He may not be a ‘whisky guy’, but Larry Emdur’s single malt is good as gold
It began as a bit of birthday fun for the TV personality, but in just two years, The Ben Buckler has become a multi-award-winning brand with an impressive new CEO.
From our table at Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, Larry Emdur points across the waves rolling in to Bondi Beach at the northern headland known as Ben Buckler. This knuckle of sandstone, dotted with small apartment blocks and oceanfront residences, is where the teenage Emdur kissed his first girlfriend, smoked his first cigarette, and slept off more than a few big nights with mates. There are three streets on Ben Buckler Point, and Emdur has lived on all of them at one time or another.
Now this little-known nook of Sydney has its name stamped on the bottle of the celebrity TV host’s first foray into whisky. And, fittingly for a man who won the 2024 Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television, The Ben Buckler has already won multiple gold medals at some of the world’s most prestigious spirits awards.
“It’s my liquid autobiography,” Emdur says of the whisky, which began as a project to create 60 bottles for 60 friends to mark his 60th birthday in 2024. “It was never supposed to become a business,” he says. “It was genuinely just a fun thing to do for friends and family.”
Emdur shares another story from his youth, about how he would hang a yellow and red flag pinched from Bondi Beach from the window of his apartment on Ben Buckler Point so his local mates knew he was up for a party. His whisky, he says, is that flag, bottled.
Larry Edmur with Beau Schlig of Corowa Distilling Co.
The liquid itself comes from nowhere near Bondi’s surf. In 2022, to help him create his 60th-birthday whisky, Emdur went to master distiller Beau Schilg of Corowa Distilling Co, on the Murray River near the Victorian border, with a vague brief and very little whisky knowledge.
“People come to me now, like, ‘You’re the whisky guy!’ But believe me, I’m not that guy,” he laughs.
What he did have was a palate and a clear idea of his friends’ tastes. They weren’t hardened whisky drinkers, he knew. If anything they were bourbon men. So he asked Schilg for something that would read as a whisky on the first sip – “not too peaty, not too smoky, just a hint” – before easing into the sweeter, smoother register of a bourbon. Schilg and Emdur built the blend from ex-tawny port and ex-bourbon casks to create an approachable sweetness, just a faint trace of char on the nose and a pleasingly easy finish. A smooth entry-level single malt with a flavour profile geared to appeal to the whisky-curious and even the whisky-phobic.
And that would have been the end of the story for The Ben Buckler – had Corowa’s managing director, Dean Druce, not asked if he could add an unlabelled bottle of it to the distillery’s tasting table. Coachload after coachload of weekend visitors tried it blind alongside the house range and, according to Emdur, about 95 per cent wanted to buy it.
Given this enthusiastic reception, Druce asked if he could send a sample of The Ben Buckler to San Francisco. “Send it wherever you want, as long as I get my 60 bottles,” Emdur recalls telling him, unaware that Druce was entering the whisky in the 2024 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. It won a gold medal, then another at the New York World Spirits Competition, followed by a silver at the Melbourne Royal Australian Distilled Spirits Awards later that year.
A third gold followed at the Asia World Spirits Competition in 2025, and most recently, The Ben Buckler secured its fourth major gold medal, topping the “best value” category at the China Wine and Spirits Awards in April.
When Emdur posted the San Francisco result on Instagram, he was inundated with messages. Venues, pubs, bottle shops and many of his 216,000 followers all wanted to know the same thing: Where could they buy The Ben Buckler?
Larry Emdur with Kristy Bloomfield, the new CEO of The Ben Buckler, at Bondi Icebergs. Louie Douvis
Thus, his birthday project became an unexpected side hustle. Emdur bought a ute and started delivering cases by hand. Posing for selfies with bottle-shop staff and bartenders, he launched a cottage industry. “I built a hundred bridges that way,” he says, but he was also aware that celebrity kudos and hand-delivered stock could only take his one-man operation so far. It was time to bring in a professional.
Kristy Bloomfield, the new CEO of The Ben Buckler company, is the kind of hire most fledgling whisky brands can only dream of. Her résumé includes four years as global chief marketing officer at the Australian start-up Lyre’s Spirit Co, which she helped become the No. 1-selling non-alcoholic spirit brand in the world. Before that, she was at booze juggernaut Lion, where she worked on Corona, the beer she says is her template for the market positioning she’s planning for The Ben Buckler. Most recently, she was chief marketing officer at the Tasmanian distillery Sullivans Cove.
Emdur says he’s still in shock that Bloomfield left her blue-chip job at a world-class distillery to run, in his own affectionate parlance, “the little baby”. But Bloomfield sees The Ben Buckler as more than just a TV personality’s hobby. “To me, it’s not ‘Larry Emdur’s whisky’. We’re building Australia’s most aspirational whisky brand,” she says.
Crucial to her decision to take the reins was the whisky’s many laurels. “We don’t even need to talk about the product because it holds its own,” she says.
Emdur’s foray into whisky began as a limited run of 60 bottles for his 60th birthday in 2024. Louise Kennerley
And then there’s Emdur’s star power. He says countless brands over his four-decade career have offered him handsome sums for his celebrity endorsement. But other than a long-time relationship with Harley-Davidson as an unpaid ambassador (motorbikes are another personal passion), The Ben Buckler is the only product Emdur’s been willing to stake his reputation on.
Bloomfield’s vision is ambitious, but patient. “We will win our backyard first,” she says, before the brand dips its toe into international markets. Her real target, though, are the drinkers whisky has long struggled to convince: women, newcomers, people who order dark-spirit cocktails but would never buy a bottle. Rather than pursuing whisky connoisseurs, the strategy will be to position The Ben Butler as “part of a lifestyle”, where a whisky is a go-to drink like a beer, rather than a rare-occasion treat. In the meanwhile, the brand is speaking to potential investors.
In time there will be signature releases and gifting packs, but accessibility and approachability will remain The Ben Buckler’s north stars for now, with prices under $100. “We’re not a brand that wants to create bottles that sit on the shelf and only get opened every 23 years,” Bloomfield says. “We want to be part of someone’s regular repertoire.”
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