Furneaux Distillery: Whispered Spirits & Island Secrets - A Conversation from the Edge of Bass Strait.

In the unruly arms of Bass Strait - where the weather freelances and the sea speaks in riddles - Flinders Island doesn’t so much emerge as it broods. Less postcard, more poetic footnote, this is no island for the hurried or the hashtagged. It doesn't announce itself; it hums in granite and saltbush, waiting for you to lean in. Time here doesn’t march forward - it curls up like a cat in the sun, dreaming of something older.

Just off the map's more dramatic margins, where tides still keep ancient appointments and the wind never learned to knock, Furneaux Distillery doesn’t so much make whisky as it midwifes it - drawing spirit from landscape with the patience of someone deciphering smoke signals in a dream. Calling it ‘craft’ feels too IKEA; this is communion, a kind of barefoot alchemy where terroir isn’t just an influence - it’s a co-author.

Take their Sawyers Bay expression. It doesn’t announce itself - it leans in. Imagine a library of sunlit afternoons, shelved in ex-bourbon and apera casks. It opens like a whispered stanza - warm honey poured through muslin, a waft of pear blossom drifting through a cracked window, and the faint trace of almond, as if someone peeled nostalgia with a paring knife. On the tongue, it glides like a sanded-down memory - subtle, glistening, inevitable. The finish? Clean as glass and just as reflective.

Then there’s Flinders Island Peated, the dark horse in monk’s robes. Less swagger, more slow-burn sermon. It’s not interested in theatrics - it simmers. A maritime peat rolls in, not with brute force but with quiet conviction. Think driftwood incense, charred citrus skins after the rain, and eucalyptus smouldering at the edge of ceremony. It doesn’t chase trends - it communes with weathered souls.

And finally, our favourite contradiction in a bottle: Smoky Wedding Distiller’s Cut. Half Flinders Island grit, half Scottish ghost, it’s a whisky that speaks in accents. Scorched sugar and waxed citrus banter with sea herbs and smoke, all tied together with a knowing wink from seasoned oak. There’s tension here, like a Leonard Cohen song played at dusk - beautiful, unresolved, and impossible to get out of your head. This isn’t heritage as taxidermy - it’s inheritance as jazz.

Drinking these whiskies is like eavesdropping on the earth - patient, reverent, and slightly conspiratorial. They’re not beverages, they’re bottled correspondence from the elements, sealed and posted from the far edge of familiarity.

And then there's Tom Ambroz, General Manager by title, translator by temperament. When we spoke, it became clear: Tom doesn’t run the distillery so much as interpret it. He listens to the island’s mutterings and turns them into liquid epigrams - fermented philosophy, one cask at a time.

Time and Tide: Flinders Island is more than a setting - it is a living ingredient in your whisky. How does the island’s elemental rhythm inform your approach to distillation, maturation, and narrative?

Tom Ambroz: Our location is our whole reason for being. Making whisky on a little island of 900 people in the middle of Bass Strait is no mean feat, but our founders Damien and Howie saw the potential in the local peat and the maritime climate and found it an irresistible challenge. It has since shaped our decisions and our dream about our future. What started as two little stills, a contract brewer and a few hundred bottles per year, has turned into a paddock-to-bottle operation on a working farm, growing our own grain, brewing and distilling all on Flinders Island. These choices were all driven by our location. Self-sufficiency is crucial to survival where we are. You can't just pop to your local Bunnings, and sometimes when the weather is really bad, or the barge is getting repairs, we might not even get food delivered for long periods. This all drives resilience, and that has motivated us to do whatever we can to foster that self-sufficiency.

Time and Tide: Furneaux Distillery evokes both solitude and communion - a remote craft rooted in a broader global dialogue. How do you reconcile the island’s seclusion with the dynamic expectations of an international whisky audience?

Tom Ambroz: It's tricky. Most people don't know that Flinders Island exists, let alone Furneaux Distillery. The only way to get to Flinders Island is the once-a-week barge from NE Tas, or the planes that only fly a few times a week. That is partly what makes the island so special, but it does isolate us from our community. We do our best to get off the island and participate in the whisky shows and community events, but we are in one of the most untouched, raw and beautiful places in the world, and we work slowly, taking our time to focus on flavour and craft. As the world gets bigger, busier and crazier, I hope that people will find some attraction to our story, either by visiting us in person or through the drams.

Time and Tide: In an era increasingly defined by engineered precision, your method embraces provenance and patience. How do you define authenticity in whisky - and what compromises are you unwilling to entertain?

Tom Ambroz: It's true that for the Tasmanian whisky distilleries to succeed on the international level there needs to be some evolution in terms of manufacturing. Part of the high price of Australian spirits is down to the fact that the producers are small, making small volumes, working hard with low economy of scale. I don't think that we are any more authentic than Starward, who produce 500,000L per year, or Laphroaig who have a capacity of 3 million litres per year. We won't ever be able to compete with that, but what we can do is focus instead on the things that make our whisky different to others - the farming, the location, the water, peat and process.

I love Furneaux because we can get so nerdy with it. We have had the opportunity to re-cooper some of our own barrels, we have done floor malting, we forage the lagoons for our own peat, we literally drive the combine harvest ourselves. We even tried to hand-harvest a crop once using scythes and sickles. The connection to the process and the ingredients is unmatched.

Time and Tide: Your professional path is not solely distilled from spirits - how have your previous pursuits shaped your whisky-making philosophy, and what compelled you toward this particular alchemy of grain, oak, and time?

Tom Ambroz: Outside of distilling my career was mostly in hospitality. I spent 10 years living in Melbourne working in cocktail bars and venues across the city. In that time I developed my love for all kinds of spirits, and my understanding of what balance means in drinks. When you're working in hospitality, if you care you spend your time learning about what's on the shelf, and you spend your quiet nights working on recipes, constantly tasting and testing. I love blending casks when we make our double oak expressions because you can find that perfect balance of sweetness, spice and texture.

Something I have learned (from people who did it much better than I did!) is that simplicity is key. Simple things done well, with a particular attention to detail is always the best. Like when a bartender pours your Manhattan into a frozen glass and pinches orange oil across the top. It smells amazing, the texture and balance is perfect - that's the experience I want our whisky to give the drinker.

Time and Tide: Furneaux’s identity is inseparable from the wild temperament of the Bass Strait. Do you consider whisky a kind of landscape transcription - a vessel for atmosphere, geography, and memory?

Tom Ambroz: I'd say that is very romantic, but essentially true. Whisky by its nature is a time capsule. We are currently filling puncheons (450L barrels) that may not reach maturity for 10-20 years! The island is also like going back in time - we don't have traffic lights, no Teslas (yet). I have no idea where Furneaux will be when those puncheons are ready to be bottled, but we're keeping as many records as we can along the way, writing stories about each release, sending our dispatches via our mailing list (furneauxdistillery.com.au/newsletter) when we experiment with new processes. Each bottle has a story to tell, that's for damn sure.

Time and Tide: Small-batch distilleries often tread a delicate line between scale and soul. As Furneaux matures, how do you envision preserving its intimacy and singular character while cultivating a broader reach?

Tom Ambroz: That will depend on the market. If there is a desire out there in the world for a single malt whisky grown from a grain on a farm from a little island, then we'll be able to keep doing what we're doing. If not, we'll see. Hopefully we can cultivate a broader reach that will allow us to build our character by investing in our own malthouse and developing heritage grains and yeast strains. But until someone builds a bridge between Flinders Island and mainland Tasmania, our intimacy will be well preserved.

Time and Tide: Your ethos seems to hold tradition in reverence without subservience. Which elements of classical distilling have you retained, and which have you reimagined to reflect the distinct spirit of Furneaux?

Tom Ambroz: Our process is mostly traditional as far as whisky is concerned. I like the "rules" of single malt whisky - one grain, one distillery, copper pot stills, 40% minimum, 2-year minimum - there are solid foundations for good spirit. The imperative for us has always been flavour. We produce 3 types of new make spirit based on the grain - unpeated, 100% Flinders Island peated and 50/50 Flinders Island and Scottish Peated.

Those spirits go into a variety of casks and will only be decanted when we think they taste their best. So think of our releases more like a vintage of wine, where you might like a particular style that comes from that winery, but each vintage will have different flavours and nuances. It's the same with our whisky. Our current Sawyers Bay Unpeated release is a double oak - ex-bourbon and apera, but the next release will be a second fill, so while they are both unpeated, bright, sweet and floral, the oak influence will be very different.

Time and Tide: Tasmania has quietly ascended as a force within the global whisky renaissance. In your view, what distinguishes Furneaux within this golden age of Antipodean distilling?

Tom Ambroz: Flinders Island is like the Tasmania of Tasmania - the island off the island. Our grain source, water source and peat source are all completely unique in the world, as well as in Tasmania. By virtue of this alone our whisky is an individual.

Time and Tide: Ageing whisky is, in essence, a prolonged conversation with time. Beyond flavour, what has the maturation process revealed to you about patience, transformation, and trust in the unseen?

Tom Ambroz: Haha, it has revealed that I don't have much of either. We are almost 6 years old now, our barrels are starting to reach the point where we have more volume year on year, but still there are points where we will be sold out of a particular style because the next release is not mature yet. Those points are agonising. We also spend much time after the barrel is decanted before it's bottled - breathing the spirit, slow-proofing, non-chill filtering.

This process is really beneficial to texture and balance, but can take weeks, and when you've got a lot of bills, and customers on the phone wanting to pay your bills, it hurts. We just have to keep our discipline, and bring the punters into the conversation so they know that we are taking time because we give a shit.

Time and Tide: If Furneaux were translated into a poem or composition, what would it sound like - and how does your whisky invite us to slow down, to listen more closely, and to dwell more deeply in the present?

Tom Ambroz: I used to sing "Bootleg Bootleg" by Creedence when I was mopping up the distillery at the end of the day. Flinders Island has good outlaw country energy for that kind of music. As far as an invitation to be in the present - remember when you'd get a record or a CD, and while you're listening you'd pour over the covers, pull out the sleeve and admire the art, scribblings, lyrics and photos on it? We sell our whisky that way.

The bottle itself has all sorts of details on it from the spiels about our reason for being, to the actual cask details and handwritten bottle number. But you can also scan the little QR code on the neck label which takes you to our website archive, telling you all the nerdy information about the grain source, process and anything else that we can think of.

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Words and questions by AW.

Answers courtesy of Tom Ambroz.

Photos courtesy of Furneaux Distillery.