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″Let’s go try some special shit.”
Chris Thomson bounds down the gravel pathway leading to the tin shed ahead of us with all the mischievous glee of a teenager who’s found the key to his parents’ liquor cabinet. The analogy isn’t too far from the truth. Now whisky maker Lark’s chief distiller, Thomson joined the team as an unskilled bottler in 2007, aged just 20. Mentored over two decades by the distillery’s founders, Bill and Lyn Lark, today he not only holds the keys to Tasmania’s most revered whisky reserves, he’s also one of Australia’s most awarded single-malt distillers.
Thomson’s ascent may sound remarkable, but the brand of which he’s now custodian comes from beginnings just as humble. It was founded in a Kingston kitchen with a still small enough to fit on a dining table and an idea big enough to launch an entire industry.
Back in 1989, Bill Lark asked a deceptively simple question on a fishing trip in the Tasmanian highlands. Sipping scotch by the Clyde River with his father-in-law, surrounded by rolling barley fields, Lark wondered aloud why nobody was making whisky here.
The answer, as it turned out, was Lady Jane Franklin. In 1839, the wife of Tasmania’s governor declared she would rather see barley fed to pigs than turned into spirits; her husband duly obliged by outlawing distillation. The legislation endured for more than 150 years, until Lark, a man with no formal background in alcohol production, successfully lobbied a sympathetic MP to overturn the prohibition.
Lark Distillery was born in 1992, and has grown from a 150-bottle-a-year business into a publicly listed company with revenue exceeding $17 million in the financial year 2025, close to 50 employees, a sprawling state-of-the-art production facility at Pontville, and a newly renovated experience centre and cocktail bar in Hobart.
It’s also arguably one of the most consequential small businesses in post-colonial Australian history. With more than 100 whisky distilleries now operating across the country, Australia commands significant respect in the global spirits market. Tasmania alone boasts more than 80 registered producers, with nearly 50 making matured single malts. Many of them can trace a line, directly or indirectly, back to Bill and Lyn’s willingness to share everything they’d learnt.
“Some of my friends were saying, ‘Mate, what are you doing? They’re going to be your competitors,’ ” Bill recalls later, over dinner at his favourite Hobart steakhouse, Landscape Restaurant & Grill. His response to those incredulous pals was simple: “Unless I help them, I’m going to be out there on my own.” The only condition he asked in return was that they pay it forward to whoever came next – and an entire sector of Australian-made spirits has been built on that handshake.
The tin shed Thomson leads me to is warmer than the Tasmanian morning outside, packed to the rafters with whisky casks, and filled with the scent of old wood and the subtle sweetness of spirit. Thomson makes a beeline for seven small barrels. Each was previously used to mature tawny port and is over a century old.
“Pick one – any one you like,” he says, still beaming with enthusiasm. I choose one of the oldest barrels of the bunch, dated to 1908. The whisky inside is rich and syrupy, all caramel and dark fruit. The next we try, matured in a barrel from 1920, has an entirely different personality – spice and fire and a bold finish that blazes into notes of toasted sesame and charred oak. Yet, had we tasted the spirits before they were laid down in these barrels, there would be little to tell them apart.
As with most Lark casks, these vintage vessels were sourced from the South Australian estate Seppeltsfield – holder of an extraordinary collection of aged fortified wines stretching back more than a century. Their ruby-stained timbers impart a kind of liquid history – a depth and dimension of flavour new wood could never match.
Thomson cannot stress enough the importance of barrel pedigree. “If we get it wrong there [with poor quality casks], we can’t make the whisky more viscous, more balanced, with better depth or power down the line. It’s already failed.”
Just as important is where the barrels are stored. Lark’s sheds are deliberately, defiantly unpretentious. When Bill Lark began ageing his whisky in small casks in the early 1990s, he had no access to the temperature-controlled bond stores used by Scottish distilleries. “What could be more Australian than a tin shed?” he reasoned, electing to store some of his first casks in one.
It turned out to be a master stroke. Tasmania’s extreme seasonal swings force the spirit in and out of the wood with a frequency and intensity that no Scottish warehouse could replicate. This accelerates complexity and produces a richness that has consistently surprised international judges accustomed to the northern hemisphere’s slowly matured expressions, Bill says.
The success of this two-pronged approach – vintage barrels; tin sheds – is most convincingly displayed in Lark’s new luxury collection, a trio of expressions unveiled in January in Kuala Lumpur.
Fire Trail (700ml, $170), the most approachable of the three, is aged in Australian PX, apera sherry and muscadelle casks before a finish in American oak bourbon barrels. Devil’s Storm (700ml, $200) steps into darker territory, smoked with Tasmanian peat and enriched in Seppeltsfield port and sherry casks. Ruby Abyss (700ml, $400), the first release in Lark’s “super luxury” range, is the most ambitious. It is matured exclusively in Seppeltsfield casks that have never before been used for whisky maturation – a so called “first fill” – including some that contained century-old Australian port reserve. The tasting notes read like a romance novel – juicy raisins, caramelised demerara, bursting plums and dark chocolate, with a fortified oak finish the distillery describes sensuously as “umami velvet”.
The collection (including a fourth expression, Cinder Forest, exclusively sold at airports, priced $160 for 700ml) marks a confident stride by Lark into the upper reaches of the high-end spirits market. Yet, its creation began with the same questions Thomson always asks before a single litre of wash goes anywhere near a still: who is drinking this whisky, where, and how will it make them feel? “With every single whisky, you should be able to explain its place and purpose really simply,” he says.
This philosophy is what distinguishes New World whisky-making from its Old World counterparts, he says. Old World whisky distillers are “always looking introspectively to who they are – what made them successful – to propel themselves forward. But New World whisky looks to what the consumer wants, what emotive moments we can create for them.”
He is particularly cutting on what he sees as the Old World’s reliance on maturity and provenance as cyphers for quality – as has been shown during blind tastings where Lark’s pours have outperformed far older drams. “When you take away the pompousness of age and place – which, frankly, I think is a farce – you see what consumers genuinely care about. There are no arbitrary rules in whisky. There are only factors that create different experiences.”
At the apex of that experiential spectrum are what Thomson describes as the “motherf--king boss” of whiskies – the kinds that carry character, complexity and surprise in a single sip. “It has to be incredibly dynamic, incredibly engaging,” he says.
Ruby Abyss, by his own estimation, is the closest he’s come to achieving this standard. Even so, he remains consciously humble and clear-eyed about the ego traps that await any distiller given too much rope. “When you’re in that egotistical mode, you’re always looking to prove yourself and never be questioned. I learnt very early on that that was fraught with danger.” The title of master distiller, he adds, is “a bit silly” in the way it’s typically deployed. “We’re not masters of the universe here. We’re guardians of a process.” In particular, he’s invested in the distillers who will eventually carry Lark’s torch after him, much as he now carries it for Bill and Lyn.
The results of this are hard to deny: three double gold medals and two gold medals at the 2025 World Spirits Competition in San Francisco. Five medals at the World Whiskies Awards including the fourth consecutive win for Symphony No.1 as Australia’s best blended malt. And now a luxury collection already making a stir in international markets from South-East Asia to Europe.
The distillery is aiming to build on its foothold overseas under the leadership of its new CEO, who was appointed last September before taking the reins in January. Stuart Gregor, the co-founder of gin juggernaut Four Pillars (which was acquired by beer group Lion in 2023), and the president of the Australian Distillers Association from 2014-2022, says international expansion is key to cementing Lark’s position as Australia’s premier whisky business.
To that end, designing the look of the new luxury collection has been a case of “dressing for the job you want,” Gregor says. “We had to make the move into 700-millilitre bottles, we had to upgrade the packaging. It’s all about making sure Lark looks like it has earned its spot among the world’s great whiskies.”
The brand’s long history of innovation is another key facet to Gregor’s international strategy. “We want to be known as a business that continually pushes boundaries – challenges the status quo. Lark has never tried to mimic Scottish single-malts. We’re passionately, uniquely Australian.” The answer is finding the right people to be those torchbearers: “Ultimately, I’d rather drink shit whisky with great people,” he says in characteristically unvarnished fashion, “than great whisky with shit people.”
