01
Grow
Offsets from mature plants go into free-draining volcanic basalt on the Atherton Tablelands. Six years of monsoon summers and hard dry winters follow — no irrigation schedule can shortcut it, and no season is skipped.
- Variety
- Blue Weber
- Maturation
- ~6 years
- Soil
- Red basalt
02
Harvest
A jimador reads the plant, then strikes the leaves away with a coa — a long-handled blade sharpened to shave rather than chop. What's left is the piña: a dense, pale core of stored sugar weighing tens of kilos.
Ripeness can't be automated. Cut too early and the sugar isn't there; too late and the plant has spent it going to flower.
03
Roast
Piñas are slow pit-roasted over open fire. Heat does the chemistry: the long-chain inulin locked in the core breaks down into fermentable sugar, and the flesh turns from white and fibrous to dark, sweet and molasses-like.
It is the oldest step in the process and the one that most defines the finished spirit. Roast it fast in a steam oven and you get sugar; roast it slow in a pit and you get flavour.
04
Ferment
The roasted piñas are crushed and the sweet juice is drawn off to ferment in batch. This is where the roast character either survives or gets scrubbed out — push fermentation too hard and warm, and the smoke and earth you spent days building disappear.
Batches are kept small enough to taste and track individually, rather than blended into a continuous stream.
05
Distil
Copper pot still, batch by batch, at Mt Uncle. Copper matters chemically — it strips sulphur compounds that would otherwise sit heavy in an agave spirit — and a pot still keeps the character a column still would strip away.
The cuts between heads, heart and tails are made by palate, by Mark Watkins. Every bottle is filled at 40% ALC/VOL.
- Still
- Copper pot
- Cuts
- By palate
- Bottled at
- 40% ALC/VOL
06
Rest
Silver goes straight to bottle. Rested and Aged go into reconditioned American oak that held Barossa Shiraz first, blister-charred before filling — six months for Rested, two full years for Aged.
Ex-bourbon is the global default for agave spirit. We had better wood closer to home, and red-wine oak gives dried fruit and tannin where bourbon oak gives coconut and sweetness.
Silver
Unaged
Rested
6 months
Aged
2 years
