Stu Whytcross stands within the dusty stockyard of a dying Australian farm in southwest New South Wales, Australia, a six-and-a-half-hour drive west of Sydney, the place the luxurious farmland of the east coast provides option to the arid inside—or what Aussies name the Outback. He’s there for a clearance public sale, the final likelihood for a destitute farmer to promote what little stays of the household legacy; he bids unopposed on a bag of scrappy, irregular seed rye that might find yourself supplying the makers of the world’s greatest rye whiskey.
Whytcross works for the boutique malt home Voyager, which, along with its work researching and creating new and heritage grain varieties, buys grains from native farmers and processes them for craft breweries and distilleries. That bag of rye can be propagated and replanted—first in a greenhouse, then a backyard plot, and eventually to a number of paddocks—earlier than being harvested and offered to Sydney’s Archie Rose Distilling Co. for its Sandigo Heritage Rye Malt Whisky.
“We’re not even positive of the number of the rye that was in that bag,” says Whytcross, “however the farmer had been rising it for the previous 60 years and replanting the identical seed, so it could have modified and advanced in response to its setting.” Whytcross thinks the distinctive character of Australian rye comes from the land. “The varieties we now have right here, like Bevy and Vampire, are likely to develop within the sizzling and dry marginal farming areas the place it survives higher than wheat and barley,” he says. “We get fairly a small grain measurement and yields aren’t large. However that’s the way you get depth of taste.”
“The concentrated earthy, spicy funk that outcomes from the grain struggling on this drought-hardened land—that defines Australian rye.”
Traditionally, Australia hasn’t had a lot of a marketplace for domestically grown rye, which is used principally as a hay crop in marginal farmland or exhausted soils. The dearth of demand means there hasn’t been a variety of selective breeding for elevated yield. “With barley, there’s been 50 to 100 new varieties over my lifetime developed for yield and tolerance,” explains Whytcross. “However a variety of that has been on the sacrifice of taste and aroma. With rye, most farmers are nonetheless planting 60-year-old strains that haven’t had the flavour bred out of them.”
It’s that grain character—the concentrated earthy, spicy funk that outcomes from the grain struggling on this drought-hardened land—that defines Australian rye. And it’s not like something you’ll discover in america or Canada. “Rye grown in a dry local weather is cereal-forward, in contrast to most American rye,” says Andrew Fitzgerald, co-founder of Melbourne rye distillery The Gospel. “Numerous American ryes drink like a bourbon with a little bit of rye spice. Ours drinks like liquid rye bread.”
In 2020, Archie Rose was awarded World’s Greatest Rye on the World Whiskies Awards for the distillery’s Rye Malt Whisky, a form of hybrid rye/single malt that’s each scrumptious and completely Australian. Archie Rose, like most Australian rye, is made utilizing methods realized from single malt Scotch: malting the grains, double-distilling in copper pots and sometimes using ex-bourbon or ex-wine casks for maturation. “We intention to make one thing distinctly Australian,” says Dave Withers, grasp distiller at Archie Rose. “It doesn’t have a lot to do with the American means of doing issues.”
Peter Bignell of Tasmania’s Belgrove Distillery was the primary to supply a 100% Australian rye, again in 2010, 4 years earlier than Archie Rose’s first nonetheless run. An engineer, farmer, artist and environmentalist, Bignell’s work is probably the epitome of grain-to-glass Australian distilling. His whiskey happened in a decidedly pre-industrial trend, when one yr he ended up with a bumper crop of the rye he was rising to feed the sheep on his household farm. Placing his expertise to make use of, he constructed his personal 500-liter (132-gallon) copper pot nonetheless, retrofitted a business tumble dryer right into a malting kiln, and fired them up with biodiesel he makes from discarded deep-fryer oil from the truck cease up the street.
Belgrove rye is deeply earthy and extremely wealthy in grain character, like wild rice cooked in bone broth and eaten with a well-worn wood spoon. It’s as unusual and complicated and Australian as Bignell himself.
“We intention to make one thing distinctly Australian,” says Dave Withers, grasp distiller at Archie Rose. “It doesn’t have a lot to do with the American means of doing issues.” | Picture: Dominic Loneragan
Together with Archie Rose, The Gospel and Belgrove, different Australian ryes, similar to Backwoods and Tiger Snake, are every contributing to what’s changing into a novel regional character, regardless of the distilleries’ wildly totally different approaches to manufacturing. This commonality is way more durable to seek out amongst different Aussie whiskey types. For context, the overwhelming majority of Australian whiskey is produced from malted barley that’s double-distilled to make single malt. Rye was at all times an afterthought—a distant overseas cousin to the malts Australians know and love. However for a nation struggling to outline itself in a world awash with craft whiskeys, rye, regardless of its indelible hyperlinks to North America, gives maybe the very best instance of a really Australian whiskey.
It’s a giant a part of the rationale The Gospel wished to make rye within the first place. Tucked within the gentle industrial backstreets of Melbourne’s internal suburb of Brunswick, the model stays a lot nearer to American manufacturing strategies than most, utilizing unmalted rye and maturing in charred new oak. Regardless of the similarities to conventional American rye, The Gospel tastes basically totally different. “Our rye may be very grain-forward, with a shiny fruit character that you just don’t usually see in American rye,” says Fitzgerald. “It tastes just like the Australian countryside.”
A part of Fitzgerald’s curiosity in making rye in Australia relies on practicality. Whytcross neatly sums up the logic: “In comparison with corn, wheat and barley, it’s higher for the farmers, higher for the soils and higher for the setting. It wants much less water and fewer nitrogen-based fertilizer, which causes an enormous quantity of CO2 emissions and runs off into our fragile river methods. It additionally has deeper roots, so it even helps to regenerate tapped-out soils.”
As craft whiskey producers in Australia, and the world over, search methods to distinguish themselves from established manufacturers, terroir is changing into an more and more necessary issue. Hyperlocal yeast strains, distinctive microclimates and heritage grains like those used to make Australian rye have turn out to be a staple of the craft whiskey playbook. From Bruichladdich’s “Islay Barley” single malt Scotch, made solely with native barley, to Balcones’ Child Blue corn whiskey, made in Texas with heritage blue maize, these grains and the place they’re grown are writing a brand new chapter within the craft whiskey story.
Australian rye, with its scrappy varieties, resilience, genetic range and intense cereal taste, is rising because the nation’s most singular spirit. As Fitzgerald says, “Making rye is the closest we are able to get to taking the flavour of an Outback Australian farm to the world.”
The Gospel Rye is offered within the U.S. instantly from the distillery’s web site, delivery to 40 states. Belgrove can generally be present in boutique bottle outlets. Archie Rose is at the moment not accessible within the U.S., however as considered one of Australia’s greatest trendy distilleries, don’t be shocked to see it stateside in coming years.
