Old Kempton Distillery
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Founded in 2012 as a partnership between industry pioneers Bill and Lyn Lark, Redlands Estate owners Peter and Elizabeth Hope, and James and Amelia Hope. Originally operated in the Derwent Valley before moving to the historic town of Kempton in 2015, adopting its current name. Located in and around Dysart House, an 1840s colonial inn. Uses three stills (600L, 900L, and 2000L). Produces limited-quantity single malt whisky, approximately 300 bottles per batch. Also supplies spirit for Callington Mill Distillery's expressions.
Production Details
The Old Kempton Distillery Tale
The Derwent Valley had whispered its secrets to the Hopes for generations before Bill and Lyn Lark arrived in 2012 with their vision and James and Amelia Hope with their land. What began as a meeting of minds—industry pioneers and estate owners—would become something deeper: a distillery rooted in Tasmania's colonial heart.
By 2015, the operation had found its true home in Kempton, settling into the stone embrace of Dysart House. The 1840s colonial inn had weathered convict times and free settlers, bushrangers and wool barons. Now it would shelter copper stills and the patient alchemy of whisky-making. The building's thick walls, built when Tasmania was still Van Diemen's Land, seemed to exhale history with every breath of the island's impossibly clean air.
The distillery's three stills tell their own story of ambition measured against craft. The 600-liter still speaks in whispers, the 900-liter in conversation, the 2000-liter in bold declarations. Together they represent choices made not for efficiency alone, but for the flexibility to chase perfection in small batches. Three hundred bottles per run—enough to matter, few enough to treasure.
Local Tasmanian water flows through the process, carrying the mineral memory of ancient rocks and pristine watersheds. This is water that has never known industrial pollution, filtered through landscapes that remain largely as they were when the first distillers arrived on these shores. In Tasmania's extreme climate swings, where summer heat can surge and winter cold bite deep, the whisky matures with an intensity unknown to gentler latitudes.
The partnership extends beyond these walls, with spirit flowing to Callington Mill Distillery, weaving Old Kempton into the broader tapestry of Tasmania's whisky renaissance. What Bill Lark helped pioneer in the 1990s now flourishes in this collaboration between families, between past and future.
Standing in Dysart House today, surrounded by the quiet industry of copper and oak, one senses the weight of choosing craft over scale, quality over quantity. The building that once sheltered travelers on colonial roads now nurtures something equally essential to the Tasmanian story: the patient transformation of local grain and water into liquid heritage, three hundred bottles at a time.