Big news – five national finalists have just been announced in the #JustAddRHUBI Bartender Competition, each of whom will travel to Melbourne to compete in the final at at Runner Up Rooftop on November 18th, with the winner taking home $1,000 in cash, stock, and coverage in paid media promotion with Boothby.
Those finalists are: Tanguy Charbonnet (Jackalope, VIC), Quinn Zuo (Island Radio, NSW), Judith Zhu (Bistro Ebony, NSW), Elliot Pascoe (Golden Avenue, QLD), and Trinity Bird (Bouvardia, VIC).
Each finalist will present their original RHUBI Apéritif and Fever-Tree cocktail to an expert judging panel and a live audience of trade and industry guests, and they want you to join them — register your attendance at the Eventbrite link below.
The old, beat-up Holden ute looks like it’s about to die, but that just means it has another 10,000 clicks in it. For now, it’s parked atop the creek bank; below, the wire of the winch is drawn out, down and hooked around the fresh harvested agave americana on the sides of the creek bed; to get at it, the couple — partners in distilling and in life — trample over younger plants, wielding machetes, and hack at the saw-toothed spiky green leaves defending the heart of the plant, its piña, each blow striking at its sharp leaves; one errant swing and they risk the removal of one of their own limbs. To rip the piña from the earth and cart it away they crank the winch by hand, dragging the heavy piña across the ground, over the other plants, and up the riverbank to the ute.
They drag the 200 to 300 kilogram piña onto the tray of the ute. And then, they repeat the process under the baking hot sun.
“We reckon we’ve had a 400 kilo [agave] once,” says Rosemary Smith, who — with her partner Stephen Beale — owns Black Snake Distillery, the final destination for the harvested piñas.
There are no staff here, it’s just Rosemary and Stephen and a quixotic mission to make a mezcal that’s not mezcal, but rather an Australian agave spirit that’s all their own.
It’s hard work at the height of summer. “[We are] 100 percent of the labour. It’s difficult,” Stephen says.
That’s an understatement: it would be difficult work for fit young men in their 20s. It’s nigh on excruciating work if you’re older, past middle age. But it’s just what Rosemary and Stephen, now in their 50s and 60s, do for work.
Black Snake Distillery is about 10 minutes outside of Narrabri, in the north of NSW. To get to Narrabri from Sydney is a six hour drive — without taking a break. You head up through the Hunter Valley, through wine country, and coal country; over the Great Dividing Range, through the horse capital of Australia (Scone, if you’ve never been) and then keep driving for another three or four hours, where the landscape flattens out, and the road straightens, as you barrel along to Narrabri.
Along the way, if you take your eyes off the road, every now and then you’ll see clumps of agave plants along the side of roads, little outcrops here and there, some marking fence lines and letterboxes.
“After Murrurundi, and then before you got to Willow Tree, you went past that truck tracking station,” Stephen tells me, as we sit on the porch at Black Snake Distillery. It’s hot — it’s 36 degrees Celsius — it’s past 8pm, and I’m tired from the drive to Narrabri. “Along the railway line there are hundreds of americana,”
he says.