Kinglake Distillery’s New Rye Cask Expression - A Single Malt With Weather in Its Veins.

Some whiskies behave themselves. They stay within the lines, salute the distiller’s blueprint, and deliver exactly what’s expected of them. And then there are whiskies that seem to slip the bridle and take the long way home. Kinglake’s new rye-cask expression belongs to the latter: a quiet renegade with the poise of something that knows it could show off, but refuses to. It’s the rare bottle that doesn’t step into the spotlight - it makes the spotlight adjust to it.

Kinglake Distillery has long stood as one of the great geographical outliers in Australian whisky - not because it tries to be, but because the land simply insists on it. While plenty of new-wave distilleries wrap themselves in borrowed nostalgia and sepia-toned origin stories, Kinglake deals in something less tidy and far more compelling: the brute, unfiltered authority of place.

The distillery sits on a high, wind-battered plateau where the weather doesn’t change so much as cycle through moods; mornings can start in a cathedral of mist and end with sunlight slicing through the Mountain Ash like a thrown blade. The forest here isn’t decorative - it’s a presence. You feel it in the air, in the silence, in the way the fog doesn’t “roll in” but occupies space, the way a cat claims a windowsill.

And then there’s the water. No mythical provenance, no poetic license - just a stubbornly pure aquifer pushing upward from the earth beneath the stills, carrying minerals that read like footnotes to the landscape itself. It’s impatient water, eager to imprint its characteristics on whatever passes through it.

In a realm increasingly obsessed with branding gloss and self-mythologising, Kinglake remains disarmingly literal. Nature calls the rhythm; the distiller simply keep time. And when their whisky hits the glass, you can taste the altitude, the forest, the volatility, the quietness - as if the place itself has been distilled into something that feels both raw and remarkably self-assured.

This new release - rested in organic rye casks from a Michigan grower who seems to treat rye less as a crop and more as a lifelong argument he intends to win - carries a kind of charged brightness that never quite shakes the darker pulse running beneath Kinglake’s malt. It’s an unexpected but irresistible tension: the clean, high-altitude clarity of the plateau colliding with the grain-born swagger of rye that’s spent its life battling snowpack, stubborn soil, and a farmer with strong opinions.

The result doesn’t read like a stylistic experiment. It feels like two very different landscapes negotiating terms - alpine restraint on one side, Midwest grit on the other - and somehow agreeing to share the same bottle.

Tasting it feels a little like walking into a story mid-chapter - the whisky has layers, and it expects you to put in the work to uncover them.

Some bottles walk in quietly, others rearrange the room without a word. Guess which one just showed up.

What tickles the nostrils doesn’t just open so much as unfurl, starting with a sweetness that’s lively but disciplined. Not the sticky, broad-stroke rye sweetness that sometimes drifts out of American cooperage, but something cleaner, almost architectural. Burnt sugar shards that cracks rather than oozes. Shaved yuzu peel and bergamot curl grated straight over the rim, bright enough to make you lean in. Then comes this gentle, disarming wave of baked apple - not generic fruit, but the kind that still carries the heat of the oven and the faint metallic scent of the old enamel dish it was baked in.

And just as you think you’ve mapped it, a thin ribbon of pine sap threads through the air. Not a flavour put on for effect, but a quiet reminder of origin - that this whisky spent its formative years in a forest where resin clings to bark, mist lingers low, and the distillery breathes the same air as the Mountain Ash towering above it.

On the top of thje mouth, this little number doesn’t stroll in - it storms. It hits with a burst of citrus that’s electric, more finger-lime pith than orchard lemon, sharp and vivid, cutting like sunlight through morning mist. Sweet spice follows, but it’s no timid drizzle - more like molten toffee kissed with cardamon, or wildflower honey scraped from a charred comb, warm and slightly audacious. Then the rye roars: grainy, obstinate, a backbone that refuses compromise, carrying the spirit like a windswept plateau carries a storm. Mid-palate warmth surges like heat over forested slopes at dusk, rolling into a finish that snaps and crackles with clove, leaving just enough rye dryness to remind you this isn’t a whisky that asks permission - it declares itself, untamed, confident, and entirely Kinglake.

What makes this release truly compelling is its unwillingness to be domesticated. You can trace the fingerprints of the distillery’s raw environment - the crisp, unsettled mornings, the way sunlight fractures across the plateau, the water that tumbles from the earth with a mineral impatience. Yet beneath that terroir lies a streak of audacious creativity. Kinglake has never been interested in crafting whisky by rote; their stills are guided as much by instinct as instrumentation. This is a spirit that wasn’t imposed with precision but rather coaxed into being, given room to wander, to discover its own rhythm, and ultimately, to arrive at something that feels alive and unapologetically its own.

Australia’s whisky landscape is evolving fast, yet few distilleries navigate the line between unmistakable identity and fearless experimentation without tipping the balance. Kinglake does. They remain unmistakably themselves even while exploring uncharted terrain. That’s not marketing flair - that’s unvarnished craft.

This release isn’t chasing trends, nor is it crafted to impress investors. It’s the kind of whisky that exists because someone dared to ask, “What if?” - and then discovered not only that it could be done, but that it could be done with irrepressible style.

Best enjoyed neat, in a space that allows quiet observation, with the evening or alternatively the morning air threading through a slightly ajar window. This is a whisky that rewards contemplation; it has a mind of its own and a story that insists on being heard.

A bright, audacious, and unexpectedly nuanced expresssion, Kinglake proves once again that their whiskies carry more than flavor - they carry atmosphere, altitude, and a hint of the wild weather that shaped them.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Kinglake Distillery.