That's The Spirit

Elevate Your Home-bar Repertoire With Archie Rose Distilling Co, The Sydneysiders Shaking Up Australia’s Craft Liquor Scene

- Tamara Davis

What does it take to disrupt the local liquor industry? For Will Edwards and the team at Archie Rose Distilling Co, it comes down to a cocktail of ambition, authenticity and a serious taste for adventure

A trip to New York in the summer of 2012 helped cement the vision for Edwards’ award-winning Sydney outfit. After visiting distillery bars in Brooklyn—the first to open their doors since the prohibition era—he returned to his home city and immediately saw potential. “We had craft brewers making incredible beers, a great cocktail and bar scene, but there was no-one making local spirits,” the 29-year-old explains. “I wanted to find out why.”

Although he’d dabbled in home-brewing, venturing into liquor production was a high-risk enterprise—while the former is a common hobby (you can buy beer-making starter kits at the supermarket), distilling spirits without a licence is illegal. “If you want to turn it into a business, you have to fully commit,” Edwards says. Quitting a corporate job, he pursued his goal of opening Sydney’s first “urban distillery” and, in 2015, Archie Rose was born from a converted warehouse in Rosebery. With an exposed production floor, the aim is to demystify a practice that has historically been hidden from view in shadowy basements and bathtubs. “There’s been this strange culture around mystery and secrets to do with [spirit] production—people not telling you the recipes, or some ‘magic water source’,” Edwards says. “We wanted to make everything as open and transparent as possible”—think interactive tours and workshops that showcase the production process from grain to barrel to bottle.