The male-dominated world of rum is being shaken up by a new wave of female distillers, blending innovation with tradition to redefine the spirit.
Chanel Melani and her partner Sally Carter had allowed themselves to dream of moving up the coast and starting a distillery. It was 2015 and gin was the hot new craft beverage.
Their distillery would have to be rum, though – that being “their” spirit. Carter was a country girl and had spent years in the army. It was her nostalgia drink and Melani was all in with it.
“I’ve got a passion for breaking down barriers and creating change and we’d both noticed that rum had overlooked women,” says Melani. “It was a spirit for men, and we felt there was an opportunity to do something more inclusive.”
The universe delivered.
Within three months of saying the dream out loud, Carter had been offered a job heading up procurement for Brookfarm, the boutique muesli company that also owned Cape Byron Distillery on the NSW far north coast.
They moved north in 2016 to the southernmost outpost of Australia’s sugar cane industry which would be their feedstock … but the rum had to wait. “To be honest, the dream went on the back burner,” says Melani. “Both of us were in the corporate sector, trucking along. We were afraid to take that leap. It wasn’t until 2021 that we decided to give it a real crack.”
Carter kept working at Brookfarm while Melani quit her digital marketing job and worked on business plans, market research, met with other distilleries. “Both of us were really mindful that rum is a difficult category, and what we’re setting out to do is not a small feat.” They did the WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) level-2 certification learning how to assess their fire water. They tasted rums from around the world and worked on their palates. Figured what they liked. “We paid consultants to train us up. Then from a product development perspective, once you’ve learnt how to make the product, you do trials to actually to get there.”
Australians have traditionally gone for the British pot-distilled style of heavy dark rum. Melani and Carter opted for a Spanish light-and-dry style. “We saw that as a nice way for people that were new to the category to be introduced to rum,” says Melani.
“‘Drink better, drink less’ has been good for us
Kalyn Fletcher, the Hoochery Distillery
They called their drink Birds of Isle and launched it in December 2023 – a blend of five Venezuelan rums aged between two and eight years. “We finished them in fortified wine barrels from the Barossa at our facility in Murwillumbah [in far north NSW],” says Melani. “We put them in there for another six months, then, to bring in the local terroir, we got bunya nuts and soaked them in the rum.”
While waiting for their own first fermented and distilled batch to age three years in barrels, they got their product into Brisbane cocktail bars The Gresham and Death & Taxes, plus Sydney’s NOMAD and Bennelong restaurants.
But they needed capital to expand and so launched crowdfunded equity round.
While crowdfunding had been around in Australia since 2007, it wasn’t until 2018 that the business equity side of things was formalised by legislation – granting licenses to platforms such as Equitise, Birchal and OnMarket. The week before Birds of Isle launched its crowdfunding offer in March, seeking just $450,000, Adelaide’s Prohibition Liquor Co announced it had raised $2.7 million from 1,183 crowdfund investors.
Birds of Isle marketing has been restricted to tastings where stereotypes always need overcoming. “We’re the face of the brand and we’re there talking to people one-on-one, and every time people say, ‘Oh no, I hate rum.’ They always tell you some horrific story, and that they still can’t smell Bundaberg, but as soon as we tell them that ours tastes and smells completely different, they come and have a try and pretty much unanimously say that it’s nothing like what they ever thought rum could taste like.”
Living at Pottsville and working at Murwillumbah, Carter and Melani are surrounded by other rum distillers. There’s Husk at Tumbulgum, Cape Byron Distillery and Lord Byron Distillery in Byron Bay [which also produces Margot Robbie’s gin, Papa Salt], and Keri Algar’s Soltera Rum at Cabarita Beach.
Kalyn Fletcher took over Hoochery Distillery, Western Australia’s oldest continually operating legal distillery, after the 2017 death of her father, Raymond Bernard ‘Spike’ Dessert III. Her head distiller is Margaret Lyons, and the majority of their distillery workers have always been female, Fletcher tells Forbes Australia.
“I don’t know why. Maybe I just find it easier to manage.”
They didn’t change the recipe after her father died but they did bring the label into the modern world and added gin to the range to cater for female tourists, who form a large part of their trade in Kununurra in the state’s far north-east. Fletcher has not noticed more women getting into rum lately. “But there’s definitely a shift in women enjoying food tourism and ag tourism generally. Women are more keen to try new things and … that ‘drink better, drink less’ idea has been good for us.”
When Carter and Melani started Birds of Isle, they sensed that rum was heading where gin had gone a decade earlier, but it still hasn’t quite arrived. “I think all the rum producers are desperately waiting for our time in the sun. For Australia, too. Sugarcane is our second largest export crop after wheat. And we always say that rum could be Australia’s scotch whisky because we have so much of the raw material in our backyard.”
Rum Rebellion
A new wave of women is reshaping the future of Australian rum:
- Sarah Watson, head of innovation and “liquid development” at Bundaberg Rum is a Scottish scientist who came to Australia to do a masters in virology. She develops new expressions of Australia’s largest rum brand, and, in 2019, won a world’s best rum award.
- Keri Algar – a former journalist – is solo founder and head distiller of Soltera Rum at Cabarita Beach, just seven kilometres down the road from Pottsville where Cooper and Melani live.
- Kalyn Fletcher runs Hoochery Distillery in Kununurra in Western Australia’s East Kimberley, and with head distiller Margaret Lyons produces 190,000 litres of rum annually.
- Meanwhile, Women of Australian Distilling, a collective supporting gender diversity in the spirits industry, is amplifying opportunities for women across distillation, blending, and entrepreneurship.
