Belgrove – the rye pioneer

Belgrove – the rye pioneer
Kempton, Tasmania.
ABV: 46% (core Rye Whisky, 500ml, $129). Cask-strength and limited rye releases run higher (to ~60%+).

Belgrove is the most singular operation in Australian whisky, and proof that rye might be the country's most distinctive category. Belgrove is Peter Bignell – a sixth-generation Tasmanian farmer, agricultural scientist and champion ice-and-sand sculptor who turned a bumper windbreak crop of rye into whisky around 2008, and built his own copper pot still from recycled materials to do it. It was the first rye distillery in the country, and it remains one of the greenest on earth: Bignell grows the rye a couple of hundred metres from the still, malts it on site, fires the still on biodiesel he makes from a neighbouring roadhouse's waste cooking oil, and feeds the spent mash to his sheep – a genuine closed-loop, paddock-to-bottle whisky. The rye is the point. Where single malt asks Australia to compete with Scotland, rye is a grain the country grows well and sustainably, and a style Australia can make its own rather than borrow. Belgrove is where that argument starts. It has the accolades to back it, too: Whisky Magazine named it Australia's Craft Producer of the Year in 2019, the same year its Peated Rye took Southern Hemisphere Whisky of the Year. Belgrave: hard to buy, impossible to replicate; easy to cherish.