OUR STORY
Our founders, childhood friends and business partners Damien Newton-Brown and Howard McCorkell have a lifelong connection to Flinders Island, having grown up spending their summers surfing, diving, exploring our island home. The idea for Furneaux came later, when, during a bad bushfire season, the fire fighters were having a really hard time putting a blaze out in the wild scrub along the east coast. The fires were burning down into the peat underground, and they were pouring thousands of litres of water down to dampen this smouldering earth. Everyone on the island was talking about the peat, the peat!
Damien had the lighting-bolt moment - if we had peat on Flinders Island, maybe we had the ability to create an iconic style of maritime peated single malt whisky using only ingredients from the island. The idea for Furneaux was born, and slowly nurtured over the next couple of years. Damien and Howard went on a pilgrimage to Islay in Scotland, the home of peated whisky and the distilleries that have inspired our whisky journey; Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Bruichladdich, Kilchoman. They dug peat by hand, and wandered through dunnage warehouses, soaking up the inspiration to hold a mirror to this beloved (and sometimes divisive) style of whisky, and put our iconic island identity to it.
Then in 2019 a chance meeting happened. Brought to the island from Hobart by the allure of crayfish plucked from the sea, and deserted beaches on a remote island, Tom Ambroz (now Head Distiller) came for a weekend with Nicole Kennedy (now Operations Manager for the distillery). They met Damien and Howard on the beach at Killiecrankie, and over a feast of the day’s catch, they started discussing all things whisky. 6 months later, Tom and Nicole had packed up and moved to Flinders Island, and Tom was commissioning our brand new lantern glass copper pot stills, made in Tasmania by Peter Bailey.
Since then, we have grown into a farm distillery where we farm our own grain, brew, distil, mature and bottle all onsite at the beautiful beachfront pasture of Furneaux Farm. We have a dunnage warehouse which sits tucked away in the trees on the farm, maturing our casks slowly in the salt air. We have 450kL of rainwater storage onsite, and a 57kW solar system on the roof, utilising as much of our natural resources as we can. We’re so proud of our range of single malt whisky and gin, and how much they speak to the terroir of Flinders Island, its maritime climate, resilience and beauty.
We started with a distillery team of one, and now we have a wonderful crew on the island who are distilling, brewing, bottling, labelling, running events, tours, tastings and generally making Furneaux Distillery the kind of place we feel blessed to work at.
