Kalki Moon “The Mill” (Batch 1) Australian Unaged White Rum – Review

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Sep 122024
 

It always pleases me when I see some new or old distillery go off on a tangent and do its own thing.  It could be some new still configuration, a parcellaire microenvironment, a crazy fermentation time or style, some obscure cane varietal, a new take on the Jamaican style of rum making (dunder and muck pits, for example)…take your pick.  It’s almost guaranteed to provide something we can look at with curiosity and (hopefully) with pleasure and appreciation.

Kalki Moon Distillery, that artisanal outfit set up in Queensland right under the nose of Bundaberg — in fact, Mr. Rick Prosser, the founder, once worked there — did something rather interesting here: in August of 2022, the distillery bought some fresh-pressed cane juice from a nearby sugar mill. The juice — it’s not specified how much — was transported the thirty miles to the distillery, transferred to their fermenters and a small amount of yeast was then added to bootstrap what natural (wild) yeast had already begun. Three weeks later the ferment was run through the pot still…twice (though we are not told which of the four they have was used); rested a bit, and then bottled.

What we have here, then, is an agricole-style rum they call “The Mill” which is the fourth in the line of their “Cane Farmer” Series  (#1 was the unaged Plant Cane, #2 was a Liqueur, #3 was the Spiced and #4 is this one). I have not tried the spiced or the liqueur, but the Plant Cane was a rum I really kinda liked so the Mill certainly intrigued me as well, especially since they beefed it up to 50% instead of leaving it at the tame living room strength. 

Photo (c) Kalki Moon, from their website

So, nose first: a brief wtf? moment when I sniffed egg cartons, dry compost (branches and grass), morphing into crisp tangy sweetness of green tea, a freshly mown lawn, ginnip, soursop, yoghurt. Ashes and iodine made an appearance, just enough to be noticed, then acetones and nail polish and fresh plastic. The through line of freshly squeezed lime juice was delectable, and it got richer and more fragrant as it opened up (it rewards some patience for sure) – it finally coughed up a last hint of burnt biscuits and breadsticks, oddly enough.

The palate was peculiar: not much of the agricole-style profile was immediately evident – indeed, what we got was pine needles, dishwashing liquid, citrus peel…and then the light white fruits (guava, pears, melon slices) made their debut. A little brine and sugar water mixed uneasily, but it was far from unpleasant, and once again those pastry notes were in evidence – butter daubed croissants, and overdone toast with crumbs turning black in the toaster.  An odd amalgam for sure, with a finish that hinted at fruits, some lemon peel, olive oil, and a dash of the herbals we had been looking for all this time.

Overall this is a white rum that goes off in interesting directions. There’s a plethora of competing flavours and aromas in it, not all of which work together all the time, true — but on the whole it’s a rum that shows Kalki Moon is not standing still, and willing to push boundaries a bit and dance around to their own tunes. The rum’s proof point and the profile (and the lack of ageing) make it likely to be more suited to a cocktail than for having neat, yet I believe that for those who have already made their peace with both agricole style rums and unaged whites that try to channel some terroire, this is a rum that should not be ignored, but tried, savoured…and hopefully promoted.

(#1088)(84/100) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • Video Recap is here. 
  • From Day 14 of the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar
  • I call this a rum even though Kalki does not (because of Australia’s two year rule for calling cane spirits “rum”).  I think that rule is both restrictive and misleading, and so I have elected to ignore it in both the title and the review.

Company background (adapted from Review R-0883)

Kalki Moon is named after an enduring image in the mind of the founder Rick Prosser, that of the full moon over the fields of Bundaberg in the neighbourhood of Kalkie, where he had built his house. After working for thirteen years and becoming a master distiller at the Bundaberg Distillery, Mr. Prosser decided to give it a shot for himself, and enlisted friends and family to help financially and operationally support him in his endeavours to build and run his own artisanal distillery, which opened in 2017 with two small stills.  The need to make sales from the get-go pushed him into the vodka- and gin-making business (gin was actually a last minute decision), where he felt that big brands that were produced by his previous employer, Diageo, had their place, but there were opportunities for craft work too.

Somewhat to his surprise, the gins he made – a classic, a premium, a navy strength and even a pink – sold well enough that he became renowned for those, even while adding yet other spirits to his company’s portfolio. Still, he maintains that it was always rum for which he was aiming, and gin just paid the bills, and in 2020 he commissioned a third, larger still (named “Marie”, after his grandmother) to allow him to expand production even further.  Other cash generating activities came from the spirits-trail distillery tourists who came on the tours afforded by having several brewing and distilling operations in a very concentrated area of Bundaberg – so there are site visits, tasting sessions and so on.

At the same time, he has been experimenting with rums – like the previously mentioned “Plant Cane” – but it took time to get the cuts and fermentation and still settings right, so that a proper rum could be set to age. Spiced and maybe the dark (aged) rums were ready for release in 2022, and the gins were too profitable and too well known to be abandoned, so Kalki will continue to be very much a multi-product company.  It remains to be seen whether the dilution of focus I’ve commented on before will hamper making a truly great artisanal rum, or whether all these various products will get their due moment in the sun. Previously, I remarked that it would be interesting to watch what Mr. Prosser did when he got a head of steam under him, with any aged rums he’s make. It didn’t even occur to me that he’d go the opposite direction as he has with this one, but for my money, it’s well worth taking a look at.

 

Archie Rose Distilling Co. “White Cane” Batch #2 Unaged Rum (Australia) – Review

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Feb 162024
 

“Oh wow!” I wrote with a sort of delighted and startled surprise when first nosing Archie Rose’s 40% white rum they called White Cane. I had not tried anything from the distillery before – indeed, I knew very little about it — but the rich and oily scent of a mechanic’s shop fumigated with vanilla flavoured acetones was really not what I had expected as an opening salvo. And it didn’t stop there, because the seeming light ‘n’ easy aromas it started out with contained quite a bit more oomph than was initially apparent – once it opened it up it was brine, olives, ripe and watery fruits, lots of pears and papaya, figs and persimmons, even a hint of caramel and some sweet yet tart apple cider. The nose displayed a thickness and depth that was quietly impressive – one does not often see this kind of profile in a standard proof rum very often.

Putting down my glass, I looked curiously at the sample label. Who was is this outfit? What was behind the name? Was it a left-handed nod to WW1 ack-ack fire, maybe, or a hat tip to Riverdale and the comics? An old but forgotten relative, perhaps, or a gone-to-seed second eleven cricket player from the past who nobody except the owners remembered? 

Apparently not. Some references suggest that “Archie” was a slang word, a pseudonym for an underground distilling bootlegger at a time in the 1800s when the temperance movement was ascendant in Australia and distillation was illicit, if not quite illegal; and since the founder, Will Edwards established the distillery in its first location in Rosebery, an inner suburb of south Sidney, the name seemed a good fit. A more prosaic alternative is that the neighbourhood itself was named after an uninspiring and obscure 19th century British PM, Archibald Primrose, and the distillery took the contracted form of his name, so take your pick. 

Anyway, it was apparently the first new distillery in the city since 1853 (one wonders what the previous one was) and comprised of several Italian made fermentation tanks (named after rappers), and three hand built gas-powered steam-boiler-heated 3600-litre pot stills made by Peter Bailey, who at the time was the country’s only still maker. It was mostly family financed, and sported a very good bar right next to the distillery to help make ends meet.

“White Cane” was and remains the company’s only unaged rum (there are some experimentals coming as well, however), and it’s interesting that they went with that name instead of the near universal “cane spirit” moniker everyone else has been using over there. The source cane came from Condong up in NSW just south of Brisbane, so the molasses likely originated from the Condong Sugar Mill, and the wash blended two kinds of molasses – high test and B-grade —  fermented with two different yeasts for 4-16 days, then run through their main and pilot still at least twice, with part being “cold” (or vacuum) distilled.

That fermentation and complex distillation was probably why the taste, as well as the nose, had enough chops to excite some curiosity, if not outright enthusiasm. It presented like a crisp, tangy, citrus-like 7-up, with green apples, pineapples, ripe pears on the edge of going off, red grapes and a subtle bite of ginger. The nose, I felt, was better, but for the taste to be this interesting at 40% did demonstrate that the awards the rum won (three so far) was not mere happenstance or flinging medals at everything that turned up. The palate continued to provide subtle and almost delicate notes: white chocolate, crushed walnuts some mint, fennel, sweet coconut shavings and some faint mustier cardboard notes, leading to a short, easy, sweet and spicy finish redolent of cinnamon and ginger and papaya. Nice.

Names and origins aside, currently the distillery boasts five different rums (and fifteen whiskies, ten gins, four vodkas and various other alcoholic products, lest you err in thinking their focus is on the Noble Spirit). Their origin was, and remains primarily in, whisky, for which they have won oodles of awards, and boosted their cash flow so well that in 2020 they were able to float A$100 million financing to move to Banksmeadow, a few kilometres south of the original location, leaving Rosebery to be a sort of visitor’s area for tours, classes and other events. Two massive new pot stills were also installed allowing production to be significantly increased.

As always, there is the downside that such a wide variety of spirits production dilutes focus on any single one. Not something I can blame a distillery for, since making payroll, paying rent and expanding the business is what it’s about, but lessening the attention that can be paid to developing and improving one product. Clearly whisky is the core business and everything orbits that priority (my opinion); and we must be careful not to over-romanticize the myth of the Great Little Solo Distiller Working in Obscurity, since commercial enterprises do make good juice, and not always by accident or as throwaways. Recent “Heavy Cane,” “Virgin Cane” and other experimental rums Archie Rose is playing with point to a committed and interested distilling team that wants to do more than just make another supermarket rum.

The White Cane, even at 40%, is pretty good and that’s an endorsement I don’t give often. I think the panoply of tastes — admittedly delicate and occasionally too faint and hard to pick apart — play well together, don’t overstay their welcome or allow any one element to hog the show, and provide a nice drinking experience. Sometimes just as much work goes into an unaged spirit as an aged one — perhaps more since there’s no backstop of ageing to improve anything so what comes off the still had better be ready — and it’s clear the distiller paid attention to the entire production process to provide both mixing and sipping chops. One can only hope the distillery expands the range and ups the proof, because then not only would it likely garner even more awards, but I’d  be able to bug Steve Magarry yet again…to get me a whole bottle, not just a sample.

(#1058)(83/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 7. This is Batch #2 from 2023. Batch #1 was introduced in 2022
  • Production notes from company webpage.