The old Milton Distillery

A still in Milton, around 1870

Queensland’s rum trade grew out of the cane fields, and for its first decades the spirit was made close to the sugar. Around 1870 a man the records call W. Samwell, almost certainly William Samwell, set up a distillery on the high ground of Milton, an inner suburb of Brisbane a short walk from the river. It traded first as the Queensland Distillery and was one of the first commercial spirit operations in the colony. The site sat around Cribb Street, down the road from the land where the Castlemaine brewery would later rise.

Our label says 1873. The earliest records say 1870. The three years in between are the subject of section eight of our own heritage research, and until the Queensland State Archives settle it we use the date on the mark: either way, Milton was making rum at least eleven years before Beenleigh.

A fifth of Queensland’s rum

Within eighteen months of opening, Samwell’s rum took first prize at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Sydney, a colonial trade fair that measured Queensland against the established southern producers. The output followed. In the twelve months to March 1872 the distillery made 18,555 gallons, about a sixth of all the rum made in Queensland; by 1873 it was 34,498 gallons, about a fifth.

Sugar crop failures in the early 1870s cut the supply of molasses and the money with it. Samwell took on a partner, James Hardy Medhurst, the partnership was short, and Robert Forsyth bought Samwell out.

1877: Fitzgerald, Quinlan and Co.

In September 1877 the Fitzgerald brothers, who had founded the Castlemaine Brewery in Victoria, joined with Quinlan and Gray and bought the Milton Distillery from Forsyth. A year later they built a new brewery on Coronation Drive, a short distance from Cribb Street. That brewery became XXXX. The distillery kept making rum under the new owners, but the money had moved down the road.

The Brisbane Heritage Trail plaque on Coronation Drive still records it: Fitzgerald, Quinlan and Co. made rum at the Milton Distillery along Cribb Street before they built the brewery in 1878.

March 1890

The end came with the flood of March 1890, then the worst Brisbane had seen. The river rose more than three metres through the low suburbs, the telegraph and the new electric lines went down, hundreds of houses went under and people drowned. Some sources say the distillery had already stopped in 1889; all of them agree it never reopened. For more than 130 years no rum was made in Milton, and nothing of the original building is known to survive.

2018: two hundred metres away

In 2018 Alexander Bell, a Brisbane chemical engineer, started distilling under the Milton name again, two hundred metres from Cribb Street, in a bar on Castlemaine Street. The connection was the point: the same river, the same cane country, and a name that had earned its place in Queensland’s rum history before it was lost. What the revival added was process engineering: a continuous column still designed and built in Brisbane, control over maturation that does not depend on decades in a warehouse, and inputs chosen so that less is wasted.

Today the stillhouse at 99 Jane Street, West End, makes the Milton range (First Rain, Stormy Skies, Rising Sun, Agave Miel, Precedent), the collaborations, and A’peel, the vodka and gin made from fruit peel.

Timeline

In the newspapers

The National Library of Australia’s Trove holds the Brisbane and Sydney papers of the day, and they are the primary record of the first Milton Distillery. Each link opens the scanned page on Trove.

• The Brisbane Courier, 4 February 1871: the rectifying distillery on the Milton road nearly complete for W. Samwell, “the first rectifying distillery started in the Australian colonies”; architect John Hall, machinery by Hipwood and Sutton, cost about £2,000.
• The Brisbane Courier, 25 February 1871: “Rectifying Distillery, Milton”: the works completed, with the 500-gallon copper still, the rectifier, the cedar vats and fourteen tanks of molasses in the bonded store.
• The Queenslander, 25 March 1871: the distillery commences operations.
• The Brisbane Courier, 17 October 1871: W. Samwell and Co. of the Milton Distillery take first prize for rum at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Sydney.
• The Telegraph, 2 October 1872: Robert Forsyth advertising as proprietor.
• The Telegraph, 30 October 1873: a visit to “one of our most flourishing local industries”, with the molasses wash and the stills described.
• The Telegraph, 22 May 1874: Forsyth’s new rectifying still, three distillations to rid the spirit of fusel oil.
• The Telegraph, 28 August 1876: “Local Industries: Milton Distillery”: two stills, 50,000 gallons of spirit a year from 100,000 gallons of molasses, twenty-four vats.
• The Telegraph, 23 September 1876: the meeting of Forsyth’s creditors; the estate assigned to John Burns and S. N. Howes.
• The Brisbane Courier, 11 October 1876: “For sale by tender, the Milton Distillery”, the trustees’ notice, also in The Telegraph, 7 October 1876 and The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 1876.
• Toowoomba Chronicle, 17 July 1877: Mr Fitzgerald, the Castlemaine brewer, buys the Milton Distillery for £1,750, “for a brewery and distillery combined”.
• The Brisbane Courier, 14 September 1878: “The Milton Brewery” opens, built by Fitzgerald, Quinlan and Co., “proprietors of the Milton Distillery”.
• The Brisbane Courier, 20 March 1879: Milton Distillery gin in evidence at the police court; the distillery still at work under the brewers.
• The Brisbane Courier, 20 March 1880: under the brewers the “Milton Distillery Co.” rum is “selling freely in quarters and hogsheads” at 2s 9d a gallon, the dearest of the Queensland rums quoted.
• The Telegraph, 31 May 1880: Sydney International Exhibition awards: Milton Distillery Company first award for white spirit, third for geneva and for rum.
• Evening News (Sydney), 17 August 1880: the proprietors of the Milton distillery apply to the Government for compensation over the increased excise duty on Queensland spirit.
• The Telegraph, 27 October 1880: Legislative Assembly: the Premier has compensation claims from “Messrs Quinlan, Fitzgerald and Company (of the Milton Distillery)”; the duty on colonial spirit is set at 10s a gallon.
• The Brisbane Courier, 25 January 1881: the Milton Distillery Company, per Geo. W. Gray, on the scale of the works: about 150,000 gallons of molasses a year from the planters, 1,000 tons of firewood, casks sent as far north as Bundaberg, and excise of about £2,500 a month.
• The Brisbane Courier, 9 June 1882: “Our Breweries and Distilleries”, a visit to Quinlan, Gray and Co.’s Milton Distillery: a 30,000-gallon molasses tank, sixteen fermenting vats, three stills worked by steam, five-year-old rum in bond; “the buildings, though old, are large and well arranged”.
• The Brisbane Courier, 7 September 1885: G. W. Gray, for the Milton Distillery Company, on his interview with the Treasurer about the excise on Queensland rum, which the Treasurer admitted had been “a complete failure” as revenue.
• Warwick Examiner and Times, 30 April 1887: John McMahon, inspector of distilleries, leaves Warwick to take charge of the Milton distillery, “one of the most important, if not the most important, in the colony”. The last mention of the name on Trove; nothing appears for 1888 to 1890.

Other sources: Queensland Places; Toowong and District Historical Society; the Brisbane Heritage Trail plaque, Coronation Drive; the Queensland Heritage Register entry for the former Castlemaine Perkins building (602684); Castlemaine Perkins company histories; Milton Distillery heritage research record, March 2026. Primary verification with the Queensland State Archives and the John Oxley Library is still to come.