Former colleagues Adam Sable and David Prior have become distilling rivals.

Sable has been revealed as the new owner of Tasmania’s famous Sullivans Cove distillery. He was previously general manager of Prior’s Bladnoch distillery, but left the company in April.

Multimillionaire David Prior bought the 200-year-old Blandoch distillery in Scotland in 2015 and released his Pure Scot brand earlier this year. Last week he released (and starred in) an ad for the brand that promoted it as “Scotch with balls”.

Sable, a former commercial lawyer and whisky afficionado, bought Sullivans Cove for an undisclosed sum.

The Tasmanian whisky industry is booming. Ten years ago there were only three distillers on the island, now there are 22, and with sales growing by more than 50% in the two years to June 2015. That number is expected to double over the next five years. 

Sullivans Cove created waves when it won best single malt at the 2014 World Whisky Awards.

Sullivans Cove distiller Patrick Maguire explained the decision to sell to Executive Style: “The business had grown rapidly over the last couple of years and there’s been a lot of money spent on increasing the amount of new make whisky we were producing.

“All we could do was drive it on cash flow. The bigger it gets, the more cash flow you need and there’s only so many barrels that we had to draw the cash flow from. We thought the sensible thing to do was to look seriously at some of the people interested in the business, and choose some people that we thought could really take it forward and put the right sort of money into it.”

Maguire and the rest of the Sullivans Cove team will remain with the business.

“It was Sullivans Cove in 2014 that put the Aussie industry on the map,” Sable said. “The world whisky market is wising up to the fact that other countries can produce the same, if not better whisky, as Scotland. We’re very excited to be a part of that … and feel privileged to be leading such an exceptional team who have already built a brand of such acclaim.”