Frequently Asked Questions

We're at 64 Warwick Street, Hobart, Tasmania.

Captain Bligh's began on the 13th of April 2011.

We make beer, whisky, rum, and a range of other things too!

Just as a chef is able to learn and understand the principles of cooking, it is much the same making different types of beer or spirit, which is an analogy that is probably somewhat unfair to a chef! The principles are the same, what changes is the raw materials and some of the methods.

Our maximum theoretical production capacity is about 110L of spirit every 2 weeks. Our highest producing year we managed to fill 11 x 100L casks. In the lifetime of the distillery, we won’t approach what some distilleries produce on a single average day.

Rum is spirit produced from sugar cane or sugar cane by-products, usually involving a marriage of spirits from 2 different still types and a concoction known as dunder. Whisky is spirit produced from grain. Both have to be matured in wood for a minimum of 2 years in order to use those terms in Australia.

Although that is indeed what we make, it is a difficult stance to proclaim superiority of any spirit over another. Mostly. When the word 'single' is associated with whisky, it means all the spirit in that bottle was produced at a single distillery. 'Malt' means that the spirit is produced from 100% malted barley and was batch distilled in a pot still. So if you blend together two or more different single malts, it becomes a blended malt. They can also be very richly flavoured and delicious!

Brewing is generally making beer, but can also apply to producing a batch of alcohol (called wash) destined for distillation. Distilling is the processing of this to make spirit. You still need to brew first to make the alcohol to distill. Distilling is relying on the difference in boiling points between alcohol and water to fraction off, or separate the different compounds, thereby concentrating the alcohol. Using a pot still this needs at least 2 distillations to achieve sufficient separation.

Certainly not. You can’t tell much about anything by the colour of a whisky alone. For starters, much of the world’s whisky is artificially coloured with ‘spirit caramel’ known as E150a. Even if the whisky is natural colour as all our spirits are, the size of the cask, what the cask had in it before the whisky along with how many fills or uses that cask has had will be much more useful information, and play a much larger role in imparting colour to the spirit. Whiskies that are very pale can still be incredibly flavoursome and in some cases surprisingly old. 

This depends on who you ask. A balanced answer is that whisky improves significantly in the first few years of being in a cask. Loosely speaking, older whisky has the *potential* for having more depth and complexity… up to a point. This also says nothing about whether it’s pleasant to drink. There are a number of factors that determine how long the spirit can be in the cask for, such as the rate of evaporation. All casks lose volume through the porosity of the timber. Wait too long and there might not be anything left! That evaporative loss called the “angel’s share” is a part of the reason very old whisky can be very expensive; there is a lot less of it. But that’s not to say it’s necessarily nice to drink. It may have acquired and concentrated too much oak and tannins from the cask. What is important about the age of a whisky is leaving it in the cask for the right amount of time for that particular spirit in that particular cask. Too long and it can be ruined, and this turning point can happen very quickly, particularly to first use and smaller casks. Not long enough, and the whisky never reaches its full potential. That being said, there can be different characteristics that are highlighted in whiskies at different ages that a producer might want to showcase. 

There can be quite a variety of factors here. But among the reasons can be the brand reputation and its perceived prestige. Production volume plays a role here too; if you are making millions of litres a year, your cost of producing a bottle becomes far cheaper as is typical when scaling up and optimising production. Rarity also comes into play. Some of this rarity is manufactured, some of it simply because a lot of the older stocks have been sold. Following the last whisky market crash, because there was little demand, a lot of spirit was just left there and in some cases essentially just abandoned to mature. When the demand for whisky came roaring back, this was astutely marketed as being better because it was older and fetched a much higher price. The casks that weren’t drinking as well as hoped were often married with younger stock to give more depth of flavour and a fuller spectrum of character, combining the mellowness and subtleties that can come with age with the vibrancy of more youthful whiskies. Cask types that are hard to come by, cask strength or small batch releases play a role as well. However, small batch has no specific definition. All whisky bottlings are “batched” by physical necessity. But these examples are specifically married up and released as a single bottling, sometimes exceeding 12,000 bottles, sometimes without the intention to try to repeat the same thing. Staggering numbers to us, where any release by us has yet to exceed 225 bottles.

No, whisky isn’t like wine in that sense. It’s much more stable and won’t noticeably age in the bottle. Once it’s open and some of the spirit is missing, it will start to slowly change. This change can be good or bad depending on the whisky. Either way, you should probably have a glass of that dram on your shelf. Whisky has long been made to be shared and enjoyed. If it's being saved for an occasion, make opening it the occasion!

The best kind (we think)! Peated whisky! It also happens to all be single malt.

Peat is found in bogs. It’s semi-composted organic matter that hasn’t been completely decomposed due to its acidic environment. Peat was cut out in bricks, dried and used as a fuel source in Scotland for hearth fires and at one stage, all whisky (and much cooked food) was peated (hardship aside, that sounds heavenly). As mentioned before, whisky is alcohol distilled from grain. Unpeated whisky relies on an electric malting kiln which was impossible until 1882. Peated whisky relies on the damp grains absorbing peat smoke as it dries, and this smoky, sometimes floral character is imparted to the finished whisky. It can add layers of depth and complexity to a whisky. 

Essentially grains provide starch and amylase, an enzyme to break the starch into simple sugar. We harness that on behalf of yeast, which we allow to colonise the sugary water so that their molecular machinery can produce alcohol.

The malt part means that it’s all produced from malted barley, whereas a "pot still" Irish whiskey relies on malted and unmalted barley. Originally created as a means of avoiding a good deal of tax that had been applied only to malted barley.

American bourbon whiskey differs again in that it must contain at least 51% corn. The 'single' part of single malt means the spirit is made at one distillery, and isn’t single malts from different distilleries married together, which is what creates a blended malt. There is also blended whisky, which can use any grains as a foundation, is very often not as rich in character by design, and is at least partially produced using a ‘continuous still’ rather than batch produced in a pot still. This can allow for significant production volumes, upwards of several million litres a year, and was popularised as a style to make up for the shortage of brandy when phylloxera wiped out wine crops throughout Europe.

That’s right. When referring to Irish or US whiskey it uses an ‘e’. During US alcohol prohibition, very bad Scottish whisky was being intentionally marketed as Irish whisky. Many Irish distilleries caught on much too late and after ramping up production to meet demand, when demand collapsed so did they. The surviving distilleries added an ‘e’ to whisky as a way to know you were getting genuine Irish whiskey. Supposedly the ‘e’ stood for excellence, or so one marketing campaign might have gone. When the prohibition ended, and the USA went all in on domestic production, the US kept an “e” in whiskey. 

Malting first involves allowing the seed to germinate. This produces amylase, an enzyme the same as we produce to break starch down into simple sugar. We need to get as much sugar as possible from the grain, so it’s then heated to stop germinating and halt the breakdown of the starch. Barley, because it was a hardy crop that was able to be grown in Scotland, and became favoured around the world for its distinctive character, gaining significant popularity in blended form when phylloxera wiped out vineyards throughout Europe, resulting in a brandy shortage. 

Yeast uses sugar as its food source, and as a by-product of its metabolism, it produces both heat and, in an anaerobic (low-oxygen) environment, alcohol. 

Water contains oxygen. Literally 1/3rd of it is oxygen. But also absorbed oxygen. Initially in this aerobic environment the yeast uses this oxygen and metabolises the sugar to produce more yeast cells. Only once the absorbed oxygen is depleted does alcohol production begin. 

Now we let the conversion of sugar to alcohol, called fermentation, complete, while keeping an eye on the temperature. Too cold and the yeast won’t be active, and too hot and they can die off. Once the desired level of alcohol has been achieved through the conversion of sugar, we can then distil it.

Distilling is also known as ‘fractioning’ whereby heating is used to separate different compounds based on their boiling/vaporisation points. We heat up the product of fermentation, called wash, in the still and through boiling it, and the collection and re-condensing of the vapour, we concentrate the alcohol that was initially produced, using single malt whisky as an example, from about 7%ABV to about 24%ABV. These are called low wines. These are distilled again, and this time with the more concentrated alcohol in the still there’s a much clearer delineation in boiling points between the ethanol and the water, so we can collect alcohol that is over 70% ABV. This is also when ‘cuts’ are made, which is where the flow of product from the still is separated into 3 parts, the foreshots, the hearts and the feints. The hearts is what is eventually bottled. The other components are combined and go into the next distillation. There is still perfectly good alcohol in the feints, however the alcohol percentage inside the still has dropped too low to separate it out cleanly, and other compounds that are undesirable become prominent. 

Yep! We think it’s great to know how things you consume are produced. Knowledge is power, and we have the power (three-phase, the licence, equipment, etc) to make whisky. We are offering you the power to drink it. Please use this power responsibly!