The day after Scott McCarthy got engaged to his wife Tamra in 2012, the couple had a celebratory beer at Steam Exchange Brewery in South Australia’s seaside town of Goolwa. The brewery had just started laying down barrels of whisky and, being a lover of the amber spirit, McCarthy bought a whisky bond (“you buy your bottle before it’s even made”). A year-and-a-half later he picked up his bottle of “The Rubicon” (and a few extras) from what’s now Fleurieu Distillery. Unsurprisingly, it’s his pick from the all-Australian craft spirits on his recently launched online bottle shop, Harvest Australian Liquor.
On the back of seven years as a bar-owner, Adelaide-based McCarthy is making the shift to retail. It’s currently a “passion project” for him and Tamra, whose day jobs are in events and mental health, respectively.
“I think there [are] enough people doing beer and wine,” McCarthy says. He’s stocking whisky, gin, vodka, rum and liqueurs.
The site is the first retail-only online bottle shop for Australian craft spirits. Similar services are largely wholesale or subscription-only.
It’s one way to combat the burgeoning import market. “Only three per cent of alcohol sold in Australia is made in Australia,” says McCarthy. As it stands, the online store stocks 50 spirits from about 10 distilleries. But it’s a slow burn: “We’ll start small and grow with the industry,” he says. It ships nationwide out of Adelaide.
Uniqueness reigns supreme (“not selling what everyone else is selling”) and McCarthy deals direct with distilleries wherever possible, reselling at the same price point.
He’s a whisky man. “We have some of the best barley in the world coming out of the York Peninsula [in SA].” But his wife Tamra is a rum-lover. In that department he suggests Black Gate Distillery’s Ranga Rum from Mendooran in New South Wales, “a small-batch rum – one of only 116 bottles – finished in a ginger cask.”
McCarthy plans to set up his own distillery in the next few years. “Whisky needs to be laid down for two years … so does rum,” he says. If all goes to plan, his spirits could hit the site within five years.
