Heartwood Malt Whisky

If you haven’t heard of Heartwood, you’ve been missing out. And if you haven’t tasted Heartwood, you’ve really been missing out.

Heartwood was founded in by Tasmanian Tim Duckett (or ‘Mr H’) in the late nineties, when he – at that point just a lover of single cask whisky – started buying casks directly from distilleries in Tassie’s then-nascent industry.

He was the first person to buy a cask from Sullivans Cove when it was still called Tasmania Distillery, picking up cask number HH007 before they became a global household name. Speaking of household names, he also picked up the first cask Bill and Lyn Lark ever sold, as they’d already become good friends through their day jobs and a shared love of a good dram.

In 2011, realising he had way too much whisky for one person to drink, Tim bottled his first ever Heartwood: the Mt Wellington Release, which had, in keeping with the close-knit nature of the industry, been distilled by Bill Lark at Tasmania Distillery. This cask strength ex-Bourbon cask paved the way for what’s become Heartwood’s calling card: unrepentantly full-throated cask strength whiskies, released when they’re ready, and not a moment before.

With no commercial drivers or shareholders to appease, Heartwood has been able to explore all sorts of things an independent bottler might not otherwise be able to: vatted malts from multiple award-winning distilleries, non-traditional cask types, aggressive and experimental maturations, solera-style iterative whiskies, and even an ongoing ‘Dregs’ series which is drawn from samples and portions of every malt Tim’s ever released.

Heartwood has always been a family and community affair, and as the warehouse has grown, Tim’s son Louis has been called on to step up as a whiskymaker, blending and vatting his own releases as well as those under the Heartwood label (including Heartwood’s very first collaboration with The Whisky Club!).

So there’s the history of Heartwood, all that’s left for you to do is sip some – just make sure you’re ready, it’s not for the faint of heart.