How Milton got started

In 2015 I started tinkering in my garage, and here we are today.

There is a bit more to it, but the first bit is true. It all started as an idea to make great rum.

I was tinkering in my garage trying to figure out why spirits manufacturing had to be so wasteful. Angel’s share, cooperage costs, years of capital sitting in barrels doing very little. It did not make a lot of sense to me, particularly when age does not necessarily correlate to quality.

So I started building what I called spirit reactors: prototype systems for rapidly maturing spirits, compressing years of barrel interaction into a fraction of the time, with a lot more control over the process. By 2015 I had something I believed in and started approaching distilleries. The industry was not particularly interested. The word “blasphemy” was used, I believe.

Fair enough. Instead of licensing the process, we built a brand around it. The rest of this post is how that went.

The Kettle and Tin

It took almost a hundred meetings with investors before I met Asa Boardman at the Kettle and Tin in Paddington, in 2017. I thought I was prepared: a fifty-page business plan, every technical document I had ever written, a brand concept and a couple of samples. I turned up in chinos and a polo, walked to the front bar and asked the barista at the coffee machine for Asa. It was him. He said no worries, take a seat, and brought over a coffee for us both.

He asked what the idea was. I handed over the plan. He flipped through maybe three pages, pushed it to one side and said he liked the concept, so let’s talk it through. We did, for a long time. I told him about the rapid-ageing work and the still designs, and that the plan had started as licensing the technology to other distilleries and had turned into opening a bar with a small distillery in it, built around rum. He was not interested in the plan. He wanted to know whether I would put the hours in, get on the tools and keep going when it got hard. That was the deal.

We made an odd pair of founders. I was clean cut, straight down the line and technical. Asa was the wild card, and all about the chat. Between us we had both halves of a bar with a distillery in the front window.

The Malecón

Over the next few months we built The Malecón Bar on Castlemaine Street in Milton, a small bar with the distillery in the front window, and opened early in 2018. The Suncorp Stadium season was about to start, so the bar came first and the distillery did not properly run until May. I decided that if I was going to be in hospitality I should start where everyone starts, so I became the glassy and floor person. I was shocking: slow, no idea what to do, the worst hospitality worker in Brisbane. Dave Pritchard, our bar manager, took me in hand, and Asa and the rest of the team put up with me while I learned.

What the bar taught me mattered more than how to carry glasses. I learned how people actually drink rum and what they enjoy. I had arrived wanting to make big, heavy rums. If the distillery was going to work, we had to make what people wanted to drink, not what I wanted to make.

The first spirits, and the name

The first product was a white cane spirit. The rum nerds liked it, but it was never going to be the hero. Spiced rum was what people were asking for, so the question became whether we could make one that was not another vanilla bomb. Australian gin was having its moment with native botanicals; why not a spiced rum built the same way? By then we had a good stock of heads and tails from the white spirit runs, so I put all of it back through the still and rectified it to a clean base, built a gin basket, loaded the first botanicals into it and redistilled. That became the Spiced Cane Spirit, and it is still in the range with the same label.

We were not settled on a name. We were trading under the brand concept I had brought to the Kettle and Tin, Whitestone Spirit Co, with Avery labels from Officeworks printed in black and white in the back room, and we took the bottles around the independent bars and bottle shops ourselves. People loved it. Our first bottle shop was Craft Wine Store in Paddington and our first bar was Red Hook in the city. Cardboard cartons were dear and got thrown out, so Asa and I made our own cases out of pine and kept them in circulation: we carried a case in, unloaded the bottles and took the empty case back with us.

Late in 2018 Steve Magarry of Sydney Rum Distillery was deep in the history of Australian rum, and he sent me a text: did you know there was a rum distillery not two hundred metres from where you are standing? I did not. The first Milton Distillery had made rum there from 1873 until the flood of 1890 finished it. The trademark was free, so we retired Whitestone and became Milton Rum Distillery, and for the first time since that flood there was rum being made in Milton again, under the same historic name. The label we settled on in 2019 carried a storm bird, an eastern koel. Most people read it as an eagle. It still is a koel.

2020

Then Covid arrived and the ground went out from under us. The bars and bottle shops we had worked so hard to get into closed in the lockdowns and our revenue went to zero overnight. I resisted hand sanitiser for a while, then gave in, but on our terms. We were not going to buy in ethanol and sell it back at four times the price. We teamed up with wineries and breweries, took their stranded stock and redistilled it. A 300 litre pot still could not keep up, so I went back into hardware mode and we rebuilt our thirteen square metre distillery around one of the smallest continuous column stills in the world. At the peak we were putting 20,000 litres of wash through it a week and turning that into 800 to 1,400 litres of ethanol for sanitiser. They were very long days.

When the sanitiser rush died down we had a continuous still, so we turned it back to rum. That still got us into Dan Murphy’s, BWS, First Choice Liquor and Vintage Cellars, and we were stocked across Queensland with four products: the Spiced Cane Spirit, the Spanish Inspired Silver and Dark, and Coffee Storm. We were finally growing well.

2022

Then the floods of 2022 came through. They destroyed the distillery, the stock and The Malecón Bar. We were out of production for nine months and could not get stock to our customers, and we lost a lot of the ground we had made. We also lost every barrel we had, including our first two-year-old rum, which was meant to be released alongside the Broken Chain. It was devastating, and nobody would have blamed us for stopping. We did not.

We moved to Craft’d Grounds in Albion and I took the old design and built a new continuous still. The space had grown to 17.68 square metres, which was still tight. Then interest rates climbed and the market filled with new labels, and the margins we had built on went with them. We made hard decisions, cut the range back to what worked and rebuilt the foundations.

West End

We were on shaky ground when one of the other founders of By Artisans rang me out of the blue. We talked for months, and in November 2024 we moved Milton’s production to West End, inside By Artisans at 99 Jane Street. It gave Milton room to grow again, but it was more than that. We were already using the team at Help Enterprises to label our bottles; now we could share equipment in one operation, bring in renewable energy and push further into using waste streams as the inputs for what we make.

At the same time Milton Rum Distillery became Milton Distillery. The name keeps the heritage and the nod to the old distillery, and it leaves room for what we make now, which is more than rum. The original Spiced Cane Spirit is still here, label and all. Beside it are First Rain, the silver cane spirit, and Stormy Skies, the dark one; an agave spirit made from 100 per cent Blue Weber agave piñas brought in from Mexico; a grain spirit that uses the same rapid-ageing process as Stormy Skies; a vodka and a gin distilled from fruit waste; and a run of collaboration releases and age statements with venues and breweries. This year the first age-statement rum to carry the Milton name went into bottles.

The spirit reactors never went away: they became the rapid-ageing process behind Stormy Skies and, later, the grain spirit. The idea from the garage, that a good spirit should not need years in a barrel or cost the earth to make, is still the one we work to.

The people

Asa Boardman started this with me and was in the bar and the distillery every day of the early years. Dave Pritchard taught me what I know about hospitality. Then there are the venues that kept pouring us when it would have been easier not to: Hope & Anchor, Straddie Brewing Co, My Beer Dealer, Saccharomyces, Craft Wine Store and, early on, Scratch Bar in Milton. They and the people behind them carried us through the dark days. So did everyone who bought a bottle with a black and white Avery label on it. If you still have one on the shelf, that is the first Milton Rum Distillery.

What this journal is for

The short version of all this, with the photos, is on the How we started page. This journal is for the part in between: how the spirits are made. The stills and how they are designed, the models behind them, what a batch looks like from molasses or fruit peel to bottle, and the things that went wrong on the way. One post a week, or every other week; we’ll see.