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Hickson House Distilling Co trio unveil further plans: S8E9

Hickson House Distilling founders (L-R) Tim Stones, Mikey Enright and Julian Train

Mikey Enright, Julian Train and Tim Stones are the founders of Hickson House Distilling Co, which is coming to Sydney CBD in June 2021.

They joined us on the Drinks Adventures podcast to reveal some further detail on the exciting project, a full-scale production distillery located in Sydney’s historic The Rocks precinct.

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Mikey and Julian are the people behind The Barber Shop – renowned for its selection of more than 700 gins – and The Duke of Clarence, their incredibly authentic homage to an English pub.

The hospitality veterans have teamed up with distiller Tim Stones, most recently of Manly Spirits in Sydney.

Tim learnt his craft alongside master distiller Desmond Payne at Beefeater Gin in London, who we met in Season Two of this podcast.

Hickson House Distilling Co will be producing gins, aperitifs, whiskies and specialist spirits crafted with locally-sourced ingredients, such as native botanicals from The Loch farm in Berrima, NSW.

There will be immersive, experiential tours, culminating with tastings, a spirit store and private dining experiences; with a mezzanine lounge sitting above an expansive bar, serving bespoke cocktails alongside a botanical-inspired menu.

The total business covers 450 square metres with 180sqm dedicated to the bar, kitchen and mezzanine area.

The space is designed by Sydney’s Steel & Stitch and Sara Mathers from the UK, working together to create a New York warehouse style bar beside an active distillery.

As you’ll hear in this episode, some of the other details are still under wraps. I did what I could to get as much info as possible for you.

Now, as there are more voices in this episode than we’re accustomed to, it probably helps to tell you that Julian is the one with the Australian accent.

But it’s Mikey you’ll hear from first up, giving you the background on how the project was first conceived.

Hickson House Distilling Co podcast: Full transcript

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Well, I suppose really you could probably say initial idea, five years ago. I spoke to Tim probably three years ago or even earlier, four years ago.

TIM STONES: Four and a half years ago.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: At Tales Of The Cocktail it was the end of the cocktail festival and I heard Tim was leaving Beefeater there, so we had a quick chat just on the way to the airport, but that’s another story. And then, you know, Julian was very keen to do this. So we got in conversation and Julian came on board about full time with Barrelhouse Group a couple of years ago and since then he’s been working on the project, and here we are.

JAMES ATKINSON: The market’s obviously moved really quickly in that time and you only have to look up behind the bar at this bar, particularly The Barber Shop, has got an amazing selection of gins. What makes you look at the market and think, we can put a distillery right in the centre of Sydney and make a fist out of it?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, quite brave, you know. Because it’s been in the making for so long and our three makeups, our history and what we’ve done in each area, we know it’s a saturated market, but we feel there still is growth for quality. We’ve got some good ideas of what we want to do and where we want to position ourselves. So we’re really excited and, you know, and we’re not just going to be making gin, we’re going to be making some other spirits as well, which we can’t say just yet, but we’re obviously going to be making whisky, which is a huge focus for us. We love gin and that’s going to be our starting spirit. But as soon as we’re making gin, we’ll be making whisky at the same time.

JAMES ATKINSON: Tell me a little bit about the venue. It sounds like it’s going to be very much a hospitality-driven operation, like a proper kind of restaurant.

JULIAN TRAIN: Yeah, I guess that, right from the very start, that’s the one thing Mike and I, when we even first started talking about this, agreed on that, you know, we’re hospitality people, we’re alright at the hospitality bit. We feel we’ve got a lot to offer on that front and we wanted to do a distillery that had a genuine, standalone, fantastic hospitality offering, as opposed to it being a bit of an add-on or a tack-on to the distillery. So we feel that the combination of a full working distillery, I guess that’s an important point as well, is we’re not making just like a show distillery and creating product elsewhere. We’ve really got a full operational end-to-end distilling operation in there. And then, of course, having what we’re calling a proper bar and restaurant, full food offering and all the stuff that we’re known for already in the hospitality side.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: I mean, even this morning we’ve been going through what spirits we’re going to have in our back bar. And you know, we’ve said, you know, no matter where those spirits are from, we’re picking all our favourite spirits that we’ll be stocking. More than likely we’ll probably be only stocking our own gin. You never know though. We’ll see whether we put a few others on the back bar. This is at the distillery, you know, Hickson House. So we’re going to have beer and some local wines, New South Wales wines as well. And we’re going to have lots of Australian whisky on the back bar as well. So we’re supporting the local part, obviously, New South Wales and then beyond that, tour as far as Scotland.

JAMES ATKINSON: And Tim, you’ve known these guys for a while and you were obviously the distiller that they had earmarked for the job.

TIM STONES: Well, I’ve known Mike for years and years. We always used to bump into each other around the traps at all the international bar shows. And Mike came to me in New Orleans a little while ago. He said, ‘you’re leaving Beefeater. Are you coming to Australia? Do you want to come and do something?’ And I was like, ‘yes, definitely’. But unfortunately times didn’t quite work out so I ended up being a distiller at Manly Spirits for three years. And then one afternoon over in the Duke of Clarence, we had a couple of pints and we were like, ‘maybe we should reprise our conversations’. And here we are.

JAMES ATKINSON: Tell me how you made the transition from what was a brand ambassador role at Beefeater, to distiller?

TIM STONES: Very clumsily, I think is probably the way to sum it up! But no, being a brand ambassador was great at Beefeater because I got to travel the world and see all the markets and see what was going on, and the most important thing for me was really to actually spend time down at the distillery. I did a lot of tours for bartenders down there. So obviously hung around the distillers a lot. Especially Desmond Payne, the master distiller. And then it kind of formed the idea that I couldn’t be a brand ambassador forever. It was eventually going to take a toll on relationships and health. So I thought moving into distilling would be a way of staying in the industry that I knew and loved, but semi retiring almost, which it absolutely hasn’t turned out to be, because… Yeah, I think I started working even harder when I became a distiller. But just being around Desmond and the guys there, they very kindly, paid for me to do my general certificate of distillation there. I started learning the ropes from Desmond and the other distillers down at Beefeater and then my partner’s Australian, we made the decision to move to Australia. It took me all of about 30 seconds to make that decision.

JAMES ATKINSON: It’s coming into its own at the moment.

TIM STONES: It really is, yeah. When we came over here, it was a bit by the seat of our pants, really. We quit our jobs, went travelling for a few months. Didn’t have a home, house or jobs to come to. I ended up meeting David and Vanessa of Manly Spirits via email while I was travelling. And within a week of landing I got a job as a distiller over there, and that was a learning curve for sure. Going from kind of a big, occasionally distilling in a big multinational facility to basically a start-up coming in halfway through the build. And yeah, the learning curve was pretty steep for that. But it was a lot of fun.

JAMES ATKINSON: That was a good few years at Manly Spirits, so they were making some gins and also they had whisky in the pipeline, I’m pretty sure as well.

TIM STONES: Yeah, I was there for just shy of three years. we’ve done some gins which, very thankfully were quite well received in some of the awards around the world. And yeah, just kind of slowly making whisky along the way as well. So I think I laid down about 500 barrels of whisky for them. I think they might be about to launch something but, yeah, I’m looking forward to doing whisky here with Mike and Jules and yeah, we’ve got a good story behind it. So yeah, it’s going to be fun.

JAMES ATKINSON: When you found this site or when you were looking, were you kind of, anticipating that you might be right in the CBD or was that kind of something that just happened out of the blue?

JULIAN TRAIN: I guess we sort of had inner ring Sydney, you know, we literally drew a circle around, picked out some suburbs and between the three of us, split up those areas, you know, the CBD I guess around. Around the airport and, you know, some other areas up north and I don’t know. For anyone that’s been through the process of dealing with leasing agents for commercial, it’s best to split this job up because the phone just doesn’t stop. And so. Yeah, it’s quite a long process. It was good, eight months of looking around.

TIM STONES: I think we quite naively thought we’d find a venue within about six weeks, didn’t we?

JULIAN TRAIN: We did, yeah. Yeah.

TIM STONES: Eight months later.

JULIAN TRAIN: Yeah.

JAMES ATKINSON: And is it a much more complicated in terms of like the sort of services that you need and you know, utilities and stuff that you need to be able to get in there? It must be a lot harder finding a site to put a distillery in than it would be a bar.

JULIAN TRAIN: Yep. It’s a bit of a unicorn space you’re trying to find, especially when you close to the city because you need the access. Obviously there’s a whole lot of Safety and health issues as well. Ah, obviously you’ve got extraction and things like that going on. So heritage, there’s a whole bunch of elements and So we actually looked at a range of spaces while we were hunting around and I think we were. Luckily, it was Tim actually, who was doing the CBD bit. And we came across this space right down in the rocks. That really, aside from the building being largely made of timber, which was for a distillery, as you know, I think a lot of people would walk away on that basis alone. but we just fell in love with it.

Hickson House The Rocks

JAMES ATKINSON: What is the history of the building?

JULIAN TRAIN: Well, the Metcalfe building dates back to the early 1900s. That space down there was the gardens for The Rocks originally and then it was built as a bond store and so it’s one of the main bond stores that was down on the waterfront there. it was operated by the same family actually for 60 or 70 years. And in recent years, I think the last 25 years or so, Saatchi, and Saatchi have had that building as their head office.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Pretty much most of it as well.

JULIAN TRAIN: Yeah. And they’ve recently moved out and I guess the space we’ve got is, their old garage, for want of a better word. It’s probably the most beautiful garage in Sydney, if you ask me. It’s absolutely stunning.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: So, a great view. Yeah, great view for a car park. It does, yeah.

JULIAN TRAIN: Yeah. So yeah, there’s been all manner of hurdles to get over, but I have to say it’s been… You know, we’ve been really well supported by The Rocks strategy team and even the State Government. There’s been so much will for something like this to happen down there… I think the fire rating bit has really been the biggest challenge. and anyone who comes and pays us a visit, all you have to do is just look up, when you walk in and you’ll realise how much of a challenge we’ve had on our hands to make the place fire safe, to put enormous alcohol kettles, into the building. But, yeah, I think it’ll all pay off. The extra work I think is going to be well worth it. Yeah.

JAMES ATKINSON: How far down the track were you when, you know, the shutdown and pandemic stuff happened last year?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: We were negotiating at that point.

JULIAN TRAIN: Right? Yeah, yeah.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: And, Saatchi and Saatchi were literally moving out of that building. They were gonna have a final party in the car park, which, they were famous for. And, they couldn’t have it because of social distancing, which, you know, those steps had already come in. So that was kind of almost the start of it. So, you know, and it just kind of like went through COVID Zoom meetings.

JAMES ATKINSON: And then without having signed a lease or anything like that.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: With no lease.

JULIAN TRAIN: Yeah.

JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: That obviously took a long time to process, you know, because the minister had to sign off on it.

JULIAN TRAIN: The Rocks is owned largely by the State Government. So all that side of it took a little longer than it would normally. But we did this all through the thick of COVID so there was a lot of Zoom meetings happening.

TIM STONES: It was great, I mean from my point of view, no-one has the luxury of having the best part of a year to do product development either. So I was working in the office upstairs here on York street and COVID happened and we all decamped to our various houses. And I got to sit in my garage for a few months with a little test still just quietly rattling off gin recipes and trialling things. And then I would drive around Sydney, drive up to the far Northern Beaches to drop off samples for Jules on the doorstep, ring the doorbell, run away, and then back down to Woollahra, see Mikey, and then do the same. And then back to my house in the lower northern beaches. And then we’d all get our samples out, jump on a Zoom call and do tastings and write notes.

JULIAN TRAIN: And we’ve been doing that almost every week, really. Since we started.

TIM STONES: So, yeah, in some ways, COVID was a blessing in disguise, certainly from my point of view, to be able to just lock myself away and develop product.

Hickson House gin

JAMES ATKINSON: Now, I know you don’t want to let the cat out of the bag with the real specifics of any of the products that you’ve made, but, I mean, can you tell me anything, like, stylistically around… I mean, you strike me, Mikey, as being a guy who’s pretty big on classic styles when it comes to gin. Would you say that you’re going to be more of a classically styled distillery or an innovative, creative combination of the both?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: I mean, Tim will talk through his recipes to a point.

JULIAN TRAIN: To a point, yeah.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: One of the things from my side that I’m quite passionate about is, you know, defining the different styles of gins. So we kind of spent a lot of time considering, what is the ideal London Dry Gin? What is the ideal Australian Dry Gin, you know, a London Dry Gin with an Australian twist on it. So that was really important from our side. I mean, they’re the two products we’re going to be launching with, so it’s fine to say that. I’d say at this point, we’re not too far off.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, two or three months. So we’re going to launch with a London Dry Gin and an Australian Dry Gin. So we’ve got a few more to come out as well, but we’ll maybe stagger them. That might change in the next three months. We just don’t know. But we’ll be kicking off with, you know, a more classic style after London Dry plus, what we believe to be a great Australian Dry.

TIM STONES: I mean, from my point of view, I’m quite a traditionalist when it comes to gin. I do really like the classic London Dry style. My background kind of bears that out. But I think here in Australia, just the wealth of wonderful, kind of homegrown botanicals that are here, it’s just incredible. I mean, I’m still… It’s been four years in now and I’m still trying to get my head around it all. So I think we’re straddling both camps quite well with the products we’ve got. We’ve got elements of traditionalism in it and also we are really trying to showcase Australian botanicals as well.

JAMES ATKINSON: What about the whisky side of things? You’re going to be, I guess, starting from scratch with whisky. You’re not buying in any stocks or anything like that to get going. So that’s going to be a much slower burn.

TIM STONES: Yeah, definitely, we’re not buying stock from anybody. We will be mashing on site, just mashing and distilling everything there. I’m quite excited to do that. I’m quite excited to start playing around with some interesting barrels as well. There’s some really interesting barrels coming through Australia, so we’re looking forward to kind of doing that as well.

JAMES ATKINSON: Will you be focused on single malt or grain whisky?

TIM STONES: No, we’ll be single malt.

JAMES ATKINSON: But will you be working with other grains as well?

TIM STONES: Yeah, potentially down the track. We’ve started looking into bits and pieces there. Obviously there’s some great stuff here. We’ve started playing around a little bit with some different bits and pieces. So, yeah, down the track we’ll definitely be doing something a bit different.

JAMES ATKINSON: How do you guys feel about this part of the city, like, in terms of the health of this area as a nightlife precinct to be kind of investing in? You’re obviously already very invested in this area anyway. But, it’s obviously had pretty tough twelve months. Are you starting to see that that’s rebounding pretty quickly at the moment?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, it’s like, if anything, this area has come back quicker than what we thought today, you know, marking March 17. But hopefully we can stand at the bar and have a pint of Guinness later for Paddy’s Day. But it has bounced back quick, hasn’t it, Julian? And if anything, you kind of look at The Rocks and it’s so quiet at the moment and you go, ‘geez, this is a brazen move, what we’re doing down there’. So hopefully, you know, it’ll start to get a bit busier down there as well. But around this area, it’s not too bad. It’s okay. But we’re small bars, right? So the two metre distance is almost strangling us a little bit too. You know, we need to go to one metre, and I know it’s really difficult with COVID, but that’s the general consensus out there that it needs to go back to one metre.

JULIAN TRAIN: You can have all the people in the world out in the streets. But if you can only fit 50 or 60 into your venue, then you may as well not have those people around. So it’s frustrating to see so many people wanting to get into places and not be able to, that’s probably the toughest thing. So the sooner we can get back to normal, the better, really, for everyone.

JAMES ATKINSON: How big is the new place going to be? Is that going to be a little bit, more social distancing won’t be so much of an issue in this premises, I guess.

JULIAN TRAIN: Look, it’s not a big venue. Because we’re doing an end-to-end distillery, the distillery is the bulk of the space. So really the hospitality offering is the equivalent of a small bar downstairs. So let’s say 120-odd and then we’ve got a beautiful sort of high end bar. We’re putting it upstairs for 30 to 40 people. So we’re looking at about 150 all up, so of the 470 square metres, the bar side is actually relatively small purely because our focus really is the distillery.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: However, the ceilings are incredibly high, so it will look bigger than what it actually is. So we haven’t designed it for, pandemic social distance, you know, we’re hoping we’ll be able to fill it up. Yeah, so we kind of rolled the dice on that. But, you know, the distillery was so important to have the space of what Tim needed.

TIM STONES: Yeah, those whisky stills take up a bit of space.

JULIAN TRAIN: They do, yeah. Yeah.

JAMES ATKINSON: And also, I mean, it’s obviously a very long-term project anyway. So you going to be hoping that there’ll be tourists and everything back within a year or two?

JULIAN TRAIN: You’d think so. Yeah, that’s the idea. And I have to say again, I feel like I’m just constantly plugging The Rocks people. But the State Government, who are the landlords, have been very, very supportive in terms of understanding that what we’re doing is challenging for the initial period, I suppose. So they’ve been really, really supportive, helping us get open with rent free and all that sort of stuff. So I think we’ve been given the best possible shot and we feel pretty confident that we can create that destination down there. We really want to see it so that we’re not relying on tourists anyway, you know? I think The Rocks deserves to be more of a Sydney local focused area. The tourists will end up coming anyway, but it’s got quite a lot to offer down there that I think a lot of Sydneysiders sort of forget about, quite frankly. We certainly did before we started. We’ve been obviously spending a lot of time down there and keep just saying, ‘geez, this area is just absolutely beautiful’. And for whatever reason, locals don’t seem to go down there, as much as they probably should and could.

JAMES ATKINSON: So where are we at, ah, in terms of time frames for everything?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Well, it’s meant to be June 1. Still waiting, on the development approval. Yeah, they said Friday. They said Friday a couple of Fridays ago, actually.

JULIAN TRAIN: I’m saying June-ish for completion.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: For completion. That’s a pretty quick considering we haven’t put, you know, nothing’s gone in there yet.

TIM STONES: What’s the average, 80% of the work and 20% of the time?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, yeah. What we’re going to do, we obviously plan. You know, Julian’s worked quite a lot with the plan and with you know, our design team and architects, stuff like that. The equipment is being made out in Griffith, so our plan is to head out to Griffith at the end of April and test run the stills. Tim’s going to perfect the recipes at a larger scale. And we’ll do our first five batches of whatever we need out there. So it’ll be the exact same recipe on equipment. We’ve done all the final taste tests on it. Ah, and everyone’s happy then it will come back to us in an IBC and then it’ll go into a bottle. So when we can turn the key and open the doors, then we don’t have to wait for production runs to start, so we’ll be ready to go. That’s kind of like the plan.

Hickson House Distilling Co will showcase New South Wales

JAMES ATKINSON: Anything you can tell us about the sort of the actual bar and food offering there?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, we’ll have a good range of spirits and from the food point of view we’re probably modern Australian, with a slight focus on shared bowls or shared plates, whatever. And then we’ll obviously have shared entrees as well, as well as shared mains and stuff like that. I suppose there’s one dish that Tim and the chef have been working on which is all around Australian botanicals, that’s all I can say about that.

TIM STONES: There’s one gin that’s quite, I suppose, culinary inspired. So I’ve been chatting with the chef a lot and we want to do quite a bit of a crossover between what we’re doing in the distillery and what he’s serving in the kitchen as well, not necessarily pairing dishes to anything but just kind of having a nice bit of a crossover between what I’m using and what he’s using.

JULIAN TRAIN: We’re seeing it also as a great opportunity to showcase a little bit of New South Wales as well, get a little bit parochial about what we have on offer here in this state. So a lot of our raw ingredients are coming from regional new South Wales. So our barley is from Wagga and our botanicals are from the Southern Highlands. And we’re going to, in our wine list and drinks and as much as we can in the food, get as New South Wales friendly as we can. And I think there’s a good opportunity just to showcase the best of the state, and of course the country as well.

JAMES ATKINSON: A pretty big emphasis on cocktails as well?

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, yeah, most definitely. I mean you know we’ve got really good access to fresh botanicals, from the farm, from The Loch in the Southern Highlands. So you know we’ll be obviously doing that but we’re not going to be. The menu is not going to be all around gin. It will have a huge part in there obviously. But you know we’re going to have different spirits as well, which we’ll be using from our preferred brands, so a little bit of tequila, cognac, bourbon. So we’ll be using a whole range of spirits. It won’t just be cocktails made of our gin, of what you’d normally find in a gin distillery or you know, you know, any distillery really, that just for the first part of its journey is just going to be making gin. So from the cocktail point of view however, we don’t want it to be too posh. So it’s got a different mix of furniture in there. it’s going to have a bit more of a casual approach. So from the humble gin and tonic to a beer on tap to a fancy pants martini kind of thing.

JAMES ATKINSON: You just sort of mentioned then the source for the botanicals. Is that something we can talk about a bit more like how you decided upon, upon that particular farm?

TIM STONES: yeah, I mean there’s a lovely lady called Brigid, Kennedy, who owns The Loch just outside Berrima in the Southern Highlands and she’s been supplying fresh botanicals, rather fresh ingredients for the cocktails here at The Barber Shop for quite a while. So I got in touch with her and we went down and had a meeting and she has this huge farm down there and this amazing garden growing loads of native ingredients. We just started talking and our values kind of aligned quite considerably. She likes what we’re doing, we love what she does down there. So we just talked about growing certain bits and pieces for the gins actually just down the road. Obviously some things have to come from other places but as much as we possibly can, we’re going to try and try and source our home grown botanicals from The Loch.

JULIAN TRAIN: She’s incredibly passionate about native botanicals and flavours, just generally. She’s originally a chef, a highly talented chef with a very successful business down there that’s full every weekend. And so we see a lot of opportunity to even take people down there, give them experiences down there with the botanicals and you know, show them the farm, have weekends away and really get the end-to-end experience of what we’re trying to develop and what she’s got there.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: It’s not like it’s a commercial farm. No, it’s kind of, you know, native thyme is grown with lemon myrtle all in the same kind of area, it’s not like there’s rows and rows of botanicals or vegetables that she’ll be growing for our own kitchen, it really is just like what Tim said, it really lines up with what we’re doing. And we hope that feel of what she’s doing down there will come out in our bar too, you know, and what we’re doing. So I think that’s where we really are properly aligned is, you know, to have that partnership.

JAMES ATKINSON: What are the long-term plans for the business in terms of like where you expect people to be able to find your products? You know, is it going to be like a… Obviously there’ll be a fair bit, a fair bit of sales across the bar and people will be able to take bottles home direct from the distillery. But you know, do you see it becoming a national brand and potentially exporting and all these things as well?

JULIAN TRAIN: We’re humble enough to say that we’d be happy if Sydney loved us first, I guess. And you know, just start from the hometown and hopefully get enough love from, from everyone in our own little area and sort of take it outwards from there. I guess the product’s going to be the big tester and as long as everyone loves it as much as we do, then, yeah, of course we hope that it’s going to be a proper national brand in the first instance. And with the connections that, Mike and Tim have, there’s obvious links to the UK there, but we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves by any means. Really, we just want to focus on making really good product that wins the love of the people that use it.

JAMES ATKINSON: And so there will definitely be packaged sales from the venue for people who just want to come by and pick up a gift or pick up a bottle for themselves.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Yeah, well, that would be great, you know, that’s definitely the plan, you know. We’re hoping to do quite a few different tours through the distillery and then have a taste. We’ve got the tasting area which will be upstairs above the bar and the mezzanine level and we’ll be able to hold masterclasses there and private functions and whatever we want to do, really. So that’s really exciting that we’ve got a private space of 30 or 40 people and that’s where we’ll hold a lot of our tastings, but we’ve kind of like, mapped out how we want the flow of the cellar door experience. So we’re hoping that people really engage with that.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: And, you know, and hopefully it’ll be something that you do in The Rocks. You know, it’s almost a tourist attraction kind of thing when tourism is back.

JULIAN TRAIN: We are incredibly lucky with the location that it’s a ferry ride away from Manly, a train ride from North Sydney, a walk down the hill from the CBD. It’s incredibly central, really, The Rocks. So we’re really hoping that we can create a destination that people will want to come and experience and learn a little bit from Tim and the team about distilling in general. And then have an afternoon in the bar and we’re looking at some pretty incredible dining experiences as well.

TIM STONES: It is a great dining experience.

JULIAN TRAIN: They’re gonna be good.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: You’ve actually got more out of us than anybody else has. We’re definitely getting closer.

TIM STONES: It’s been bottled up for a year now, so we’re like really, really happy.

JAMES ATKINSON: We don’t even have drinks in our hands either. Well, guys, thanks so much for having a chat with us, and I can’t wait to come down and have a drink with you, in June. Fingers crossed.

MIKEY ENRIGHT: Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you James.

TIM STONES: Thank you, thank you.

JULIAN TRAIN: Thank you. Yeah.

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