Back in early 2023 we met Jeremy Blanks and Greg Jackson of Tarac, the largest distiller of grape spirit in Australia, which is diversifying into the contract production of whisky.
Twelve months on, Jeremy and Greg return to the show having recently had their first trial whiskies come of age.
I’ve had a chance to taste these whiskies that have been column distilled from malted barley, and was really impressed with them.
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Don’t take my word for it though, if you’re a distiller and heading to the Australian Distillers Association Conference in Brisbane at the end of April, you can try these whiskies for yourself at the trade show. See you there!
In this special episode of Drinks Adventures – produced in partnership with Tarac – Greg and Jeremy update us on all the developments in their whisky program since we last spoke.
The company’s first commercial batch of whisky will reach maturity in August 2024. And based on the level of interest from distillers thus far, this milestone should mean we start to see some more blended whiskies coming on to the market in Australia.
Does Australian whisky have the appropriate regulations to accommodate these products? That’s something Jeremy, Greg and I explore a bit later on in today’s conversation.
Click here for more information on Tarac’s Australian single malt whisky offering.
Tarac whisky podcast: Full transcript
JAMES ATKINSON: Well Jeremy and Greg from Tarac, thanks so much for joining us again on the Drinks Adventures podcast.
GREG JACKSON: You’re welcome.
JAMES ATKINSON: Very exciting to be talking to you 12 months on from our last conversation and most importantly, you’ve got whisky to talk about, so spirit that’s now of the minimum two years age.
Tell me about the whiskies that you’ve got on hand there and what stage of the process you think they’re at so far.
GREG JACKSON: Well, as you know, James, back in mid to late 2021, we started our whisky program.
We were able to put our first batch of whisky down in December and that’s just turned two years of age.
It wasn’t a big volume. We only have five barrels of that material. We picked five different barrels to put our first batch in to see how our style would age in those different barrels.
One was an ex-bourbon, just a single fill bourbon barrel. We also had a bourbon barrel with additional toasting. It would be similar to a wine toast, 45 minutes of heat with a little bit of light charring at the end.
We used an ex-apera barrel and also an ex-wine barrel with charring. So we’re able to have a look at how our whisky performed in those four different barrel types.
And they certainly are very different. It’s quite amazing. And watching that whisky progress through the months and two years to see them all have different characters.
You get a really lovely vanilla, fruit and creamy blend in the bourbon barrels and the apera takes on some lovely savoury and Christmas spice.
And then right to the wine char, which is a really interesting barrel. I know that there’s a lot of Australian whiskies being produced in ex-wine barrels. Obviously, we have a plethora of wine barrels in Australia.
And so it’s really interesting to see how our whisky looked, combining our fruit forward characters with the fruit or the wine elements from that barrel.
JAMES ATKINSON: And are they ready from your point of view? Like, are they effectively ready to supply? Is that a decision that your customers will have to make? Or is it Tarac’s decision to say we now have whisky that’s ready to sell to you?
GREG JACKSON: We certainly believe they’re ready to supply and sell. And obviously, it will be a customer’s decision whether they would like to take a product at two years of age.
With those five barrels, we’re not selling any of those five. We’re keeping them as part of our trial and watching the whisky, our whisky age in those barrels over time.
We’ve successively put down batches of our new make spirit every two or three months since December 2021. And in smaller volumes in February and April.
But our single largest batch will be two years old in August of this year. That represents about 11, 12,000 litres all in single fill ex-bourbon barrels. And so we’re hoping that that will be ready straight for market.
I’m pretty confident it’ll be ready straight to market for purchase by our customers as a two year old whisky, Australian whisky.
JAMES ATKINSON: Has there been a lot of interest in what you’re doing over the last 12 months since we last spoke from potential customers?
GREG JACKSON: We’ve had a great deal of interest in both our ex-steel product and our aged.
And as we continuously talk in the industry about where our program is headed and how much volume we’re putting down and the maturation periods are growing, we’re getting a lot more interest. Will we have a three year old soon? When’s the three year old due?
Even above and beyond the two year old. So the interest is climbing for sure.
JAMES ATKINSON: One thing that I realised I didn’t ask you last time round is that I realized that because you’re distilling from a base of malted barley, but you are using a column still, which I think would mean that you wouldn’t be able to call that spirit a single malt whisky in some other markets elsewhere in the world.
I know that the intention was for this product to be used in blending. But do you see that as being any kind of barrier at all?
GREG JACKSON: No, I don’t see it as a barrier. That is correct. It would not be a single malt in some other markets like the European market.
But here in Australia, we recognised very early on that there are a lot of single malt pot distilled whiskies in the Australian market. And there was a need for a range of whiskies across both style and price points.
And that’s where we see our continuously distilled whisky as a blending option to create that quintessential Australian blended whisky. And with the installation and commissioning of our brew kit from July last year, we’ve been able to successively increase our production so that now we have the capacity to meet anyone’s requirements for a blended whisky.
JAMES ATKINSON: Well, yeah, let’s talk about the commissioning of the brew kit. Now, Tarac obviously had a lot of relevant skills in the business for distillation, but I’m assuming that the brewing discipline would have been a bit newer for the business.
Tell us how you sort of, you know, the gear that you selected and how you went about commissioning it and kind of bringing in that brewing skill set into the business.
GREG JACKSON: We had a really good look at different types of brew kits from around the world, and we settled on one from Braucon in Germany.
We purchased that, it arrived in Australia in February of 2023, and we commenced commissioning and installation once it arrived and had up and running on the 29th of June.
So we’ve been running that brew kit since the middle of last year. We were very conscious of keeping the same style of whisky wash.
We did a lot of work with the contract brewer on how we replicated the style here.
And so within a month, six weeks, we had a very consistent product that we’re extremely happy with, and the spirit was turning out just how we envisaged it would be with our own brew kit.
So far, we’ve done 600,000 litres of wort, fermented to dryness and then produced over 60,000 lals of spirit. And the next thing for us is trialling different grains.
We have the option of purchasing some really locally grown wheat and rye from the north and around Barossa Valley. Really excited about working with farmers there to supply us locally grown grains so that we can start experimenting with different mash bills.
We’re talking to customers and finding out what their requirements are. We’re working very closely with a couple of clients on their own mash bills, creating unique products and then distilling and creating unique spirits for them from our continuous distill.
There’s a lot of scope for us in the future about control and increasing our capacity.
JAMES ATKINSON: How far off do you think those grains are for introducing to the project?
GREG JACKSON: At the moment, we’re still running our single malt barley program and getting more of our single malt into barrel to boost our stocks prior to June 30.
As you know, we’ve just started in the process of distilling grape spirit during vintage, which does take up a fair bit of our time. Very shortly after vintage, we’ve planned to do a wheat spirit to begin with and then we will look at trialling rye towards the end of the year.
Every 14 days, we have the capacity at the moment to do about 60 barrels. Obviously, we’re not putting down 60 barrels every two weeks. A lot of that is in bulk storage, ready for sale.
Future capacity, though, one of the reasons why we chose the BrauKon Brew Kit is the ability for us to upscale very quickly.
As I mentioned, we’re only fermenting 75,000 litres every two weeks, but the current capacity of the brew kit would allow us to produce 250,000 litres in a five-day period, which is roughly equivalent to 25,000 litres of alcohol.
So we have the opportunity to really increase production when we’re required.
JAMES ATKINSON: Actually, that’s a good point. Has there been much take up of the new make spirit by customers so far?
GREG JACKSON: Yeah, really happy with how it’s been received by our current customer base. We get a lot of inquiries. We are selling our new make on a regular basis.
Remembering our minimum order quantity is 20 litres. So we do sell quite a little bit in smaller volumes, where I would imagine people are using our product in smaller barrels or potentially blending with their own material before it goes into barrel.
We do see an uptick in larger volumes in the last, particularly the last 2-3 months before and just after Christmas.
JAMES ATKINSON: Very exciting. Tell me about some of the other developments. You’ve had to find the space to store all of this whisky, so there’s been a big expansion of the storage warehouse there, I believe.
JEREMY BLANKS: One of the product offers we had always had in mind was to be able to offer our own matured whisky as well as the new make, but also the opportunity for contract storage, knowing that that was a bit of a pain point for the industry.
So as part of that strategy, we later this year expect to start construction of a new barrel warehouse that will also be up in the Barossa and it will be integrated with some of the other activities we do with other parts of our business, but the barrel warehouse will be dedicated to whisky.
As I mentioned, that is all about our own product into barrel, but also down the track the opportunity to be able to store for our customers.
JAMES ATKINSON: I also noticed that you were investigating export opportunities. Tell me about that.
JEREMY BLANKS: Yeah, that’s right, James. Again, that was part of our longer term plan. What we’ve learned though in the passage of time and the work that we’ve been doing so far is that there’s a bit of movement and adjustment and change in the domestic market.
There’s clearly some pressures on the craft sector, the spirits right across the board and, of course, for craft brewing. So we made the decision to accelerate the investment in export markets. It’s important to stress that we are absolutely committed to our domestic markets.
All we’ve done is brought forward plans so that we can run both domestic and export strategies in parallel.
So it’s in the early stages, and it’s really all about the investigations to understand where we think the best market opportunities may be that match with our style and who understand the quality and the benefits of buying Australian products.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah, so distilleries or aspiring brands in other countries that might want to use a white label whisky product to either supplement their existing stocks or to launch a brand off the back of that. Is that the type of opportunities you’re looking at in other countries?
JEREMY BLANKS: Yes, it is. Initially, we’re focusing on Asia, and also we’re watching with interest the evolution of what’s being called international blends.
So where there are products that are using a local spirit as a base, I guess you’d call it, but then looking to blend that with spirits from other countries, it’s an interesting little niche in the market that seems to be emerging.
JAMES ATKINSON: Absolutely, that’s what I was getting at. And you’ve just touched on this Jeremy, it has been an eventful 12 months since we last spoke, just with some of the sort of economic forces that have come to bear on the industry.
You know, it’s been a very challenging time for a lot of distilleries and breweries, as you say.
And actually, through that turmoil is, you know, we’ve kind of seen, unfortunately, the demise of MasterCask, the cooperage and Ostra Distillers in Victoria is currently in voluntary administration, I think. You know, have there been any assets coming onto the market that might have been appropriate for Tarac?
JEREMY BLANKS: Nothing that we’ve seen. We’re very committed to our current program. Not to say that we wouldn’t look at other assets, but we just want to make sure that we get what we are doing now right for the market and for our customers.
And one of our commitments and the foundation stones to why we make the decision to do what we’re doing was to be able to provide the industry with the opportunity to gain access to high-quality, cost-effective whisky or blending options off the back of a need for our industry to remain sustainable by being able to offer a range of styles but also a range of price points.
And so we’re very committed to getting that piece right because we do think that is an important part of industry sustainability long-term.
Greg mentioned earlier this need to be able to not compromise on quality but to be able to offer our consumers a range of different products at different price points.
We think with what’s happening that there will always be a market for the high-end premium and luxury Australian spirits and the people who can afford them will continue to buy them.
But if we’re going to grow our market for Australian whisky, we need to be really committed to providing products for consumers in a range of price points.
JAMES ATKINSON: And I suppose the other thing to say is that, you know, this is very much a long-term venture for you as well, isn’t it? So any economic cycles should ultimately play out and wouldn’t be causing you too much concern right at this stage.
JEREMY BLANKS: Anyone who’s in the whisky market, I think, knows that it’s a long-term venture. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as slow-moving consumer goods, but it may well be.
JAMES ATKINSON: When these products come to light in the future, do you have any kind of agreement with your customers about whether they shout it from the rooftops that they got it from Tarac or whether it’s kind of up to them how they talk about the product that you’ve supplied to them?
JEREMY BLANKS: The point that is, I think, important, which is with our regulations, we have a fair bit of flexibility. They’re pretty broad compared to, say, for example, Scotch whisky regulations.
That is, it’s an opportunity, but it’s also a risk. And I think one of the things that our industry needs to continue having discussions around is how to keep those regulations in a form that protects the integrity of our products without unnecessarily impinging on the ability to be able to experiment and explore and try different things.
JAMES ATKINSON: Is that something that you see from your own experience or your conversations with people in the industry that there are some issues around the current regulations as they stand?
JEREMY BLANKS: We’re not seeing it come up, but it’s something I can see will potentially come up because it’s inevitable that we have broad regulations, but particularly if you’ve got an industry under pressure, people want to try different things.
And I think that’s a really healthy thing, particularly for a young industry that’s emerging and still developing what is Australian whisky.
Equally, I would hate to see it go too far the other way where you do risk the brand integrity of the category of Australian whisky.
GREG JACKSON: Or stifle innovation.
JEREMY BLANKS: Or stifle innovation. My point is I think it’s a healthy discussion for the industry to be having before something goes wrong, rather than something going wrong, and then you deal with it in hindsight.
JAMES ATKINSON: Jeremy, has there been any progress made with this very exciting timber Coffey stills that you’ve got there that we talked about last time round?
JEREMY BLANKS: Not at this stage. We had always said that we have to get the product right first.
It’s still very much on our agenda, but I have to say the focus and commitment of resources on getting the brew kit up and running, both in terms of the equipment in place itself, but just making sure that our people have the support to be able to get it running, to get the quality and the consistency that’s so important.
The next project is the maturation warehouse, so there’s a lot of action happening before we get to what we call the love job, which is the coffey still.
JAMES ATKINSON: Sure. Where are people going to be able to potentially taste some of these samples that you’ve got available?
I mean, I know last year you kind of premiered the new make at the Australian Distillers Conference, where you’ll be making appearance again this year?
GREG JACKSON: Yeah, we’ll be at this year’s ADA conference with a range of new whisky samples.
As I mentioned just earlier, we’ll have some batches of 2-year-old aged in February and April, which we’ll have available for tasting at the conference.
And come August of this year, we’ll have a significant volume ready for sampling so that our craft distillers and whisky producers in Australia can try our 2-year-old continuously distilled whisky and have a look at blending with their single malt or purchasing it for a product on its own.
So definitely from August of this year, we’ll have some significant volumes available.
JAMES ATKINSON: Really exciting. Well, Jeremy and Greg, thanks so much for joining us for another chat about the project.
And yeah, really, really excited to see some of these blends come to fruition as we move forward maybe later in the year or early next year.
GREG JACKSON: Great, thanks James.
JEREMY BLANKS: Thank you very much, James.
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