Drift, Smoke, and the Occasional Heresy: Travis Lawrie’s Whisky Capital and the Art of Losing the Plot.

There is a fleeting interval - so brief it almost escapes notice - when taste detaches from certainty. The first sip refuses classification, the second unsettles the first, and by the third you are no longer quite sure whether you are drinking the whisky or the whisky is, in some oblique way, drinking you. Not consuming, exactly - but rearranging. A small internal shift. A recalibration of expectation.

It is a sensation closer to reading Italo Calvino than following a tasting flight: light, precise, and quietly destabilising. Or perhaps to the way Gaston Bachelard writes about reverie - how certain materials (fire, water, air) do not simply exist but provoke states of mind. Whisky, in this sense, is less an object than an atmosphere. It gathers memory, geography, accident, time - and then releases them unevenly.

Most tastings attempt to discipline that experience. They impose sequence, logic, hierarchy. Begin here. Progress there. Conclude, ideally, with understanding.

Travis Lawrie has always seemed faintly suspicious of that impulse.

Not dismissive - there is structure in what he does, certainly - but wary of anything that pretends flavour can be reduced to a clean arc. His tastings behave less like lectures and more like what W.G. Sebald might recognise as a walk: digressive, associative, punctuated by unexpected encounters. A peated outlier appears where it “shouldn’t.” A cocktail interrupts a sequence otherwise trending toward orthodoxy. Conversations stretch, fold back, splinter. You are not guided so much as gently disoriented.

Somewhere between a sermon, a science experiment, and a very good excuse to stay out late.

There is a kind of productive mischief at work here. The sort Paul Feyerabend might have approved of - his insistence that rigid systems often obscure the very phenomena they claim to clarify. In Lawrie’s world, rules are less frameworks than provocations. To break them is not to rebel, but to reveal.

This instinct finds its fullest expression in Whisky Capital, his annual gathering in Canberra, which unfolds less like an expo and more like a temporary republic of taste. Not a hierarchy of expertise, but a field of movement. Distillers, drinkers, the whisky-initiated and the whisky-sceptical circulating through the same space, each encounter slightly altering the next.

It is tempting to describe it as a festival, but that feels insufficiently precise. Festivals imply spectacle, a kind of curated excess. Whisky Capital operates closer to what Édouard Glissant called relation - a system where meaning is produced not in isolation but through contact, collision, exchange. You arrive with preferences; you leave with questions.

And perhaps that is the point.

Because beneath the rare pours, the Octomore oddities, the gelato infused with distillate and the quiet theatre of the rare & old bar, there is a subtler project underway: the dismantling of certainty. The slow erosion of the phrase “I don’t like whisky,” until it reveals itself as something more provisional. Less a conclusion than an unfinished sentence.

In a culture that increasingly demands instant expertise - the quick take, the definitive ranking, the algorithmic preference - there is something almost contrarian in insisting on not knowing. On allowing taste to remain unstable. On creating spaces where hesitation is not only permitted but necessary.

Which is where Lawrie becomes most interesting. Not as a host, or even as a curator, but as something closer to a choreographer of uncertainty. He arranges conditions. He introduces variables. And then, crucially, he steps back.

What follows is rarely linear.

It is, instead, something like a conversation that has forgotten its starting point.

We sat down with him to talk about that space - between structure and drift, between guidance and discovery - and the curious art of building experiences that refuse to behave.

What prompted the move from curated tastings to a larger-scale format like Whisky Capital - was there a gap in the Australian whisky landscape you felt needed addressing?

Travis Lawrie: I’m still going with my regular tastings, but I also love the bigger events - getting out with friends and wandering around chatting whilst trying different whiskies. You also in many ways get more bang for your buck with these events as you get to try a lot more than you do at our regular events.

I also keep Whisky Capital smaller than similar events from Whisky Live or The Whisky Show - although we overlap, we’ve got different target audiences that we’ve structured our events for. I focus heavily on smaller producers, especially Aussie distilleries, but also small scale importers and indie bottlers - who often don’t have the stock available to pour at larger events.

How are you thinking about curation within the festival context, i.e. what distinguishes a meaningful tasting experience from a purely consumptive one?

Travis Lawrie: I think these events are what you make them. There’s always going to be people who just try to drink as much as possible, but I try to keep things a bit more spread out physically, and with smaller crowd numbers, allow people to have more time chatting to the distillers and brand reps.

I also try to make Whisky Capital a bit more of a party or festival than a straight whisky expo - we have masterclasses every half hour throughout the event, a cocktail bar, custom-made whisky gelato from a local gelateria (Jasper+Myrtle - who we also regularly do whisky & chocolate pairings with), the rare & old bar - and this year a vintage Octomore bar.

Last year we also started Canberra Whisky Week in the lead up to Whisky Capital - which we’re continuing this year - with whisky tastings, whisky launches, a boilermaker with local brewery Capital Brewing Co, and a distillers dinner - where 12 guests get to dine and drink with 6 distillers; very intimate with every guest sitting next to a distiller!

Canberra is an interesting choice - what does the location enable in terms of audience, atmosphere, or positioning that other cities might not?

Travis Lawrie: The main reason I mostly operate in Canberra is that I live here. When I first decided to launch Whisky Capital, we also only had Whisky Live. The Whisky Show beat me to the punch in actually launching - but that’s fantastic; Canberra is more than big enough for 3 large whisky events across the year. I often end up repping at one or both of those events - the more the merrier.

I also believe that an independently run event is also great for the city - Melbourne has Whisky Abbey, Perth has Whisky Freedom, Brisbane has QMWS’s Whisky Expo and Whisky Whisky, and Sydney used to have the Whisky Fair (hopefully it returns, or a replacement appears) - and Hobart has both Dark Mofo and Tas Whisky Week. Even more regional cities are starting to get their own local events: Dubbo has their Winter Whisky Festival, Corowa runs Whisky on the Murray, Bellarine has Whisky by the Bay. And Canberra has Whisky Capital!

In bringing together distillers, importers, and drinkers, how do you see the role of the festival in shaping the next phase of whisky culture in Australia?

Travis Lawrie: I think festivals & expos are massively important in bringing people to whisky that are only occasional whisky drinkers - allowing them to expand their experience with whisky in a way that is less stressful than attending a regular smaller sit-down whisky tasting can be if you’re not deeply into the whisky scene. You can come with some mates, try new whiskies, chat to people, and if one whisky or distillery isn’t your jam; you just move on - you’re not stuck being polite for the next hour.

This is also why I started Canberra Whisky Week; we’ve got events for a wide variety of tastes - the exclusivity of the distillers dinner, regular tastings, an Aussie whisky night for members at The Commonwealth Club, a boilermaker, and Whisky Capital. Hopefully over the next few years we’ll expand it further to reach more people; partnering with a greater variety of industries that we either overlap with, or complement.

Finally, what would you like attendees to leave with - not just in terms of palate, but perspective?

Travis Lawrie: An appreciation for the variety of whisky available. I often hear people who “don’t like whisky” but they’ve only tried Bourbon, or rye, or peated Scotch, or unpeated Scotch, or even just single malts in Sherry casks (or Bourbon casks, or wine casks, etc).

With a heavy focus on Australian distilleries, the variety available is amazing - like with many foods, and even wine and beer; Australia has adopted whisky styles from all around the world. We have great single malts, which are a large part of the industry - but we also have award winning ryes, and pot stills, and corn whiskeys, and rice whiskies, and even native grains.

We’re also not constrained by the tight rules of the Scotch Whisky Association, or the laws surrounding Bourbon - we have red gum casked and red gum smoked whiskies, we have whisky aged in mulberry wood, wood smoked whiskies; and whiskies aged in everything from traditional Bourbon, apera, and tawny casks - to rum, beer, wine, even ginger beer and chinotto casks.

On top of that we do have some international whiskies at Whisky Capital - and as great as Australian whisky can be, some international brands have been honing their craft for a very long time. It’d be plain rude to turn down a dram.

Most people that say they don’t like whisky just haven’t found the right whisky.

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Words and question by AW.

Answers courtesy of Travis Lawrie.