Malt & Peat

Victoria has no large-scale peat bog of its own, unlike Islay or parts of Tasmania. Anyone hunting for the smoke that defines whole coastal regions elsewhere will rarely find it here.

Peated bottlings do exist, though. Bakery Hill in Bayswater is one of the few Australian distilleries to offer a Peated Malt at all. That's only possible with already-smoked malt, which has to be imported, since there's simply no source for it within the state.

What Victoria has instead lies deeper than any bog. The west of the state is one of the largest continuous volcanic plains on Earth, formed by lava flows that swept repeatedly across the land over hundreds of thousands of years. It's on this very soil that the barley grows, the barley that distilleries like Starward source their malt from.

Beneath the topsoil lies dark, mineral-rich clay first, mixed with weathered volcanic rock. It holds water without choking the roots, and gives the barley enough minerals without overwhelming it. Only further down does the soil turn to hard, gray basalt, too dense for roots, but exactly the stone that gave the farmland its flat shape.

No smoke drifts through the malt here the way it does on Islay. What travels from this soil into the whisky is quieter: a grain grown in volcanic earth, long before it ever set foot inside a distillery.