There was, however, one task that had to be undertaken before Hughesy could put his feet up, and that was a phone call to Da Angelo to make a booking for dinner. We managed to get ourselves booked in for six, but had to be out by seven-thirty. The time limit wasn’t something I was too happy about, but we’d breakfasted late, had skipped lunch, and I figured we could dine pretty well in ninety minutes.
After we’d given ourselves a bit of rest it was time to start hoofing it over to Da Angelo, and given the fact that we weren’t due there until six, The Inquisitive Reader may be puzzled by a 4:30 departure time.
We knew where were going since we’d walked past the establishment in question twice on Saturday and earlier on Wednesday, and it wasn’t going to take a whole hour and a half to get there.
But at the same time there were a number places where you could look to kill time along the way.
Like the Lark Distillery Cellar Door for starters. I’d had a serious session on the single malts in Japan roughly twelve months earlier, reckoned I was developing a taste for it, but needed further exposure. Lark Distillery seemed like the perfect opportunity.
It’s not Tasmania’s first distillery, but there was a lengthy hiatus between the previous operation which closed up shop in 1839 and Bill Lark’s fishing trip a hundred and fifty odd years later. The vision of producing Tasmanian malt whisky was born on a trout fishing trip in the highlands of Tasmania. Bill's father-in-law took along a bottle of single malt from Scotland, and they were sitting beside barley fields on the banks of the Clyde River when the penny dropped.
You don’t need much to produce malt whisky. Barley, soft water and highland peat are the key ingredients. Tasmania happens to have all three, so why not give it a go?
The result was a distillery that uses a 1800 litre copper pot still and a 500 litre spirit still, to produce ten to twelve hundred litres per month. That’s ten to twelve barrels of a hundred litres each, which are then matured and hand-bottled.
I’m still not able to identify the particular elements that go into what you feel in the mouth and whiff through the nose, and I didn’t attempt to get precious and start taking tasting notes, but I was highly impressed and walked out with two small bottles, one for me, one for The Golfer, who likes his single malts.