Greenbackyard

What to do with a small block of land full of fruit trees?

What would you do if you moved to a small block of land, smaller than a normal farm, full of established fruit trees? Well you might consider erecting a pot stil to make your own liquors and spirits. That’s just what the owners of the Tambourine Mountain Distillery did, in 1992, after they moved from Tasmania to the Glass House Mountains in Queensland.

“As we did not want to use chemical sprays on our fruit, we discovered that our products did not meet with market requirements’, their website says. “For a four person family, we had too much fruit, so we needed to ‘convert’ it into something which would make this small property productive.” See more of their story here.

What a wonderful idea! You should check out their site – it’s a delightfully personal and warm website, complete with pictures of their hand painted bottles, glowing stills, and caskets of maturing liquors. They’ve won numerous awards, and every bottle is hand-painted… and be sure to take a look at the peacock named Claude displaying his huge magnificent tail outside their show rooms. I can’t wait to visit in person.

Setting up a distillery in Australia is not easy at all, (which perhaps explains why there are so few of them.) Where-as in France and many European cultures, making alcohol at home is centuries old practice, that is still very much part of the tradition of cooking and food preparation, it is very uncommon in Australia, because the Government makes it very hard to own a Still. Owning a still even to make your own home made liquors, which you don’t intend to sell, without the proper license is illegal. You can’t own the still, make the liquor, store it, sell it, or move it, without a license.

When you get a license, the Government imposes what is called an excise duty on your goods. So for every litre of 40% proof alcohol you make, you need to pay the Government $65. A 750 ml bottle (think of a wine bottle) with 40% alcohol will have an excise duty of $18. Which you have to pay upfront, regardless of whether you sell this bottle or drink it yourself at home. If you sell it, you pay taxes and GST on the earnings after that. And just imagine the record keeping this all takes?!

And don’t even get me started on all the other licenses that you need to make your fruit into a tasty liquor. You need a license to store your alcohol, and to move it. I’m not yet sure how much each license costs… I assume the licenses themselves cost nothing, since the excise duty and the taxes on top would be a huge chunk of change for our dear Government anyway!

Which only goes to add an extra bravo to the family of the Tambourine Mountain Distillery, who have overcome these hurdles! Personally, I’m going to make my first batches of limonchello and orangechello with Vodka. I’m going to buy premade spirits and I’m going to think very fuzzy fuzzy thoughts about distilleries until one day when I finally have the gumption to face all the red tape. By which time , my next batch of Limonchello should b ready…

New tanks, new plans, new idea?

We’ve been thinking about a new aquaponics system – a phase 2 set-up. Ofcourse we only have a sketch on a back of a napkin at the moment, (so many good plans start like that!) but we’re thinking of a bigger system than our initial prototype we set up in the backyard in our last house.

A bigger set up will give us the chance to learn about medium size set-ups work. For instance, we can get an idea about how to scale up the technical stuff, such as the sort of the pumps we’ll need, how the beds full of vegetables will respond to the Bellingen climate, and what sort of problems a medium size rig will create (not that we are anticipating any, but its good to allow for the unforeseen.)

In the winter, it gets cold around where we are. Well, by cold I mean about 0 or just below – that’s centigrade. Not so cold by the standards of many of our friends, but that’s cold for a beach girl. It will be cold for our plants too – and our fish. Dealing with that cold will be new for us.

Perhaps one piece of the puzzle will be to use a marquee-tent that I found on on ebay. It might act as a makeshift housing for the tanks, (and possibly some beds), and by crikey we’d have to stake it down properly. But it might also act as a greenhouse within the tent, raising the temperature and stopping frost. I wonder if this will work?

Marquee from KMATE - look for it on Ebay