Australia Introduces First Native Distillery

Adelaide Hills Distillery was founded in 2014 and is a distillery that uses a handmade copper still to produce first grade whisky from local harvests. This revolutionary South Australian distillery has taken a big leap and has ventured into distilling the world’s first whisky produced out of native Australian grains. This month the distillery has released a preview of its Native Grain Spirit that incorporates wattleseed, an edible seed from the 120 species of Australian acacia. It is generally used in a traditional way as edible items by Indigenous Australians. The new drink is a small run of nine-month-olds that were put up on the distillery’s website after a few days of their release. The new bottles have been packet at 46.2 per cent ABV and are being sold for $120 for a 700ml bottle. The distillers have also hinted on a 12-month release by the end of this year or in early 2018.

The product will be labeled and sold as whisky when they have reached the 2 year mark inside the French Oak barrels. The head distiller of Adelaide Hills Distillery, Sacha La Forgia has said that although the spirit has used the traditional barley malt and wattleseed, primarily his goal was to create a whisky which would be purely made from native Australian grains. He also said that his biggest concern was that they were breaking the longstanding tradition of distilling whisky and they feel that people might be disappointed. But since the early preview of the drink has went pretty well, they aren’t hesitant anymore.