We finish the tasting at Bad Frankie with a glass of Two-Fold, and it’s delicious: aromas of fresh toast, some dried fig, a hint of ripe banana, then a soft, pretty, creamy vanilla texture on the tongue, finishing with a little tannic grip and savoury complexity. A whisky that anchors you in the here-and-now. As good as it is, though, Seb is still buzzing from finally getting to open the old Corio bottles after all these years, and tasting them alongside the next generation of Australian whisky:
What I love about tasting side-by-side like this is that you get to see the evolution of the industry. You can see the cultural differences. You taste that 1960s Corio and you can imagine old men in a pub, smoking a thousand darts while drinking it. Then you taste the 1980s Corio and you know the distillery was just smashing it out in huge volume, didn’t care about quality – and everyone was busy doing aerobics anyway. And now, with the Two-Fold, we’ve come back to people wanting to drink spirits with heaps of flavour and character. It’s really exciting.
Seb’s right. There has never been a better time to be a spirit drinker in Australia. In the last ten years, hundreds of small, new distillers have emerged, with many producing outstanding gin, vodka, rum and liqueurs, as well as excellent small-batch whisky. Some are even producing baijiu, modelled on China’s strong white spirit.
Baijiu (pronounced ‘bye-j’yoh’) is traditionally made from grains such as rice and sorghum fermented using a starter-culture mix of yeast and bacteria called qū (pronounced ‘chew’), then distilled. It is the most widely drunk spirit in China. But it is almost completely unfamiliar to most Australians – unless they have spent time in China, on business. And those who have come across the drink there invariably shudder when recalling their first encounter: epic late-night drinking sessions in restaurant after restaurant, endless toasts, downing shots of baijiu, one after another. They warn me about how strong the drink is, 50 per cent alcohol or more, and how rough it tastes. Firewater. Something to be endured, not enjoyed. So why would any Australian distiller want to make it?
‘It’s my passion,’ says James Mylne when I catch up with him at his tiny East Coast Baijiu distillery in Brisbane. ‘When I die, I want to be known as the white guy who makes awesome baijiu.’
The young distiller learned how to make the spirit, and how to appreciate its finer points, working for a distillery in Taiwan. This inspired him to return to Australia in 2017 and set up his own brand. Like the Chinese distillers making arrack in Java in the 17th and 18th century, James uses a combination of techniques from various different cultures to produce his baijiu. When he started, he tried making a super-clean, fruity style of spirit to appeal to Australian drinkers, but his Taiwanese and Chinese friends and colleagues weren’t impressed. So now he sources qū culture from China to ensure his baijiu has an authentic flavour profile.
‘I want to appeal to Chinese palates,’ he says. ‘China and the West are so different, culturally, when it comes to food and alcohol. I see my market as mainly China and Chinese-Australian people. I’m sure there is a small market for white guys drinking baijiu. But it’s not something I’d bet my house on.’
I can see why. My first taste of James’s 52 per cent alcohol baijiu is unforgettable – and almost incomprehensible.
It looks so innocent in the glass. Like vodka, or gin. But as soon as I bring it to my nose and take a sip, I’m thrown into the unknown. My senses scramble. My nasal hairs burn and bristle, my tongue tingles. I flail around, trying to latch on to a flavour I recognise. Dairy cellar? Incense? Wax? Nothing in this pungent burning water is familiar.
It’s as though I’m tasting alcohol for the very first time.
A DRINK TO TRY AT HOME
Blow My Skull
Van Diemen’s Land, 1815
Colonel Thomas Davey, lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, was a notorious pisspot.
Davey had sailed as a young marine with the First Fleet in 1787, staying in Port Jackson for a few years before returning to England. Rising through the ranks, he arrived back in the colony in 1813 to take up the position of lieutenant governor in Hobart. He was described as ‘dissipated and profligate’ by New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie, who wrote to his superiors in England regularly about Davey’s ‘drinking and depravity’. Davey developed a formidable reputation among the colonists, too, when it came to the grog, as one particularly colourful account written years later by cookbook author Edward Abbott makes clear.
Fourteen-year-old Abbott had arrived in Hobart just after Davey, in 1815. The Sydney-born son of the colony’s deputy judge advocate, Abbott became a clerk before rising to prominence in Tasmanian society as a pastoralist, publisher and politician. In 1864 he wrote what is considered to be the first cookbook compiled by an Australian, The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as Well as for the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’. It’s a remarkable insight into mid-19th-century attitudes to eating, and includes thirteen pages devoted to mixed drinks – recipes for the ‘punches’ and ‘cups’, the ‘juleps’ and ‘cobblers’ then fashionable in Australia. To put this into context, Jerry Thomas, the American ‘father of the cocktail’, had written his Bar-Tender’s Guide, the first drinks manual to be published in the US and today seen as the ‘blueprint’ for cocktail culture, only two years before.
In his book, Abbott depicts the ‘eccentric’ Colonel Davey hosting epic drinking sessions in a ‘wattle hut … improvised within a mile of the capital’. Davey would install himself at the head of a makeshift table in this dingy grog den, a ‘barbecued pig’ for sustenance laid out before him and a barrel filled with a punch of his own invention off to one side, ready to be tapped.
Davey’s concoction was a blend of beer, rum and brandy, sugar syrup and lime juice. He called it ‘Blow My Skull’. The lieutenant governor would welcome visitors into his shack and hand them a tin mug filled with a generous pour of his punch. ‘A challenge to liquor from the representative of majesty in a roomy pannikin’, Abbott wrote, ‘could not be declined.’ Especially when Colonel Davey then bellowed, ‘No heeltaps!’ (meaning ‘Drink it all; don’t leave any dregs’), and you both sculled the brimming cupful of the potent brew in one gulp. Abbott wrote that the unfortunate visitor would immediately be ‘hors de combat’ – out of action – while the lieutenant governor, ‘having an impenetrable cranium, and an iron frame, could take several goblets of the alcoholic fluid, and walk away as lithe and happy as possible’.
Blow My Skull. It sounds lethal. I just had to make some.
Abbott gives us a recipe: dissolve loaf sugar in two pints of boiling water, add some lime or lemon juice, a pint of ale or porter, a pint of rum and half a pint of brandy. My 21-year-old son Riley was particularly keen to help: it has become a tradition in our house for him to try out new cocktails on Sophie and me at the end of the day, as we get dinner ready. So while I barbecued some pork chops (Colonel Davey’s choice of accompaniment for his Blow My Skull), Riley found a big jug and started blending. The result was … surprisingly palatable. The sugar and lime help to mask the boozy hit of the rum and brandy, and the beer (we used porter) brought a malty, almost cola-like flavour.
Then Soph suggested adding some sparkling water to dilute the alcohol content even further. This wasn’t very ‘authentic’ – there was no SodaStream in that wattle hut in 1815 – but it was a revelation: the now-fizzy sweet brown drink tasted just like rum and Coke. And it was delicious with the barbecued chops.
So, if it actually tastes good, how did Davey’s drink get its fearsome reputation?