The Little Still Memory

The Little Still

Every now and then, you come across a photograph that takes you straight back to a particular moment.

This is one of those for us.

Rob, standing on the farm with our little still.

Looking at it now, knowing the size of the stills in the distillery, the casks sitting quietly in the bond stores and the whisky that has since left the farm in bottles carrying the Auld name, it is hard not to smile.

The little still wasn't the beginning of Auld Farm Distillery.

By then, the idea was already much bigger than that.

Our plans for the commercial distillery were underway, and the large stills that would eventually become the heart of Auld were arriving around the same time.

But this little still represents something different.

It represents the learning.

The experimenting.

The stage where so much of what we were trying to create still existed in our heads — and we were beginning to turn those ideas into something tangible.

We knew the raw ingredient particularly well.

Grain had been grown on this farm since the 1880s, and the Auld family had been farming here since 1924.

What we didn't know was where our decision to take that grain one step further would eventually lead us.

There were a lot of questions.

Could we really build a distillery here?

What would whisky made from our own barley taste like?

What about oats?

Or wheat?

Could a family farm in Western Southland grow the grain, harvest it, distil it, mature it and eventually bottle it without that grain ever really leaving home?

Those questions eventually became what we now call Seed to Sip.

But back then, we were simply working it out.

One experiment at a time.

One problem at a time.

One slightly crazy idea at a time.

There was no way of knowing that years later there would be thousands of litres of whisky maturing on the farm, visitors arriving from around the world, bottles travelling well beyond Southland, or that spirits made from those early grain harvests would one day receive international recognition.

We were just getting on with it.

Perhaps that's why we love this photograph.

Not because the little still was where Auld began.

But because it captures a moment when we were somewhere between an idea and what Auld Farm Distillery would eventually become.

And we had absolutely no idea just how much was still ahead of us.

Rob unwrapping our little 66l still.