Flooding has impacted many business across Queensland and New South Wales in recent weeks, with much of the NSW Northern Rivers regions, including Husk Distillery, heavily affected.
The distillery is on the Tweed River floodplain, and while many locals are used to flooding, this year’s water went much higher than previous historic floods, sending homes and businesses underwater.
For the team at Husk, the good news is everyone is OK, and now the clean-up is underway with lots of volunteers from the local communities helping out. The team told The Shout that they started the clean-up by cutting paths in the mud to stop them slipping before going on to clean the floors ahead of working out what equipment needed replacing, including the farm tractor, equipment, and packaging.
Marketing and Hospitality GM Harriet Messenger said that at the height of the flood, she and her fiancé had to head to the Gold Coast to find stock feed for their cattle who usually eat the distillery waste. After finding seven bales of barley hay, they had to hop on a barge, driven by a local, over their paddocks of sugar cane and past the underwater distillery just to get the feed to the cattle.
The full clean-up for residents of the valley and for Husk themselves is going to be a lot longer than this initial two weeks. Especially for those families who have sadly lost everything in the floods and the team at Husk wants to shout out to all other affected businesses and residents in their local areas of the Tweed, Byron, Ballina, Lismore and beyond. They ask for good vibes to be sent out and want to let the Australian public know that there are plenty of charities they can donate to, that will help the people who have lost everything in these devastating floods.
The team at Husk now has the distillery reopened and Husk products are now available for trade through nocwholesale.com and for consumers through nipofcourage.com.
