were also revealed. Suddenly it was clear, this wasn’t just a simple RTD brand.
We learnt that the Ned Whisky story starts with Drew Fairchild, a former CFO for Cleanaway and Shell, and the founder of Top Shelf International, the privately-owned company responsible for the brand.
Top Shelf’s investors are of a similar ilk, with the likes of Gerry Harvey, Aurizon chairman Tim Poole, and Bennelong Asset Management’s Richard Pegum and Paul Henry involved, among others. Adem Karafili, the former Managing Director of Swisse Wellness (before it sold to a Chinese company for almost 1.8 billion), is Top Shelf’s executive chairman. And most interestingly, Lark Distilling Co, formerly Australian Whisky Holdings (AWH), is also an investor. Bruce Neill’s there, too, the Hobart rich lister reported to be the principal agitator in the boardroom coup that ravaged AWH last year.
Earl Bamber Motorsport
But despite the money pumped into the brand (reportedly in the tens of millions), and the expertise of the high-flyers involved, I struggled to see Ned Whisky as anything more than an unimaginative, cashed up derivative of Jack and Jim. And unlike Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, Ned Kelly was never really a distiller. The Kelly gang’s crude attempts to make illicit whisky at Bullock Creek pale against the distilling legacy of the Beam descendants, who have dominated American whiskey-making like no other family. More problematic is the brand’s leveraging of Kelly’s complicated legacy.
This came to the fore last year when Tom Elliot, a well-known radio presenter and investment banker, was discussing the brand with a listener who likened Ned Kelly to a ‘cop killer’. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to use the image of Ned Kelly to sell whisky and coke and say that he’s a legend, he wasn’t! He was a convicted criminal,’ Elliot told his listeners.
It’s a simplistic interpretation of Australia’s most recognizable and polarising historical figure. But as the old adage runs, you can’t buy authenticity, and like him or not, Kelly lends a sense of identity and legitimacy to brands that attach themselves to him – perfect for a whisky devoid of both. And in fact, we’ve been here before – the Kelly legend has already been co-opted for an Australian whisky. Ned Kelly Australian Outlaw Whisky was first created by W&A Gilbey’s back in the 1960s. It was aimed at America’s booming whiskey market, but the timing was off (whiskey sales crashed in the 1970s) and the Gilbeys outlaw brand was thrown in the dustbin.
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 24, 1967
It became easier to ignore all the marketing malarkey when Top Shelf released its own proper Ned Whisky bottle in late 2019. At $60 retail, it became the cheapest Australian whisky on the market, an achievement not lost on those who’d been bemoaning the high price of Australian whisky.
By then, word on the distillery in Campbellfield started to do the rounds. I found out through a bartending friend that Sebastian Raeburn, one of Melbourne’s most respected drinks industry pros, had taken over the reins at the new Ned Whisky distillery.
Raeburn has one of the most illustrious CV’s in Australian hospitality. He’s headed up some of Melbourne’s top venues like 1806 and Lui Bar, authored cocktail books and history tours, spearheaded the distillation program at The Craft & Co, and co-founded Anther Spirits, now recognised as one of the country’s top gin distilleries. With Raeburn at the helm, I felt a lot more positive about Ned, and when I got in touch, he offered to give me a full tour of the operation.
On the morning I arrived, it was pelting with rain, which didn’t help the 25 minute walk from Upfield station (the end of the line) to the distillery. I took the train to get a feel for the area, a place I’d only driven past on the Hume heading out of Melbourne. Honestly, driving through Campbellfield is probably the best way to experience it. Vast business parks dominate what is mainly an industrial suburb, making it a great place to build stuff (Ford has long been the biggest employer in the area), but rubbish for anything else.
Sebastian Raeburn – Oz Whisky Review
The always affable and articulate Raeburn greeted me at the entrance. Vests on, a wave to the epic canning machine through the main door, and then we stepped into the distillery proper. A large 3500 litre pot still was flanked by a towering column pumping out 1800 litres of spirit an hour. Behind that, eight large stainless steel fermenters stood to attention.
This is the future of Ned Whisky. I say future, because I quickly found out that the first batch of Ned Whisky released in December 2019 hailed from Ostra Distillers, a massive winery and distillery in Robinvale, north west Victoria. Ostra was founded in 1962, and since then, it’s predominately produced wine and neutral grape spirit for fortifieds. But from 2008, they also started laying down large stocks of grain whisky and single malt for a variety of businesses, which is how they hooked up with Ned Whisky.
Oz Whisky Review
For the first Ned Whisky batch, Ostra wheat spirit was matured for two years in used oak and then given a further 18 months in new American oak barrels. The result was uninspiring (see our review), and that bottling seemed even more curious when Raeburn told me what future Ned Whisky batches would look like.
Pumping through the column on the day I was there was a mixed grain mash of 71% corn, 17% wheat and 12% barley (almost identical to the Maker’s Mark mash bill). A taste of the newmake confirmed that: sweet, fruity and malty, with nice hints of spice and cornbread. Obviously, when this spirit comes to maturity it will be completely different to the first batch (and a significant improvement in my opinion).
Across the massive room was another sign of where the distillery is headed. Sections of a large column still were sitting on a trolley in pieces. This, along with another large pot still, will be up and running in August 2020, mirroring the current production set-up. When commissioned, the entire distillery will be capable of producing up to 7000 litres of spirit a day, twice that if they go to a double shift (that also includes white spirits like vodka and gin).
Oz Whisky Review
Up the road from the distillery is the bond store. Inside here, you’re greeted by whisky barrels and lines of large oak vats. As Raeburn explained, whisky destined for both RTD cans and Ned Whisky bottles is maturing here.
‘We’re using 100% American oak, and we’re doing a combination of first and second fill,’ he said.
‘Right now, it’s predominately first fill, because we’ve only filled them once. The goal is to build up six to eight years of use from each barrel. We’ll have a multi-fill process that we use, so every year we’ll be getting rid of barrels but also getting more in. It will predominately be new oak – so much of what Ned is and how it tastes is that signature of new American oak.’
Ostra have continued to supply Top Shelf with spirit, but under the new mixed grain mash bill. 300,000 litres of Ned Whisky are currently on oak, and when the second phase of the distillery comes online, Raeburn forecasts double that amount will be maturing by the end of 2020.
Oz Whisky Review
‘The biggest thing we’ve found is that scale is what defines cost,’ said Raeburn. ‘So even though we are putting a product out there that’s around $55 a bottle on shelf, the attention to detail for each batch through the production cycle is no less than the single malts out there at $150 a bottle. The difference for us is that we’re laying down 70 barrels a fortnight, rather than six.’
There’s no lack of ambition here, which is appropriate if you’re trying to capture a 5 per cent share of the Australian whisky market (the figure Fairchild is quoted to be aiming for). But with Raeburn, the distillery has found a more informed and sophisticated direction. And when whisky from the new mash bill comes online in the first quarter of 2021, it will be fascinating to see how it measures up to its American and Scottish competitors.
Either way, it’s a big project that poses a number of questions. Is this how Australian whisky needs to promote itself to capture a larger audience? Do whisky brands need symbolic figureheads to thrive? And does it matter if a whisky changes beyond recognition from the first batch to the second?
Is Ned a whisky I’ll be drinking in future? I doubt it. But crucially, is Ned a whisky I could see the broader Australian public drinking in future? That’s where the game is.
