A Dram of Judgment: Callington Mill Distillery's Supreme Courthouse and the Peated Poetry of Justice.

Where time is ground finer than grist, and history ferments with intention, Callington Mill Distillery stands as both relic and revelation - an operatic outpost in the Tasmanian midlands where old world meets new spirit.

Nestled in the heritage-laden town of Oatlands, Callington Mill is unlike any other whisky distillery in Australia. Established on the site of the southern hemisphere’s only operational Lincolnshire-style windmill - originally built in 1837 - the distillery is a fusion of colonial architecture, state-of-the-art distillation, and storytelling that seeps into every cask. This is a place where wind once turned stone to flour, and now turns grain to gold. Where restoration isn’t just an architectural gesture, but a philosophical one - honouring Tasmania’s chequered past by bottling it, sip by singular sip.

Here, Callington Mill isn’t merely producing whisky; it is conducting séances. Through its Heritage Series, the distillery channels the spectral echoes of Oatlands’ most storied buildings - each release an elegy in oak. The third expression in the series, Supreme Courthouse Tasmanian Single Malt Whisky (Peated), is a case in point: a cask-strength character study of justice, punishment, and redemption, dramatised at 64.5% ABV.

Only 350 bottles exist. Each is a relic. A riddle. A requiem for empire.

Where the Law was Laid in Stone

The Supreme Court House of Oatlands is no mere structure - it is a carved confession, Tasmania’s architectural soul laid bare in sandstone. It stands not only as a relic of jurisprudence, but as a monument to moral contradiction: at once a pillar of colonial order and a mausoleum of human suffering.

Its very stones were quarried under duress, chiseled into shape by those shackled to the penal engine of empire. Among them was John Mackintosh, a stonemason turned prisoner, whose craftsmanship was forged beneath the weight of punishment. Beside him, George Wood - a highwayman of infamous repute - lent his hands to justice’s façade, even as he lived on the wrong side of it. Their leg irons rang like mourning bells over Lake Frederick, their labour a paradox: building law by breaking men.

By 1841, what began as a colonial courtroom had ascended to the ranks of the Supreme—a rarefied tier of legal authority shared only by Hobart and Launceston. And yet, its authority was etched into blocks by those it condemned. The courthouse's stoic silhouette, presiding over the pastoral serenity of the Tasmanian Midlands, remains a silent arbiter of those paradoxes - where justice was administered in the same breath as it was denied.

It is this tension - between reverence and reckoning, between legacy and lament - that Callington Mill distills with evocative intent in its Supreme Courthouse Peated Single Malt. This isn’t merely whisky aged in cask; it is memory matured in oak, echoing with the grit of forced hands and the grace of craftsmanship. The dram becomes a dialogue - between history and hedonism, fire and finesse.

With this little number, Callington Mill has captured the spirit not just of a place, but of a time steeped in contradiction - refining Tasmania’s colonial complexity into something amber, smoky, and enduring. With each pour, the past returns - smouldering, spectral, sublime.

Tasting Notes as Allegory: A Courtroom in a Glass

A solemn, deep gold glints with hues of burnished amber - less a colour than a memory captured in liquid. It evokes the varnished sheen of gavelwood, worn smooth by time and ritual, basking in a shaft of courtroom sun that cuts through centuries of silence. One might imagine it as the glow of torches at dusk, their light licking against sandstone walls, elongating the silhouettes of judges, convicts, and ghosts alike - casting long shadows of verdict and vengeance.

The nose is an opening argument delivered with gravitas. It enters with thick, smouldering campfire smoke - resolute and commanding, like the voice of the magistrate reading a charge aloud. It halts all distraction. Then come the roasted hazelnuts - earthy, steady, like calloused hands folded in testimony. These give way to subtler notes: crème brûlée appears, soft and elegant, like parchment unfurling under candlelight. Toffee follows, warm and consoling, the flavour of hard truths softened for survival. The air is thick with history, yet it speaks in layers - some defiant, some forgiving.

On the palate, the whisky pleads its case with the authority of seasoned rhetoric. Peat smoke - dense, articulate, uncompromising - leads the prosecution. It enters like a judge’s final word, echoing off the chamber walls. Then, hazelnuts again, this time richer and oiled - an anchor, a reminder of the human hand behind the law. Raisins lend a sacramental sweetness, reminiscent of altar wine or sun-warmed timber in a chapel forgotten by time.

And then - an unexpected flourish: Christmas spice bursts across the tongue in a flare of clove, nutmeg, and the faintest trace of anise. It’s the folklore of the court’s margins: midnight confessions, yule-time rebellions, the crackle of illicit laughter in shadowed cells.

The Judgment Is In

The Supreme Courthouse is not a whisky one merely sips - it is a reckoning in liquid form. This is a dram that doesn’t just warm the chest, but stirs the conscience. It calls not for consumption, but for participation. A rare Tasmanian single malt whose potency lies not only in its formidable 64.5% ABV, but in its audacity to exhume the past - layered with critique, burnished by reverence, and steeped in story.

To taste it is to sit with history’s complexities: to walk the worn stone corridors of the Oatlands courthouse; to hear the echo of shackled footsteps and the weight of verdicts handed down by men whose own hands may have been once bound. This is whisky as jurisprudence - distilled through the moral architecture of empire, matured in casks that hold not only liquid, but legacy. It is as though the sandstone walls themselves have been transmuted - warmed, liquefied, and aged in oak - so that we might sip their secrets and trace their fault lines.

With this release, Callington Mill Distillery has not merely produced another expression of whisky - it has authored it. Each bottle becomes a palimpsest, where time overlays time: the windswept Midlands, the judicial muscle of Van Diemen’s Land, the whispered labours of convicts consigned to toil and silence. Supreme Courthouse belongs to a lineage of spirits as literature - narrative malts where the nose is the prologue, the palate a rising action, and the finish the lingering aftermath of all that has passed.

Callington Mill has emerged not only as a custodian of Tasmanian terroir, but as a chronicler of its moral and material past.

So pour it with intention. Let it breathe, and then listen: to the clink of irons on stone, to the hiss of oak meeting spirit, to the whispered plea of history’s ghosts.

The court is back in session. And in your glass, the verdict lives on.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Callington Mill Distillery.