Our story
It starts with the river
In March 1823, four men in a small open boat left Sydney for the Illawarra. A storm drove them out to sea for three weeks. The survivors washed ashore at Moreton Bay, the first Europeans to set eyes on a wide, unfamiliar river the Turrbal people had long called Maiwar. When Surveyor-General John Oxley sailed north aboard the brig Mermaid that November, castaway Thomas Pamphlett led him to the river's mouth. On 2 December 1823, Oxley rowed eighty kilometres upstream and named it the Brisbane River, after Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane. A settlement followed on the north bank in 1825, a cluster of buildings that grew into a city. Two centuries on, we distil on Edward Street, a few steps from the same river, on country the Turrbal called home long before any of it was written down.
December 1823
The map on our vodka
When Oxley rowed up the river, he charted it as he went. His hand-drawn map of the Brisbane River is the quiet background of our Kingfisher Vodka label. Look closely at the bottle and you can follow the same bends he sketched from a rowboat two hundred years ago. It is our way of keeping the river on everything we make.
Brisbane, 21 November 1888
The tiger that got loose
A travelling menagerie was parked near George and Turbot streets when a handyman left a cage unlatched. Jimmy the Bengal tiger took his chance. His owner went after him armed with nothing but a whip, and both men ended up in hospital before Jimmy was back behind bars. The city petitioned the mayor, the papers had a field day, and the whole affair is still preserved in the John Oxley Library. We gave Jimmy a quieter retirement on our labels, prowling through the fan palms, where the only thing in danger is your tonic.
The bird on the R
The kingfisher
The azure kingfisher hunts the quiet edges of the Brisbane River, a flash of blue over brown water. It perches on the R of our wordmark, it gives our vodka its name, and it sets the standard we distil to. Small, precise, and very good at what it does.
The mangrove jack. At home in the river.
The heart of Brisbane
Produced in Edward St Brisbane
The settlement that became Brisbane took hold on the river's north bank in 1825. Two hundred years later we distil at 109 Edward Street, a heritage-listed address in the middle of the city, a few blocks from where it all began. Every bottle is produced here, in the heart of Brisbane. No other spirit brand is more firmly rooted in this city.