How Lark Distillery’s Unusual Fermentation Process Came To Be, As Told By Founder Bill Lark

The brand’s efforts to increase production have evidently paid off, as an all-new luxury portfolio has been revealed. Fire Trail, Devil’s Storm, and Ruby Abyss were unveiled recently in Kuala Lumpur, one of the collection’s first international stops, while a fourth travel retail edition, Cinder Forest, was also announced. Visiting also to extol the distillery’s virtues were key personnel, including new CEO Stuart Gregor, veteran master distiller Chris Thomson, and the legend himself — founder Bill Lark.

Bill Lark is quite literally the progenitor of Australia’s modern-day distilling scene. The story is one he has been happy to tell many times over — in 1989, on a fishing trip in his native Tasmania and while contemplating one of the Scotch single malts that he has deep appreciation for, he asked a question: why wasn’t anyone on the island making whisky? It was the law, it turned out. Tasmanian distillation was outlawed in the 1830s at the whim of its then governor. The regulations for Australia in general were dictated by an antiquated Act from 1901 that only allowed large-scale production. This would not have been possible for someone like Lark, who had no formal background in the industry and was looking to start something on a smaller scale. He then found enough support to have the law changed, paving the way for today’s craft distillation industry.

The Lark Distillery was founded in 1992. The first years were quite literally a kitchen table affair, making 150 bottles a year. Those days are long gone, but they left an indelible mark on the distillery’s character. The best example is the extraordinarily long fermentation time of its spirit — six and a half days, among the longest in the industry. Thomson, who joined the company at just 20 years old in 2007, is an unabashed whisky nerd, enthusiastic about every aspect of the process, and explains that the long open fermentation allows them to take a very deep secondary cut and results in an especially clean spirit. “We create a wonderful spirit that shows no feints — creating an incredible depth of palate, an incredible silkiness,” Thomson says. “They have this mouthfeel across them that makes them incredibly drinkable.”

It is very unconventional by traditional Scotch standards, emblematic of the sort of experimentation that new world whiskies are known for. And it started with Lark — but very much not by design or intent. “The reason we ended up with a six-and-a-half-day fermentation was because I was lazy!” he proclaims cheerfully. “I was running the business, doing the distilling, and doing the brewing. Our distillery was about 15 minutes out of town, so I would have to drive out there and I would start my brewing, and I’d do that on the Monday. And then I thought, I don’t want to come back on Thursday and do the distilling, because I’ll be back on Monday to do the brewing — so why don’t I just leave it up until next Monday?”

Thomson adds: “You’ve stumbled on one of the most important principles of what makes Lark. We are never bound by what someone else has told us, or the literature or anything like that. It is always through taste. The flavour is our compass; everything from Lark is through flavour. We are, at our core and our history, huge lovers of Scotch. We love it, we learn from it. But we’re also a 25-hour flight away from Scotland, which has allowed us to grow in our own incubator.”