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#011 Sam From Starward Distilling, Melbourne, Australia
639 Plays4 years ago
Sam is the head distilling and head of distilling operations at Starward Distilling in Melbourne Australia.
Starward is making waves internationally with their approachable yet interesting whiskey. They are doing so by making the most of what they have locally. Great malt, amazing ex wine barrels and the crazy Melbourne climate.
Their whiskey is available internationally so keep an eye out and pick up a bottle for yourself. Starward Whiskey: https://starward.com.au/
More From Jesse and Chase The Craft: https://chasethecraft.com/
Adventures In Home Brewing: https://www.homebrewing.org/CTC
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
How's it going chases? I hope you're having a kick-ass week. This podcast is brought to you by Adventures in Homebrewing at homebrewing.org slash CTC. You can check out their specials page. Awesome specials, awesome prices, awesome service from awesome people. Yes, they are based in America, but they do have international shipping and shipping for most orders over $50 is free.
00:00:24
Speaker
for those in the lower 48. So next time you need supplies or equipment to make beer, wine, or spirits at home, check out homebrewing.org slash CTC. This episode is also brought to you by the Patreons. Thank you so much, Patreons. These are the people that make this possible for me, the people that let me do this every day of the week now, which is pretty freaking cool.
00:00:46
Speaker
If you're finding value in these podcasts or these still-it videos, you can visit chasethecraft.com slash support to find out all the different ways that you can help me out, including, if it's right for you, becoming a Patreon.
Interview with Sam from Starwood Distillery
00:01:00
Speaker
My guest today is Sam, the head distiller and head of distilling operations at Starwood Distillery, which is based in Melbourne.
00:01:07
Speaker
I'm talking to Sam because at least five different listeners have suggested that I should talk to Starwood because they're doing kick-ass things in the world of craft whiskey, and it's not just Australia and New Zealand that's seeing the fruit of these labors. Their whiskey is being exported to multiple different markets around the world. For example, if you listen to this podcast and you decided you wanted to pick up a bottle to try it, you can get it in America at Total Wine & More.
00:01:35
Speaker
In this conversation we talk about SAM and the distillery, sort of specific operations around the still and ingredients they use, for those of you that are interested in that. But we also talk about things a little bit wider, like making the most of a crisis, which is obviously quite topical at the moment.
What gives Starwood whiskey its unique flavor?
00:01:51
Speaker
We also talk specifically about the red wine barrels that they're using for most of their aging.
00:01:57
Speaker
These wine barrels among some of the other ingredients and processes they're using gives them a distinctly Melbourne flavor according to Sam which is pretty freaking cool. I think that is something that's important in the world of whisky. So without further ado let's talk to Sam from Starwood.
00:02:24
Speaker
Sam, you're live, my man. How are you? Good, JC. Thanks for having me on the podcast. So, thank you so much for doing this. It is nice to be able to talk to someone, I should say, from the southern side of the planet. Everyone else has been north.
00:02:40
Speaker
Just across the ocean. Yeah, dude. You're actually the first Australian or New Zealand, the first Anzac, anyone that I've really done anything with. So yeah, I'm really excited about this. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, man. So let's talk real briefly about who you are, where you came from and what you're doing
Starwood's Expansion and Projects during COVID-19
00:03:00
Speaker
now. So your current title is Head Distiller. Is that correct? Yeah. So Distillery Manager and Head Distiller, we've kind of rolled
00:03:07
Speaker
two titles, so probably day-to-day at the distilleriest distillery manager, but more public facing head distiller as a title that is easy to understand. So pretty much just heading out production, like everything from raw materials in through to bottles out and all the steps in between, and just making sure that everything's working well. So whether it's working with maltsters on making sure our malt spec's right,
00:03:33
Speaker
working with our brewer and making sure the wash is right or checking the stills, make sure the distillates right and make sure that's all good. Signing off batches before they go out the door, it's a pretty broad role.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah right, just to give us an idea how many people are employed that started. So we've got about 30 full-time, a bunch of casuals at the bar as well. So we've been going for you know just over 10 years. We put in our first Distillery at Essendon Fields in 2009, we commissioned that and now we're just in the midst of our
00:04:12
Speaker
commissioning our new distillery at Port Melbourne. So we've just done a basically doubling capacity at Port Melbourne. And so literally today I'm looking at a new boiler going in, a new mezzanine floor going in. It's pretty exciting. Wow, that's super exciting. What's your timeline like on that? How soon are you hoping to make that happen?
00:04:33
Speaker
So we should be doing first commissioning runs mid-July, so about four or five weeks away. Oh wow, okay. To normal production in first of July, so it's an interesting time to be doing a big project but we've been able to do a pretty good job of it considering, so yeah not too bad. For those of you that are listening to this later on, we're in the COVID situation still and I don't want to dwell on this but
00:05:00
Speaker
It's an interesting thing, right? In some ways, going into a project like that at a time like this means that you suddenly got a whole lot more time on your hands to be able to focus on something like that. And then on the other hand, it means that you've got a whole lot less time that you would have had for it and things that
00:05:19
Speaker
you know, should be able to get done quickly, just nothing happens, you can't get in touch with contractors or people can't do anything, they can't do any work. So how are you guys finding that at the moment in terms of being able to utilize the, you know, the extra advantage of it versus being completely shut down and just not being able to do anything? Yeah, it's a really good point. I think you've got to make the most of crisis, right? And it's been fortunate for us in some ways that we've had the ability to have
00:05:50
Speaker
bit more time and normally out of still as I'm making whiskey every day right so they don't have a huge amount of hours in the day to do additional projects and so it's always hard when we're running because you know before this upgrade we were running pretty much seven days a week and then five of those days were 24 hours so there wasn't much free time in the schedule to
00:06:13
Speaker
to do other stuff. But now we've had, like we shut down mid-February, right? So before COVID and now we're still shut down and we're in May. And so obviously that creates an issue that you're going to have a hole in your stock in the future and you've got to manage that.
00:06:33
Speaker
But it's been really good to have the time and have the opportunity for artists to do all these other projects that we've wanted to get working on. So a big job that we've done is gone through our barrels and done a barcoding exercise. So over 10,000 full barrels across two warehouses.
00:06:54
Speaker
And when we started filling barrels, our registered process was pretty basic. It worked, but it was quite basic. And now that we're moving so many more barrels, just getting too time consuming to do that. So we're moving to a barcode system, but going through and touching every barrel, validating it, sticking two barcodes on it, putting it away takes a lot of time. So we've been able to use this stuff.
00:07:21
Speaker
That's awesome. This isn't something that people talk about a lot because let's face it, it's not the sexy side of distilling. Keeping track of what's in what barrel and inventory and attaching sensory data to numbers and all that sort of thing. I don't want you to give too many secrets away, but do you want to touch on really quickly the problem you had with your old system and what you're moving to now with the new system and how that's going to fix things for you?
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah, so we basically were using, so we had a house built access database built on web access, which Microsoft have long since stopped supporting.
00:08:05
Speaker
We had a guy that built it in-house and he did a really good job and it was fantastic because we needed a solution and there wasn't anything on the market that was fit for purpose, right? So it worked really well, but it was just clunky and slow to enter data. And so what we would have is, you know, we'd fill 30 or 40 barrels, we put it on a paper log, and then we'd have to do data entry and get it into the system. And we just had multiple steps of basically paper logs, going to data entry,
00:08:33
Speaker
and it was just very clunky and so that that time was just really hurting us and the opportunity for mistakes was there as well. As a business we're growing and so we you know across the business there's a lot of those pressures as you're growing right all of a sudden
00:08:50
Speaker
system that you're getting by with and it's not perfect but it works is coming under stress and if you've got 15 of these systems that are all getting stressed you're running around doing repair work all the time and so we're actually implementing
00:09:06
Speaker
an ERP system, so NetSuite, that's going to replace a lot of these issues. And then as part of that, there's Crafted, which is a module on that, encompasses a lot of the distillery functions and barrel management. So that will be
00:09:21
Speaker
much more streamlined so rather than paper entry it'll go straight into digital using a handheld barcode scanner and tablet and basically just gives much better traceability across you know from when the barrel enters our system from from the winery or the couperage you know when it's filled when we sample it when it gets emptied if it gets sent away and recoupered when we refill it if we sell it to someone it's all there in one spot and it's really easy to trace whereas at the moment it's just been
00:09:52
Speaker
more challenging because we've got an inventory software system which is web-based. We've got zero and then we've got a separate access database and you've got to get all these three things to work together and it's just a nightmare. And they're all great tools in and of themselves but they're not a purpose-built product for you, right? So getting everything
00:10:15
Speaker
I get you dude, I know that feeling, I've had that same situation in a few day jobs and the problem is that on any given day you just need it to get by, right? So you end up slapping Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids and it kind of works but to take that next step to actually totally overhaul a system, it just takes so much time and effort and you know that it's going to be a good investment in your future but
00:10:41
Speaker
Where do you get the time to do that when you're stuck in the day to day? Yeah, exactly. And circling back on that original point, that's been the advantage of this situation is we've just got time as a team to do it because it's a real cross business exercise that involves inventory control, production, kind of everyone's got to play a part in it. And because we're all working from home and essentially we've got
00:11:06
Speaker
quite a bit of idle time. It's just made this exercise much easier to execute. So yeah, it's good. Yeah, that's awesome, man. So I've had a, I've never actually tried any of your product, which I'm really ashamed to say. Uh, yeah, I haven't tried a lot. Did we send you anything? Yeah, sure, man. We'll, we'll talk afterwards. But
00:11:32
Speaker
I have talked to people that I trust that have recommended that I talk to you directly. That's why I reached out to you. Because they said that you guys were doing awesome things, that you were doing interesting things from a conceptual point of view, from a taste profile point of view. And it's close to home for me. So it's special. I mean, I was born in Australia up in Ken. So Australia and New Zealand are both home to me.
00:11:55
Speaker
You seem like, and tell me if I'm wrong, but from everything I've seen, a huge part of the distillery and the ethos of everything that you do seems to be staring into that sense of place and you're trying to make a Melbourne spirit.
Crafting a Unique Melbourne Whiskey
00:12:10
Speaker
You're not trying to make
00:12:11
Speaker
You're not trying to copy someone from somewhere else in the world and just happen to do it in Melbourne. You want it to be a Melbourne product. Do you want to talk about a few of the things that you're utilizing or taking advantage of? Man, I can't talk today. Sorry, dude. A couple of the things that you're taking advantage of from Melbourne, around Melbourne, to make a Melbourne spirit.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a great talking point. I think we started making spirit, you make spirit in 2009 and from the onset we knew that we didn't want to be
00:12:53
Speaker
making scotch in Australia, right? Like that right now, it's not what we want to do. And I think, you know, there has been a bit of that. If you're making single malt, you're trying to make scotch and you might do it somewhere else, but kind of it's just the
00:13:10
Speaker
default I think for a lot of distilleries and I think that's changing now but I think historically that's kind of been the path. There's nothing wrong with that but at the end of the day we can't make better scotch than the Scottish. No yeah. At one point trying to do that and we really want to make something of where we're from and talk to where we're from. You know we've got a really, we've got a great country here that produces awesome
00:13:37
Speaker
barley and also malt. Australia is one of the biggest producers in the world. We've got a really good environment for maturation that's quite different to Scotland but works really well for us and we've got access to fantastic barrels out of our wineries so Australian wine industry is massive and really doing well on a global scale and Australian wine's done a good job of championing
00:14:03
Speaker
I guess new world wines and that kind of modern winemaking style. And so if we've got access to great malt, great barrels, great water, perfect environment, let's make a whisky that speaks to that and not try and make something that's just another single malt whisky in the style of Scotch. Our kind of guiding principle, right? You know, we like, we're really flavour-led, we're really
00:14:31
Speaker
also into drinkability and approachability. And we want a whisky that appeals to a broad group without being simple or dumbed down, but at the same time, it's just something you can drink. And I think that's something we've got from beer, on craft beer, and seeing craft beer do a full circle from going to kind of starting up and kind of drinkable styles like wheat beers and
00:14:56
Speaker
pale ales and things and then you know it went to IPAs and double IPAs and triple IPAs and imperials. Yeah and it's fun but it's like they're not that drinkable and then you see craft beer kind of doing a full circle now coming back to you know drinkable beers lagers you know extra pale ales these beers that are delicious but drinkable.
00:15:14
Speaker
I think there's a really interesting, I was a homebrew before I was a distiller, and it seems like every person that gets into craft beer or craft spirits or anything, from any angle, whether they're making it professionally at home, whether they're just enjoying it, it's almost like a rite of passage, right? You get into something, something gets you hooked, and then you slowly move up that ladder of, okay, so now I'm doing pale ales, IPAs,
00:15:41
Speaker
Rizzas, you know, Rizzas with coffee and all sorts of crazy stuff. And then you start going, oh, this is fun conceptually, but actually, like you say, it's not something that you want to sit there and just drink. And then slowly, you ease your way back down. And for me, I got back to like bizzes and specials, you know, 4% crushable. Yeah, that's good. We're going to have a whole week or an hour about Betta, to be honest, as a style of beer and how good it is. Yeah.
00:16:10
Speaker
So that was key for us as well because I think if we came out with 60% cast strength release single barrel whisky, it would be great, fun, delicious whisky.
00:16:22
Speaker
we're appealing to such a small audience and we're not kind of inviting or opening up for other people to experience whiskey. So we wanted to be a really inclusive brand and product as well. And there's a, it has been a tricky place to be in for a while, I think. And I think it is starting to open up now, right? Where you had the, oh, it's smooth, which means it's drinkable, but then anyone that hears, anyone that's in the know for whiskey and hears the word smooth, it just dismisses it.
00:16:51
Speaker
And then you've got the other side, which is, like you say, the big cask strength, bold, crazy stuff, which kind of writes the rest of the more, you know, day-to-day drinkers, I guess, that takes them out of the picture. But I think there is this sort of middle ground that's opening up now where it can be drinkable and approachable.
00:17:13
Speaker
and easy to get into, but there's also something more to it. That drinkability doesn't come at the detriment of flavor. So that's kind of the design that you're aiming for, right? Exactly. Yeah, definitely.
00:17:29
Speaker
I think the other thing was we've got a bit of a beer background. I started in brewing, I started home brewing. That was kind of what I was doing for a long time. I worked at Grain and Grape in Yargles. That's kind of leading home brewing shop in Australia and really deep into home brewing and down that path.
00:17:48
Speaker
You know, that kind of drove a lot of our practices in the brew house. So we really carve it from a brewing school, not a whiskey school. And so we make wash, like we're making beer. We don't boil it. We don't put hops in it. But, you know, we've got that in the mindset. And I think it's nice because it's much
00:18:12
Speaker
It's much more technical than kind of typical wash brewing. And it's also, you know, brewing leads a lot more on yeast strains and flavor development in wash and using different malts and all those things. Whereas wash is kind of like a male malt, M1 yeast, three days. Done.
00:18:33
Speaker
Right, but like there's so much room, so much scope for flavor development in just that brewing and wash stage that I think is overlooked a lot. And so we really focused on that. So we use two yeast strains. So we use a M1 distilling strain as a workhorse, but we also use a brewing strain and we co-pitch those. And that brewing strain gives us a really cool ester profile, a lot of tropical fruit that Starwood's known for. So we kind of just started developing our flavor profile there.
00:19:00
Speaker
So are you co-pitching those together or are you doing two pitching stages where you know first and then clean it up with in one or you know at the same time so
00:19:14
Speaker
Wash fermentation is devastating for yeast, right? So compared to a beer fermentation, which is really clean, because you've sterilized the wort by boiling it, and you're putting the yeast into a pretty safe environment with wash, because you haven't sterilized that wort, you've still got enzymes that are going in the wash, so it's still degrading, it's still making more sugar.
00:19:39
Speaker
also got a lot of lactic acid bacteria, bugs, because you haven't sterilized it and pasteurized it. And so they'll start making acid as well. So it's a much more acidic environment. And so the combination
00:19:56
Speaker
of, you know, alcohol coming up. So we get up to eight miles in alcohol, a lot of acid production. So your pH is dropping rapidly and your temperature, you know, we top out at 33 degrees in the winter, pitch at 20 and let it free rise to 33. That is a hostile environment for yeast. So they're dead. At the end of that, essentially, if they're not dead, they're on their knees and
00:20:23
Speaker
we can't pitch any later into the fermentation process. So as soon as we pitch yeast.
00:20:30
Speaker
That's your time has started. And then a day later, if you put yeast in, it's not going to be happy. It just doesn't do anything. So it's always about if you're going to do multiple strains, get it in at the start, because it is not a fun place for use to be. They'll do the work, but that's all they'll do. Yeah. Cool. So you're using, I don't need to get the exact strain out of you for the brewer's use, but it sounds like you're using something like an English or something that, I mean, maybe even
00:21:00
Speaker
Fruity brewing strain. So, you know, look at fruity ales and that's the strain that we're using essentially. We trialled quite a lot of different yeast strains and this is the one with the S profile that we really, really liked and I think there's a huge amount
00:21:18
Speaker
of variation that you can get just through a different yeast and a different ester profiling your spirit and then it's kind of how do you shape that through your stools and your installation process and how do you marry that with your wood and it's about bringing all those things together which is what makes I think a great spirit a great whiskey compared to an average one is when all those things work in unison it's a beautiful thing.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, there really is no secret sauce when it comes to whisky. It's the same as beer. It's the same as anything else like this. It's thousands of little tiny incremental changes, little levers that you can pull or push in certain directions. And like you say, when they all line up in a certain direction or aim towards a certain flavor profile, that's where the magic happens.
00:22:03
Speaker
I also wanted to ask you, you mentioned the molds. Are you using any specialty molds or any sort of variation and grist? What can you tell us about that? Look, it's pretty straightforward. We work with local molesters and we're really spoiled for barley growing here. So we grow a huge amount of barley. We work with the molesters and then the barley growers on varieties. So we will basically trial varieties and see what works for us. So at the moment,
00:22:33
Speaker
We've just been doing some trial work with Planet, which is a new strain that they're growing that's looking really, really good. We've used a lot of scope in the past, Bodan, La Trobe, and Gardener. But as the market changes and the growers change what they're planting, we grow with them. We're not stuck with one strain. We like to mix it up and then the moleses can get the most out of that.
00:23:01
Speaker
barley that they can and then we can get the most out of it here. So as long as it meets our specs and our flavour profile, we'll work with that. We tend to do a relatively
00:23:14
Speaker
It's like a medium toast, right? So it's kind of like a pale, a pale malt that you use in a pale ale. So it's not as light as distillers malt, and it's not as dark as like a Vienna or a Munich malt. It's kind of relatively light toasting regime. And that gives us a bit more, you know, it's a big difference between us and Scotch is we're not using distillers malt, like we're using a more highly potent malt. So you get more malt flavor, more flavor development, but it's not at the point of so much, um,
00:23:43
Speaker
my reaction product flavor and you're getting that heavy, toasty biscuit thing, like we have a bit of multi-bready character, but not so high. Not so high, not such a feature.
00:23:54
Speaker
We don't have like we can't easily put other grains into our brew house at the moment So basically we've got a silo we get 30 ton to live it into that and that's what we use But we are looking at changing that so we've got another intake and we can do smaller batches and do something like, you know a big proportion of Munich malt or different look at start looking with different malts like obviously rye or
00:24:19
Speaker
week or something like that just for variation but the bulk of what we do is a pretty simple malt that we just work really closely with our growers and our malts design to get exactly what we want out of it. Yeah cool. All right dude so let's touch on the the distillation process itself a little because you know people always want to know about the stills let's face it and then we can start talking about the
Innovative Production Techniques at Starwood
00:24:45
Speaker
barrels. I'm excited to talk about the barrels so
00:24:48
Speaker
I see you using pretty much pot stills. Are you doing, is it like essentially double distilled or one and a half distilled? What sort of regime are you going through from your fermenter through to barrel? We're pretty traditional here. I know I've said we're not traditional, but we're pretty traditional in this. Just double distillation. So it just works for us really well. So we go into the washed still at about eight and a half percent alcohol.
00:25:18
Speaker
It's about an eight hour distillation. And then our low wines will come off at about 23% alcohol. And then we'll charge that into our spirits still with fours and faints collected from the previous run. Previous spirit, right? Yeah, they work out to be about 50% alcohol contribution. So liters of alcohol, 50% from the low wines, 50% from the fours and faints. Oh, wow. Okay.
00:25:46
Speaker
And then we'll run our spirit still. So again, that's about an eight hour run, um, six to eight hour run, depending on how we're running the stills. We've got a jacket on our spirit still. So early on we got, we got our stills, um,
00:26:07
Speaker
from an old distillery, Jejoda Creek. There's now a new distillery in Jejoda, but completely unrelated, but they were a pair of Nablua, so made in Tasmania, pot stills. And for some reason, they're always missized. So I think it was an 1,800 litre wash still with a 600 litre spirit still. And the first thing you learn about sizing a spirit still is it should be about two thirds the size of your wash still, not one third.
00:26:35
Speaker
and so we couldn't get the yield out but basically it still was too small and we were filling it up to the man way and we still couldn't get it out so we were losing alcohol every run. It was just a waste so our workaround for that was to retrofit a jacket, a water-cooled jacket onto our spirit still that allowed us to get more reflux and increase the alcohol that we were capturing from it and improve our efficiency
00:27:00
Speaker
but also let us have really good control over the reflux profile. And given how dynamic our weather is here, a bit more control over that between summer and winter. So we've obtained that jacket moving forward and we really like it because we've got, it just means we can dial in, dial in the reflux and dial in the character of that spirit distillation.
00:27:26
Speaker
Sorry I've just realised when you say a jacket you're talking about a condenser on the column somewhere or are you talking about heating? No this is on the neck of the spirit still right so it's just a traditional looking spirit still neck.
00:27:42
Speaker
and then it's just got like a five mil baffle on the outside that would put water in the bottom and then it comes out the top and so the flow and the temperature of that coming through regulates the amount of reflux on the inside of that neck. I thought when you first said it you meant a like a jacketed still for heating so it was indirect heat but yeah sorry I've realized you're talking about a essentially a reflux condenser.
00:28:09
Speaker
That does make sense, because when you're talking about copper in large sizes, the external, like the temperature of the room is going to make a huge difference. In Melbourne, I've spent some time in Melbourne, and it is no joke that you can go from damn near desert temperatures to hail in a day. It's so crazy the weather. So in summer, like we're in a big tin shed, right? So in summer, it'll get hot day, it'll get 40 degrees inside.
00:28:35
Speaker
I don't know if it's Fahrenheit, but it's hot. You're really hot and you're surrounded by all this boiling equipment and it's just hot, so hot, right? And so everything's running really quick and so the jacket lets us adjust that a bit. In winter, like it's, I think it was three and a half degrees when we started here this morning. So it's the first kind of really cold day we've had, but it's just freezing in winter. So it just allows us to control that as well. Yeah, that's super cool.
00:29:02
Speaker
All right, man, are you doing anything interesting or different or crazy on the cut side of things? Nice. Pretty standard. We run relatively tight cuts. We want to make sure we capture all the ester and all the flavor that we've created in that wash. What we want to do is spirit distillation.
00:29:24
Speaker
is capture the essence of that and the flavours that we're looking for. So our head's cut, we run quite a bit through just to make sure all the ethyl acetate acetaldehyde's blown off and then essentially once we get clear on that.
00:29:38
Speaker
will go to heart. And then at the other end, once the faints start coming in at too high a level, we'll cut it again. So I think our, what is it? Our bottom cut's about 64 and a half percent. Oh well, okay. We're getting it quite clean. And then we'll run through the rest of the way. And look, we want a little bit of faints in our spirit, but at the same time, like we kind of subscribe to the
00:30:07
Speaker
the New World model of spirit making, which, you know, late Jim Swan sort of coined really, but it's like clean spirit, good wood, good maturation environment.
00:30:20
Speaker
faster whiskey, right? And not by taking shortcuts, but just by doing stuff to suit your environment. And so we always knew that we wanted a relatively clean spirit and not too clean. You know, I think one of the biggest issues I see with new whiskey makers coming on, the first distillate they show me, I'm like, this is too clean. Like there's going to get blown out by wood. So it's really that balance.
00:30:43
Speaker
We want a little bit of feints and a little bit of weight in there but we don't want it to be feinty spirit because you know typical maturation times three four years and so it just doesn't have that 12 plus years that you can get that stuff to really round out and create a lovely flavor profile like that's not what we're doing so yeah we try and keep the feints relatively low. So the spirit at the end of that's about 72 and a half percent alcohol that we capture.
00:31:13
Speaker
And then we bring it back. So we cut it back. We come back to 55% to go into wood. So bourbon style, pretty much. And we did trials early on with that strength. Like we started at 63 and a half, kind of Scotch standard.
00:31:30
Speaker
But we did some trials early on and found that the lower fuel strengths just gave us a much softer whiskey, less heat, even when it was cut back proportionally, like it just was a nicer profile. And so we brought that back and then kind of looking at how people do it around the world, it kind of makes sense given our environment.
00:31:52
Speaker
You know, we lose more water than we do ethanol, so our strength is rising up during maturation. So we'll go in at 55 and we'll come out at about 56, 57%. But really glad we did that work early on, because I think that's been one of the factors that's made our whisky relatively drinkable and approachable, is that it's not matured at 63.5%.
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, right. And I've got to imagine, especially in your climate, you'd be pulling so much more tannin and spiral barrel spice rather than barrel candy at the higher temperatures. I say the higher proofs. I also let's get onto your barrels, man. I'll be really wanted to talk to you about this ever since I first looked at your website. So you're using a lot of Australian wine barrels, which
00:32:41
Speaker
Let's get onto the flavors that the actual wine brings to the table as well. But first, are these barrels new barrels with wine going into them? And if so, I have to imagine that that changes things too, because the Scots are generally using secondhand spirit barrels, which I have to imagine have a whole lot more of that tannin and spice taken out of them, as opposed to wine where, in some cases, I have to imagine there's tannin being put in, especially with the big red wines and stuff.
00:33:09
Speaker
So these secondhand, they're just new barrels that have had wine in them and now you're using them? Is that the way it's working? Yeah. Yeah. So we, going back to what we wanted to do, we wanted to make Australian whiskey. And so I love bourbon, use bourbon barrel, mature whiskey. Like I love it. I love what bourbon barrels do for it. I think it's a lovely, really clean palette to work with. And it's just a delicious flavor and really that's a spirit shine and I like spirit forward whiskey. So, you know, I was,
00:33:39
Speaker
really happy to use berm barrels, but didn't make sense to us to import berm barrels out of the US to make our whiskey in. It just didn't fit with the story and what we wanted to do.
00:33:51
Speaker
You know, a lot of Australians are using fortified wine barrels, so tawny, which is what we label port, but we can't call it port anymore, so we call it tawny. Apera, which is Australian sherry. You know, those are sort of the two big fortified barrels that people use. And we started feeling a lot of apera barrels, sherry barrels that have been recoupered.
00:34:17
Speaker
But the problem with them is there's not much supply. And so it wasn't a sustainable supply of wood from 10,000 a pair of barrels. It's just not that much a pair of being made. We started doing some work pretty early on looking at red wine barrels because Australia makes heaps of red wine, really good red wine. And wineries get rid of wood. They get rid of a lot of wood once they're done with it, once it's spent with the wine.
00:34:41
Speaker
So typically a winery use a barrel for kind of six to eight years. It'll have a working life in a winery, depending on what they're doing with it. And then essentially they're done with it. They want to move it on. So they've got space for newer barrels. So they might sell it. And traditionally it's been nurseries, you know, cutting it in half to grow an apricot tree and a lemon tree, which is great. But we got some hundred litre barrels, octaves from your lumber. They do Octavius, which is their premium Shiraz.
00:35:09
Speaker
I've got these 100 litre American Oak Shiraz barrels and put some spirit in them and we watched them develop and it was amazing to see them come along. You've got really good quality oak, like winemakers are pretty finicky people and they're really into making sure they've got the right oak. So the oak quality is fantastic.
00:35:29
Speaker
And then the red wine, you know, we use a lot of Shiraz out of Barossa Valley in South Australia, and you get this really lovely, jammy, juicy, vibrant red fruit character from the pinky red colour as well. And there's still heaps of oak left in there because the wine's only at, you know, table wine drinks at 13, 14, 15% alcohol. When you're going at 55% alcohol, there's a lot of stuff that wasn't taken out by the wine. So
00:35:55
Speaker
it works really well. And so we moved to that on quite a big, in a big way when we realized that, well, we can't get enough four or five barrels. We think this is a really good opportunity to make a new sort of style of whisky that no one's really doing, but it really speaks to where we're from and gives the drinker something new. And there's a lovely story that you can tie to going back to the winemaker and speaking to the winemaker about the wine that's been in there and then what we're doing with it, making whisky with it, and then bring those flavours together.
00:36:25
Speaker
It's been a really good maturation wood for us because we can get it and it's delicious and it's kind of part of our DNA. So yeah, it's really cool. That's awesome. And it puts a stamp on something that no one else can have, right? It goes back to this idea of you can have two delicious whiskies that are pretty similar, but if one of them's got an interesting story and an interesting place that it comes from,
00:36:49
Speaker
people generally in the market are going to take the one that's got that little bit of extra something to it. So I don't know, man, the more and more I'm hearing people attempt to do this, and it seems to go one of two ways. One is that
00:37:06
Speaker
There's an opportunity that people see and they take, like you. It almost just happened, right? And then because it happened, it turned into something special. And it worked on a profile side of things in terms of taste. It worked on a conceptual level in terms of being able to share a story with the winemaker. It works in terms of marketing to be able to draw it to a place and also have the collaboration with the winemaker as well. It's a nice story for you to tell. It's a nice story for them to tell, which means that you're helping each other out.
00:37:33
Speaker
It either goes that way and it just works or people try to crowbar something in and manufacture a story and that just seems to fall flat on its face, which is, I'm not saying that's what you're doing at all. I'm saying you're doing it the right way. No, I think what I see a lot is you can't force stuff, right? And so you don't want to do too much stuff. And so I see people kind of trying to jam all these ideas into one whiskey. And it's like individually they're great ideas, but
00:38:00
Speaker
kind of just jam all together and expect it to come out. You know, it's kind of, I think simplicity is key to this stuff and it's something that I really, really hold to here. You know, this stuff doesn't have to be complicated, like just do stuff well, simply, and you'll end up with a really good whiskey at the other end. Yeah, I have to imagine too, coming from the wine, you're going to pick up some of that dry tannic finish
00:38:24
Speaker
which brings it back around to the idea of drinkability, right? If a drink, for me anyway, if a drink finishes, if it's sweet and big and bold, but then finishes dry, it makes you want to take another sip rather than lingering and be cloying on the palate. So are you getting a lot of that from the red wine?
00:38:43
Speaker
Yeah, it comes back to balance. And so we've got, you know, Solera, which was our first whisky that were released, was built on these a pair of barrels, right? And so the Recrupert Australian Cherry barrels. So they are on the sweet side. Right. We finished lots of kind of wood sugar because they've been Recrupert and really round and sweet and rich and lovely.
00:39:05
Speaker
And we started doing red wine barrels, and that can have a lot more tannin and a lot less sugar. So you get a much drier, more a pair of teeth style whisky out of it. And so you've got to be careful that you're not getting too much tannin and too much dryness, that it's kind of puckering and tannic and excessive. Because the other thing we don't like is overly extractive whisky. Like if you have a whisky that's 240, it's just not that pleasant. You want it to be balanced.
00:39:36
Speaker
And so we've got to work really carefully on getting the right wood in. So we use a lot of French oak and a lot of American oak, and the ratio that we use those is really critical to getting it right.
Blending and Consistency in Starwood Whiskey
00:39:47
Speaker
And as you know, we've been filling red wine barrels now for eight years, and we've learned so much about how to get the most out of it, what to fill in what ratios. And then at the other end, when we put together our blends, because our blends of Nova would be 20 to 30 barrels.
00:40:04
Speaker
how to balance that out. Because if you don't get that balance right and there's too much tannin, it can be a lot less drinkable than if you get that balance right and there's just that nice dryness but not excessive. So it does definitely aid drinkability and when you've got it right, it's a good thing.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk about blending quickly, because I think a lot of people that get into this from a new, if they're starting a distillery or they're new at a distillery, they grossly underestimate the importance of A, having enough barrels to select from and blend from, and also the time and effort that you need to put into your blends. So do you want to just talk to that for a minute or two, and then we're getting close to getting out of here, I think, mate?
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, look, blending is a huge part of what we do. I think it's really, I mean, people always have this kind of mythical concept around blending, right? And it's really magical and it is pretty full on. We've always been into blending, like we like bringing things together and making
00:41:13
Speaker
the product better than some of its parts. So you can really make a better product through blending. And I think that's something that you need to really make sure you adhering to when you're doing it. Like what am I trying to achieve and am I doing it through bringing these barrels together? Like is it beneficial or not?
00:41:29
Speaker
but you can really get your flavor balance right through bringing barrels together because each barrel is different, you know, each barrel is different, especially with us with wine barrels, like barrels from the same winery, you know, they were coopered by the same coop bridge on the same year, they filled with the same wine, saw in the same place, same rack, same location, they got here, we saw them in the same You Make Spirit batch on the same day, saw them in the same location, the warehouse on the same rack.
00:41:53
Speaker
You look at them three years later and they're completely different. You're like, what happened? It's insane, isn't it? Absolutely insane. And that's where blending is really together. So we've got Jared Huxholtz. So he's our primary blender. His role is headed downstream in blending.
00:42:13
Speaker
So Joey's come out of wine, and so he sort of does a lot of the groundwork on pulling these blends together, and he's pretty good because he can just look at these barrels and pull stuff together. And we like consistency, like we're trying to make nova taste like nova so that when you have it, you're getting what you expect. Like we want there to be pretty consistent flavor profile there. Minor variation's okay, but at the end of the day, you should be able to pick out nova. That's what I want to drink.
00:42:41
Speaker
And that's hard for a start-up to get that consistency when you're learning. When you're learning so much along the way and you're changing your process a bit to try and thread a needle, thread a consistency is really hard. So the blending part's a huge bit of that.
00:42:54
Speaker
And also when you're new, you just don't have as much product to select from. If you've only got 15 barrels that are ready, there's only so much you can do with it, right? And you guys are getting to a volume now where you really can start dialing in consistently. Yeah, definitely. It's fantastic. Once you've got depth in your mid-tree, which is something that we've never had, and this is probably the first time in history that we've actually got.
00:43:12
Speaker
depth that we can really, you know, be really, really fanatical about the barrels that we're pulling out. It just changes your world. Like you're in a really strong position. It takes a long time to get there. The other thing we do is a lot of emphasis on sensory training and using panels and sensory science rather than just one nose, right? So we really want to make sure we know what people can taste, what they can't taste, what faults they're good at, not good at.
00:43:41
Speaker
and get alignment and do it in a structured scientific manner rather than just kind of standing there sniffing stuff and enjoying it. Like for us sensory science is a big part of what we do and it takes a lot of time and training and a lot of effort but the reward I think is really worthwhile. That's awesome man.
00:44:00
Speaker
All right, dude, we're running out of time. I know you've got a pretty tight schedule to get back to. So we will take a few minutes after we say goodbye to answer the Patreon questions. Patreons, if you're listening to this on the normal podcast, make sure to jump over onto the Patreon page and grab the Q&A section as well. But thank you so much for helping us out, Sam. Having an insight into a local business on the other side of the world for a lot of people is pretty special. And for us down here in New Zealand and Australia, it's pretty cool to have
00:44:30
Speaker
people doing it right on our back doorstep. That's awesome. Thank you, man. I appreciate it.
00:44:36
Speaker
Thanks, mate. Yeah, you should be able to find Starwood pretty much everywhere you're listening. You should be able to find a bottle. So Google it and have a look. Hopefully you enjoyed it. And thanks, mate. It's been fun. I really, really did enjoy that talk with Sam. Very educational for me and also interesting to hear about people making whisky on my side of the planet. We need more of it down here in Australasia. So if you're thinking about it, if you're thinking about starting a whisky distillery, I'm all for it. Go for it, guys.
00:45:02
Speaker
And don't forget, this podcast was brought to you by the Patreons. Thank you so much team, and also to Adventures in Home Brewing. Visit homebrewing.org slash ctc to check out their specials page. Using that URL doesn't cost you a cent, but it does help me out a whole lot. See you guys.