Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well welcome to Lark Distillery, my name's Mark, Mark Nicholson and I'm part of the team
here at Lark Distillery, I look after the tastings and tours and promotion of our whisky
and we've been making whisky in Tasmania for 21 years in Tasmania this year so I guess
it really is time to celebrate!
Lark takes it's name from our founders, Bill and Lyn Lark and they started distilling back
in 1992 when Bill Lark actually approached the government to see if he could have the
distilling act of 1901 changed. And the change that was absolutely essential was to change
the act to allow small scale distilling.
21 years on we're selling our whisky throughout Europe and most wonderfully on the Royal Mile
in Scotland. And they love our Whisky and we get great tremendous feedback from the
Scottish judges.
We love to come on board the Spirit and tell people the excitement that we have for Whisky
in Tasmania. I mean as new kids on the block in the Whisky industry we love to be part
of the value adding of what is already a wonderful experience.
I think that we've come a long way from selling our Tasmanian product in terms of bushwalking
and apples. There's so much more that this little state now and of course the rest of
the world's starting to discover that.
We love to be able to tell people that as soon as they come on board and give them 3
or 4 hours to have a talk to us, experience our whisky and talk about all the other things
that they can do while they're in Tasmania.
We love to meet people who are new to Tasmania and even if they're new to Whisky we consider
that to be just a nice little challenge for us to meet so we introduce people to single
Malt Whisky and Single Malk Whisky represents only about 5% of the World Whisky market but
it's the top 5%. It's the Whisky that's only made by 1 distillery, it's not blended and
its all made form 100% barley.
It's a matter of finding that absolutely beautiful balance between the wood character of the
barrel, the soft lovely matured alcohol itself and all those lovely things that come from
the oily malt and from the barley. The Maltster at the Cascade Brewery, he actually insists
that we get the premium Tasmanian brewing barley and that's got this lovely rich oily
malt. So we rely on that for our flavour and we do everything past that we do the mashing
in , and of course that lovely mountain water form the central highlands and then we add
our own particular varieties of yeast and then we rely on some of the ambient yeast
from the Cole River Valley to finish off the fermentation for us. So by the time it gets
through the distilling process it really is a wonderful, carefully distilled and fermented
and beautifully finessed I think you'd call it Tasmania product so as Tasmanian as we
can possibly make it.
Here in the city at 14 Davey Street, we're right next door to the Tasmanian visitor centre.
On Friday night we ave a live blue grass band and we kick our heals up and enjoy the product.
It's also the starting point for our tours so when people come on a tour of Lark distiller
they meet us at Davey Street, we travel out to the distillery out in the Cole River Valley
and sometimes we even go up into the highlands to our peat bog and dig some peat and have
the full experience of whisky making.
Tasmanian whisky's generally and there are now 9 distilleries in Tasmania all producing
spirit, not all on the market yet but in a few years time there will be a wonderful diversity
of whisky from all over Tasmania.