Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  This is the way the distillers want it, for the most part. They’ve stretched things a bit in the past, and the labeling got a bit loose in the mid-2000s, which is what triggered these new regulations. Now everyone is restricted the same way.

  Independent Bottlers

  Not all whiskies are bottled by the distillers. Many of the great blends, like Johnnie Walker and Dewar’s, started out being made and marketed by men who were either grocers or wine merchants. They would buy whisky from distillers, sometimes age it themselves, blend it, then sell it to customers and eventually to agents in other areas and countries.

  Independent bottlers also brought some of the first single malts to the market. They would buy barrels of whisky from brokers or direct from distilleries. The brokers made their living by facilitating the trading of aged whiskies that the different blenders needed to create their whiskies. They would buy lots from different distillers and swap them. Sometimes barrels were left over; these would be sold to the independent bottlers. And in the lean times of the industry, there were always distillers who were willing to sell entire casks, aged or new, to independent bottlers for a quick shot of cash.

  The bottlers — firms like Gordon & MacPhail, Signatory, Cadenhead’s, Berry Bros. & Rudd — would gather these casks, age them (sometimes leaving them in the distillers’ warehouses, marked as theirs, and sometimes moving them to their own warehouses), and bottle them as either continuing brands or as-we-have-it runs. Depending on the terms of the sale, the malt may or may not have been identified on the label. Back before the current days of single malt ascendancy, an independent bottler was often the only way to get a taste of a distillery’s malt.

  The whisky market is tougher these days, as supply is being squeezed by demand, and rare whiskies command high prices at auction. But the bottlers have years of connections to fall back on, and they continue to make some very good whisky available.

  Visitors to Glenfiddich often find themselves ending their tour at the Malt Barn, the distillery’s on-site restaurant and bar, where samples of otherwise unavailable bottlings can be savored.

  Putting Things Together

  Following the rules isn’t the straitjacket it might seem. The distillers can still vary lots of things: the type of yeast and the speed of the fermentation affects the estery fruitiness of the spirit; the shape and size of the stills and the type of condenser affect the weight; the timing of the heads and tails cuts greatly affects the flavor and “cleanness” of the spirit; and then there’s the choice of wood for aging, the type of warehouse and its location, and how long the whisky stays in the wood.

  (Compare this, just to be mean, to America’s biggest-selling spirit, vodka. The distillers can use grain, potatoes, grapes, whatever; they can distill it once or — literally — 199 times, each time removing more flavor; they can filter it, and of course, dump a trendy new flavor into it, making all the preceding choices essentially null and void. And flavored or not, none of it makes one bit of difference once the vodka’s inevitably poured into a glass with Red Bull or tomato juice.)

  The master whisky blenders know their home distillery’s choices on those factors deep in their hearts and use them when they create expressions of single malt. Once an expression is created, the blender’s job is to use what stocks are available to maintain that expression, consistently.

  Remember, the age of an expression is not the age of every whisky in the bottle, or an average; it is merely the age of the youngest whisky in the bottle. With that baseline age, blenders can range upward and use what they need to keep the whisky tasting the same, every time. It’s a job that requires a keen, well-trained nose and a mind for detail and organization: how much stock do they have, of all ages, in what barrels, in which warehouses? How much should they be telling the distillers they need in 5 years, 12 years, 20 years? It’s a guess at best as the times get longer, but it has to be an informed guess.

  That’s just for single malts, at one distillery. Expand that job to making and maintaining the gigantic volumes of blended whisky that leave Scotland every week, and consider: now the blenders are faced with knowing other whiskies’ characteristics, how much is needed to get just the right note, what those stocks might be, and how they can be replaced in case of problems with supply, because after all, a lot of times the whiskies going into a company’s blends are made at distilleries owned by other companies. They’re traded back and forth in a complex system of equalities known generally as “reciprocity.”

  Don’t think the blends are simple matters of “throw some 3-year-old grain whisky in with 8-year-old malt from this distillery for sweetness and a little bit of 10-year-old from this distillery for a touch of smoke.” Blends can be quite complex, with several different aged grain whiskies and malts from 20 or more distilleries, carefully proportioned and married, and adjusted as needed when supplies vary.

  What Are Grain Whiskies?

  You’ll hear about blended Scotch being a mix of malt whiskies and grain whiskies. We know what malt whiskies are; those are all the single malts with the richly Scottish names. And grain whiskies, those are the whiskies made from grain — is malt a grain? What are grain whiskies, anyway?

  Grain whiskies are distilled from a variety of grains (usually whatever’s good and cheap; currently, that’s often wheat) to a very high proof on continuous, or column, stills. That part was explained at the beginning of this book. It’s not vodka, any more than Canadian blending whisky is vodka, because part of spirit is intent. This spirit is intended to be whisky, so different things will happen to it than filtration, dilution, fancy packaging, and forceful marketing.

  The high-proof whisky is aged in casks (most often former bourbon casks) for at least 3 years to smooth the rawness, giving it a creamy mouthfeel and notes of vanilla and coconut from the oak (and to make it legally “whisky”). Some grain whiskies are aged longer, of course. And some are bottled as just grain whiskies, with no malt whisky. They’re good enough to stand on their own; lighter in character, but still whisky.

  Most grain whisky goes into blended Scotch. Snobs may tell you that it’s used just to add cheap bulk and to dumb down the flavor. That may be the case in cheap blends, but in the flagships and the premium blends, the grain is as important as the malts, adding that mouthfeel and balancing the prickliness or thickness of the malts. If it were “just” grain whisky, blenders would just open the spigot on the tank and add it. But they blend in several different grain whiskies: different ages, different distillery sources. It’s whisky, true and solid. Respect it.

  Blends have been successful — wildly successful — for a simple reason. They fill a need, a desire, for a drink with a certain amount of a certain kind of flavor. They are not as intensely focused as single malts; they’re not meant to be. Blenders look at blending as the ability to make a whisky taste the way they want it to, not the one way a distillery produces it.

  The single malt whiskey produced by the Aberfeldy distillery in Perthshire, founded in 1896 in the Highlands of Scotland, is a major component of Dewar’s blended whisky.

  Just as there are different kinds of cars for different budgets and needs, there are different blends for different price points and palates. Need to get around but don’t have much money? Small used car; that is, a store-brand blend, or bargain label, meant to be mixed with seltzer or soft drinks. Want something a bit more luxurious, something a bit more pricey? Trade up to a new compact, or a “preowned” better line; try something with a bit more character, a bit more malt, and get to know your tastes for peat or sherry wood aging. Need something for commuting or running about town? A small, comfortable sedan or hatchback, fun but reasonable; or in other words, a good bottling for rocks or Scotch and soda and relaxation. Got that professional job, and you’re looking for something that’s really enjoyable? Sport sedan, highway cruiser, crossover: look at some blended malts or age-statement blends.

  And if you’ve hit it big, then you can really drive (drink) anything you’d lik
e. While you may think that means single malts, there are blends at that level, too: the Johnnie Walker Blue Label (perhaps even the King George V bottling), the Chivas Royal Salute Stone of Destiny, and the Black Bull 30 Year Old Deluxe, for example, are all excellent whiskies. We’ll talk about it more in subsequent chapters on Irish and Canadian whiskies, but just know this: blends can be simply excellent whiskies. The idea that they’re cheap, and not as good, is a relatively new one, and largely an outgrowth of single malt snobbery and a proliferation of lighter blends that started during Prohibition and kept on right up through the 1970s.

  Blends are circling back to what they used to be: a spectrum of choices, “flavor packages,” to use a phrase in vogue in the industry. Malts, on the other hand, have stubbornly stayed the same, even when they weren’t being sold on their own; blends have driven that trend, too, of course, because the blenders wanted and needed those consistent flavors.

  Now the consumers want those flavors, straight up in single malts. They want them so much that stocks are under pressure and prices have gone up and up. Some people predict that the price increases will bring drinkers back to more robust blends (though the “more robust blends” are often similar in price to entry-level single malts), but so far the sales of single malts continue to rise. Let’s take a look at how those flavors are kept consistent.

  Maintaining Malt Consistency

  If you tour more than three or four Scottish distilleries, you’re going to pick up some common themes. Frequently you’ll hear a distiller proclaim, “Our whisky can only be made in this particular spot”; this usually has to do with the water source or climate. You will also hear, “While other distillers may do things another way, here at this distillery we continue to do it this way”; this usually reflects a sensible refusal to mess with success. The one I particularly like is when a distiller points out the geometry or size of the stills; this, you’re told, “is what makes our whisky here unique,” with the strong implication that the stills were made to the order of some distilling genius.

  Twin “pagoda” kiln towers at the Strathisla Distillery in Keith, the oldest continuously operating distillery in Scotland.

  Well, yes and no. Yes, if you moved the distillery somewhere else, or you built a copy of it in another spot, the spirit would almost certainly be different; it’s been tried, it doesn’t work. It’s almost like an indefinable manufacturing equivalent of terroir, a combination of humidity, sunlight, water, wind, and other factors that bend a spirit in ways science can’t encompass. It sounds romantic, but it’s really quite scientific — chaos theory, as applied to distillery design — and alternately frustrating and wonderful, depending on who’s concerned. And certainly yes in the case of the stills, because the shape of a still has a direct bearing on reflux, which in turn directly affects the character of the spirit and ultimately the character of the whisky.

  However, talk to enough people in the industry, and you begin to realize that many of these logistical arrangements came about “just because,” not from any great plan of the original distiller or the master planner. You learn that stills were bought because they were affordable, often secondhand from a distiller who had gone out of business. Glenmorangie’s famously tall stills (at almost 17 feet, the tallest in Scotland), which make the whisky light in character and quite elegant, were famously bought secondhand from a gin distillery; rather than have them changed to fit the norm, Glenmorangie simply put them into service.

  After hearing so many similar stories, I was standing in the new expansion stillhouse at Glenlivet, looking at the stills and wondering, Why are they shaped in that particular way? I had the opportunity, so I asked Richard Clark, the brewer, exactly that question. He answered, with a bit of a grin, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

  Then he got quite earnest and continued, “But that’s really what it is. Do it the same way, whatever that way is. Because whatever reason they were made that way doesn’t matter. That’s how your spirit is made, and that’s how your spirit is. You’d never want to change it.”

  Glenlivet’s global brand ambassador, Ian Logan, took it from there (not the everyday tour guide, I’ll admit), when we started talking about how the distillery had expanded. They’d installed this second set of stills, built to the same ratios and proportions as the first. But these were fully automated: computer-actuated valves, temperature probes everywhere, and enabled to make every batch just like the one before.

  “It’s a balance, between tradition and expansion,” Logan said. “Is it about quality? Or consistency? We’ve bet on consistency. You may not get that rare amazing run every now and then, but the overall level of quality, every day, every run, is much higher than before. We’re retrofitting the same equipment on the old stillhouse.”

  “Still,” he said, “the automation doesn’t work without the people. Ten people make the second biggest production single malt whisky in the world; ten people make all of it. People make whisky.”

  The funny thing is, a day later I was in the stillroom at Dalmore, where things are manually controlled — barely. The stillhouse is a madhouse, with some very odd stills indeed: the wash stills with a cutoff flat top (the lore is that they were originally cut off to fit under the ceiling), the spirit stills with cold-water jackets around the necks to cool the copper for more reflux. There are two sets of stills, the newer one with the exact same quirks but on a much larger scale, and when everything comes together . . .

  “It’s an unbalanced distilling system,” stillman Mark Hallas noted. “The spirit’s different coming off the different stills, but over 24 hours of distilling, it balances.” He grinned. “Automate it all you want, the most important part is the meat in the machine.” He grinned again and tapped the side of his head. As Logan said, people make whisky.

  Sometimes, also, a person makes whisky. There is much said about the team, the cooperation necessary in the industry to make a whisky, and there are many factors that go into Dalmore other than the stills: the array of different types of casks they use, the multi-pathed blending of the casks to make the different whiskies. But right there in my notes from my visit to Dalmore it says: “The aroma in [the warehouse] is unique: salt, stemmy grape, malt, earth. What makes Dalmore what it is: eccentric stills, varied casks, careful selection and blending. And Richard Paterson.”

  Paterson has long been the master blender for Whyte & Mackay, the parent company of Dalmore, and a legend in the industry. He is The Nose, trained in blending by his father, said to have been the youngest man to become a master blender. Like David Stewart at Balvenie, Dr. Bill Lumsden at Glenmorangie, and many, many others, he has put his stamp on the whiskies from this distillery (and on the blends from Whyte & Mackay) for now and likely for years to come after his inevitable retirement. A single person in this position, with the right talents and a fairly free hand, can be enormously influential on how the whiskies are made at a distillery, how they are aged and blended.

  There is, of course, another factor at play in blends, and that’s inertia. Even a master blender has a hard time turning an established blend; you’ve got the flavor of the blend to preserve, of course, and the sales, and you don’t want to react to every twitch of the market’s palate when what’s old may become new at the speed of social media. There’s also the weight and impact of tens of thousands of barrels of whisky, all made the same way, and often in the same proportions; you can’t aim it in a different direction very easily. Changing a whisky has to be done very carefully, and with great deliberation.

  Finishing

  One way to add a new character to Scotch whisky was pioneered by Dr. Bill Lumsden at Glenmorangie and Balvenie malt master David Stewart in the 1990s, a technique that’s come to be called “finishing.” As a whisky comes to maturity, it is dumped from its bourbon or sherry cask into a different cask. These subsequent casks often were previously used for aging wines, such as Madeira, port, sauternes, or Malaga, or for aging rum or other spirits.

  Fi
nishing falls within whisky-making regulations because the casks are oak, and they are drained before being refilled with the whisky, so nothing is being physically added to the spirit. What is added is flavor, aroma, and synergistic effects between the new barrel character and the old. Carefully done, finishing can create something new and quite good.

  But finishing can also ruin good whisky. Pick the wrong barrel for a whisky, and the contrasts can ruin it. Leave it in the finishing barrel too long, and the finishing effects will overpower the whisky. I’ve had whiskies that suffered from too-long finishes; one was finished in a port cask, a wood that can be delightful if used skillfully, but one that can be dreadfully sweet and fruity if used too long.

  Finishing was quite the vogue for a while. It’s not as widely used as it was, but the blenders who continue to use it are, generally, the ones who have mastered it.

  Casks mature in the warehouse of the Glenmorangie distillery in Tain, Scotland. The wooden mallet is a “bung starter,” sharply hit on the sides of the bung to pop it out.

  How to Choose

  Having learned some of what goes into the putting-it-together side of Scotch whisky, how do you make a choice on what you’re going to drink? Much depends on your own tastes. I’d advise you to start with blends or flagship single malt bottlings, the 10- and 12-year-old (or 16-year-old, in the case of Lagavulin) malts that are the bread and butter of a range.