On an island off an island, where you can fly across the sounds or sail past treacherous craggy rocks, you find Furneaux Distillery. Our passion is to create a unique Peated Single Malt Whisky that speaks of its maritime environment. Through deep care and respect for our provenance, we want to bring the spirit, beauty, and ruggedness of Flinders Island to every bottle we distill.
After a trip to Islay in the Southern Hebrides, our founders Damien Newton-Brown and Howard McCorkell realised that on Flinders Island we also have the ideal environmental characteristics that have traditionally made for excellent whisky production; namely naturally occurring peat, pristine water sources and a strong maritime climate.
With the help of Chris Condon at Launceston Distillery, Damien “gypsy distilled” the first batches of peated and unpeated spirit at Launceston, eventually packing our first set of barrels and our stills into a shipping container and sailing them across to the island where they were then commissioned in September 2019 by head distiller Tom Ambroz.
Home to famous Flinders Island Saltgrass Lamb, our farm at Sawyers Bay is a beautiful 1.5km of beachfront pasture on the west coat, where our casks sit in a dunnage warehouse on an earthen floor. In the full force of the prevailing westerly winds, this farm is the heart of Furneaux Distillery.
With construction and farming underway, we’re developing this site to house our new custom-built facility, brewery and a functional barley crop. By next year we will be able to grow own grain, malt and smoke it, brew and distil all in the one place; true paddock to bottle spirits.
https://www.furneauxdistillery.com.au/