customers and a smattering of drinks-industry people – distillers, media, hospitality – have gathered in the bar on this fine Saturday afternoon to taste a couple of rare bottles of historic Australian whisky. They’re from the long-defunct Corio distillery north of Geelong. One of the bottles is from the 1960s, the other from the 1980s. Luke McCarthy, author of The Australian Spirits Guide, has come along to guide us through the whiskies as we taste: he has spent a lot of time researching Corio, because the rise and fall of the big distillery tells a broader boom-bust-boom story of Australia’s postcolonial spirits production.
After distilling was made legal in the 1820s, new stills popped up all over the country. Most were small operations, and they often struggled to survive. Distillers realised that to succeed, you needed scale, and from the 1860s – helped by a rapidly growing post–gold rush population – a number of very large operations opened. Robert Dunn’s Mount Warrenheip distillery near Ballarat, for example, was turning out 2000 gallons (9000 litres) of gin a year by 1864.
By the turn of the 20th century, Australian distilling was being conducted on an even larger scale. A few operations from that era still exist. South Australia’s St Agnes brandy distillery, established by winemaker William Angove in 1910 to make spirit for fortifying his port and sherry, is enjoying a renewed interest in its brandies. And the Bundaberg distillery in south-east Queensland still produces 3 million litres of rum a year.
Bundaberg was established in 1888, when a group of local cane growers decided the best thing to do with the enormous quantities of thick molasses left over from sugar refining was to ferment and distill it. When I visited the home of Bundy rum in 2017, curious to see why 70,000 tourists make the pilgrimage each year, I was struck by how ‘19th century’ the place looked. Huge wads of steam billowed from the chimneys of a sugar-cane mill next door. The warm air was thick with a sweet, vegetal smell of silage and treacle. Soot and bagasse – the fibres left after sugar milling – lay in a fine layer over all the old distillery buildings, including the molasses well: a huge rectangular covered concrete pit, like a sunken warehouse, its low corrugated-iron roof supported by Oregon-pine beams.
The distillery manager took me inside the dark molasses warehouse. During the six-month sugar-cane harvest, from June to December, thousands of tonnes of rich, gloopy ‘blackstrap’ molasses are pumped over from the mill into this well, so that the distillery can draw on the raw material throughout the year to make rum. It was warm and muggy inside. Gloomy, too, apart from a shaft of skylight sunshine being sucked into the molasses and humming back out into the room as a dark golden glow. It was a close, unforgettable atmosphere; all that energy embodied in the pit. I felt I could easily topple off the wooden walkway that stretches out over the molasses only to sink into the ooze, never to be seen again. The perils of being a drinks journalist.
Bundaberg and St Agnes may be thriving, but most of Australia’s other large early-20th-century distilleries have either disappeared or are now shells of their former selves.
The Federal Distillery overlooking the bay in Port Melbourne was established in the 1880s. In its heyday, it was one of the biggest spirits manufacturers in the world, producing over 4 million litres of whisky, brandy and gin a year, not going out of production until the 1970s. The refurbished building is now home to luxury apartments, the only remnant of its former life being large murals on the outside wall of the various brands of spirits once made there.
The huge Corio distillery outside Geelong hasn’t had such a lucky second life. Opened with great fanfare in 1929, the big four-storey brick building closed down in the 1980s and is now mostly empty.
I have travelled from Melbourne to Geelong countless times over the last twenty-five years on the way to wineries or the Great Ocean Road on holiday. And as the car or train I’m in has sped through the suburb of Corio, north of the city, I’ve glanced at that big brick building and been intrigued by the words ‘Distillers Corporation Ltd’ emblazoned on it. One day, I decided to turn off the main road and have a closer look.
This part of Corio is flat and industrial, with wide roads for big trucks and tankers. I pulled up outside what were once the main gates to the distillery compound; the company’s initials, DCL, can be seen in cracked and fading red paint on the gateposts. I wanted to get closer, to take a photo of the old distillery, and as I walked through the gap where the fence once was and crossed the lawn towards the building, I saw that one of its doors had been left open. So, feeling more like an investigative journalist than a booze hack, I went inside.
There have been various attempts since Corio closed down in the 80s to utilise the huge spaces inside, with parts of it turned at various times into an arts centre, and offices. Luckily, there was no-one there the day I sneaked in. Just silence, the smell of dust, and, sitting facing each other in the atrium, two huge copper pot stills that had once churned out vast quantities of spirit. A few empty Corio-branded barrels had been stacked around the stills for show. Behind them, the empty warehouse floors, where millions of litres of whisky once sat maturing, stretched away into the gloom.
As the scale of the building shows, whisky was hugely popular in Australia in the 1920s. Not only was this country the world’s biggest market for Scotch, but – thanks in part to high tariffs on the imported product introduced in 1925 – we also developed a thirst for the locally made spirit, particularly in Victoria, where 40 per cent of the whisky consumed was Australian. That’s why the huge Scottish firm DCL decided to build an ambitious operation on this flat stretch of land north of Geelong, on the rail line, close to ports. The first product, Corio Old Special Whisky, was launched in 1934, and by the 1956 Olympics, when the distillery released its 5 Star Extra Matured Old Whisky brand, aimed at the international market, it was selling millions of bottles a year.
The first whisky we try at Bad Frankie is a bottle of Corio 5 Star that dates from the 1960s. It’s very good: punchy, almost sherry-like, nutty, smoky aromas, and a bright, warm, linseed-oil-like richness on the tongue. It has a time-travel quality to it: smells and flavours that make you feel like you’re not here and now but somewhere else, in another era.
The second Corio bottle we try, the one from the 1980s, is nowhere near as good. It’s lighter, simpler, less interesting. A nice sipping whisky, but nothing more. Its mediocre flavour tells the second half of the Corio story: by the 1970s, the whisky wasn’t being made with as much care and had developed a terrible reputation. Luke McCarthy explains this was done deliberately: ‘After high tariffs on imported spirits were removed in the 1960s, DCL decided that the [Corio] distillery should be producing whisky as quickly and as cheaply as possible so as not to compete with the premium imports.’
There’s another reason for Corio’s decline. In the early 1950s, the Shell oil company began constructing a huge refinery right next door. The refinery is still there, a sprawling complex of pipes and tanks and chimneys, spewing flames and steam into the sky, dwarfing the old red-brick distillery.
‘Just imagine,’ says Seb. ‘When the distillery was first built, it was surrounded by paddocks. Big flat areas of long grass, the buildings looking out across the bay, a train line that brought barley in and carried whisky away. It must have been so impressive. A mythical place. And then, by the 1960s and 70s, after the refinery was built, people thought they were just drinking petrol.’
This is the image of Australian whisky, the legacy of Corio, the grand dream turned sour, that Bill Lark was up against when in 1989 he famously became the first person in Tasmania to obtain a distilling licence since spirits production had been banned 150 years before. Lark wasn’t the only person who established a small distillery in Australia at the time, but the quality of his whiskies and his support for other emerging producers – his recognition that there is strength in numbers – helped kickstart a craft spirits renaissance.
For the first couple of decades of that renaissance, most of the distilleries that opened were smaller, family-run businesses, selling direct to bars and restaurants and through cellar doors. Since around 2015, though, the industry has grown rapidly, and there are now some bigger distilleries that, if not yet quite at the production level of a Federal or Corio, certainly have grand