It takes 23 concrete trucks to fill an 864 square metre slab, as Adam Saunders and Adam Pinkard discovered when working on the latest project for their distillery.
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And despite rain holding up work for two weeks, the slab had been poured and polished and the pair is well on their way to having Adams Distillery’s new bond store, visitor centre and cafe underway.
“It’s a fair decent size,” Mr Saunders said.
This expansion could fit almost three of the distillery building at Glen Ireh Estate, Perth.
“It’s pretty much triple the size of the existing distillery. I could fit all of my two-storey house and the front and back yard in there,” he said.
The new building will have a gantry walkway to a viewing platform so visitors can look down on the bond store.
“Once all of that is set up, it will be quite an amazing outlook on to all of that.”
But the pair has even bigger plans for next year, with the bond store converting to a craft brewery and a coopery to be built on site, Mr Pinkard said.
“We are going to scrap all of the new mashing gear we’ve got coming in and tripling that size,” Mr Pinkard said.
“So we’re going five times bigger now and then the next year we hope to go three times bigger on that again and have multiple sets of stills.”
“We’ve already looked at brew systems that are thousand-barrel systems,” Mr Saunders said.
The plan behind the major expansion is to cater to everyone’s tastes, with whisky, rum, gin, brandy, beer, cider and maybe even ginger beer.
“We want to cater for everybody and be a one-stop shop,” Mr Pinkard said.
Work is not all about building on the estate, with 20 hectares of barley already sown for next season’s whisky, and plans to plant apple and pear trees for estate cider early next year.
“We would do a cherry cider as well, but we will probably just buy those in as we needed them,” Mr Saunders said.
“Land acquisition and getting our orchard in are probably our priorities for the beginning of the cidery.
“Eventually we do want to have everything as home-grown as much as possible,” Mr Pinkard said.
None of this expansion and future plans would be possible without the Adams duo partnering with Professor Bernie Einoder.
“All of this has become possible because we took on our business partner. He has faith in us,” Mr Pinkard said.
The new distillery and bond store will be unveiled at at party on December 15.
The distillery opened in September 2015.
Johanna Baker-Dowdell
Johanna has more than 22 years experience as a journalist for newspapers, magazines and online publications.
Johanna has more than 22 years experience as a journalist for newspapers, magazines and online publications.
