That’s the spirit

Jaspers, in Pemberton, WA, provides hearty, local produce, and its own whisky ‘bible’.

Story + Photos Ken Eastwood

When you turn up to Jaspers, in Pemberton, WA, there are 3 menus. There’s the food menu – full of hearty, enticing fare – then the drinks menu, which includes a good selection of non-alcoholic beers, wines and cocktails, as well as local beers, wines and spirits. And then, if you ask for it, there’s the whisky ‘bible’. As well as the listing of 180–200 available whiskies, it has suggested whisky ‘flights’ – in which you can sample 3 half nips of different drops – and a series of wonderful pairings to have before or after your meal: a Jameson Caskmates stout Irish whiskey with a Guinness; a local, dark 70% cacao chocolate with an Ardbeg Uigeadail; even a fried Mars bar paired with a bourbon.

The whisky bible is also a huge source of information – on whisky regions in Scotland, how to pronounce Scottish words, and the influence of cask type on a whisky. Combined with charts on the wall that show where different whiskies sit on a tasting scale (mild to richly flavoured and the influence of peat), it’s a relaxing and warm environment to learn a bit more about whiskies in the hands of bar manager, Damien Hodge. “It’s an intimate setting, and they mightn’t know anything about whisky, but we can give them a quick education,” he says. People therefore become less daunted by what they may have perceived as fire water. Shots are priced from $9.50, but even Damien hasn’t sampled some of the rare whiskies on the top shelf, which cost up to $180 a nip.

Jaspers owner Steve Peaple, who set up the restaurant and whisky bar 4 years ago adding to luxury cabins he created in 2018, says he thought whisky would really suit the heavily forested area. “There’s something timeless about Pemberton – nature is very slow, steady and there’s a purity here, and that to me, suggested whisky,” he says. “It’s how cold it gets here, too. And if you get to the top of one of those fire lookout trees [an 80m climb up steel rungs on a tree trunk], you need a whisky."