ABOUT US
ABOUT US
The Story of How It Came to Be
MITCHELL DISTILLERY
A bottle in the dirt. A river that took everything.
And the ground that gave it all back.
Part One:
The Bottle
It starts on an ordinary afternoon in 2008. Mat had just brought his kitchen and joinery
business out to the small Queensland town of Mitchell, a trade he’d already spent five
years building in Brisbane. He was doing what he’d done a hundred times before —
digging a hole for a fence post. Then the shovel struck something that wasn’t dirt, wasn’t
rock. He knelt down in the red dust and pulled an old glass bottle out of the ground, heavy
with a century of dirt, a name pressed into the glass: J.B. Eaton.
It turned out that up the road, a cordial factory had once stood under that name, founded
by a man called John Bull Eaton. It opened its doors in 1885, and was pulled down exactly
a hundred years later, in 1985. Holding that bottle, Mat found himself wondering what it
must have taken to build something real in a town this size. It was just a passing thought at
the time. But it stayed with him. That bottle sits today in the Mitchell Heritage Museum —
and it turned out to be the first seed of everything that followed.
Part Two:
The Bees
The next year, something else took hold, stranger still. Mat woke at three in the morning
wanting to know how honey was actually made. One hive followed. Then another. Within a
few years he was tending 250 hives of his own, learning queen breeding alongside an
operation running seven thousand. Bottle and bees, on the surface, had nothing to do with
each other. But underneath, it was the same instinct — taking raw land and raw material
and turning it into something worth having.
He gave his time to the town too, joining the State Emergency Service that same year,
2008 — work that asked a lot and gave little back, most weeks. It would ask everything of
him before long.
Part Three:
The Flood
In 2012, the Maranoa River rose and didn’t stop. It flooded the house. It fully submerged
the prime mover and the bobcat right where they stood. And it tore his 250 beehives apart
and scattered them — some found 200 kilometres downstream in St George. His kitchen
business, four years of work, was gone within hours.
And in the middle of all of it, Mat was out on that same river in an open boat with local men,
pulling a builder and his family off their roof, after the official rescue crew had already said
it was too dangerous to go in. He hadn’t even had time to grieve his own losses yet. That’s
the shape of who he is — showing up for someone else’s worst day in the middle of his
own.
The kitchen business never came back. That chapter closed the day the water took it. But
the ground it stood on didn’t stay empty for long.
Part Four:
New Zealand
He didn’t stay down. In 2013, he left Australia for the first time, to New Zealand, chasing
something he couldn’t quite name yet — spirit and mead making. In a boutique bar there,
he tasted mead for the first time in his life, and it was disappointing; it reminded him of an
old, dying hive. And in that moment of disappointment, something clicked. He already knew
honey better than the person who’d made that mead did. He went back again in 2016 to
learn more, and by then he’d already joined the rural fire brigade too — trading floodwater
for fire, but never losing that instinct to run toward trouble instead of away from it.
Part Five:
Mitchell Distillery
Piece by piece, over more than a decade, he rebuilt. And in March 2025, he finally held
that same piece of land in his hands again — the fence post, the buried bottle, the ground
the river once tried to take. This time he knew exactly what belonged there. He used the
last of the honey he’d saved from before the flood — honey that had survived everything —
to make his first batch of mead.
Mitchell Distillery isn’t just named after a town.
It’s what’s left standing after everything that could have washed it away,
didn’t.
More Than Mead
Witchess Falls Meadery is more than a producer of honey wine. It is a celebration of nature, heritage, and craftsmanship.
Every bottle invites you to experience the flavours, stories, and spirit of Queensland’s hinterland—one glass at a time.