Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  Meanwhile, a new kind of whiskey made largely from corn was being made down the Ohio River in Kentucky: bourbon. Another new whisky-making tradition was growing up in Canada: blended whiskies, which quickly became the norm. And in America, France, and Canada (and later Scotland), a hybridization with French brandy technology — storage in barrels that were toasted or charred on the inside — would change whiskey from the fiery, off-clear spirit it had been since its birth to the amber beauty we know today.

  Bourbon and rye benefited suddenly from this new aging technique, getting the nicknames “red liquor” and “Monongahela red” from the deep color the charred wood imparted. The oak made a perfect container for the whiskey, and the longer a distiller (or retailer — whiskey was sold in full barrels at the time, and a store or tavern would pour from the barrel) kept it, the better it got.

  Scotch whisky started to benefit from barrel aging at around the same time. The ports of England and Scotland received barrels of wine from continental Europe; in the thriving economy of the post-Napoleonic era, Britain grew rich and drank up the best of France and Spain and Portugal, particularly sherry. Distillers stored their whisky in these secondhand barrels and made the same discovery about their properties that American bourbon distillers had. It was a new world.

  Two things then cemented whiskey’s place in the world: steam power and the phylloxera aphid. Steam power and the industrial revolution came to distilling and made possible great breweries and distilleries. The invention of the steam-heated column still allowed the production of great quantities of mild-flavored grain whisky, which blenders used to tame the full flavors of pot-distilled malt whisky. This blended Scotch whisky was more popular than its predecessors — it fit the tastes of more people.

  Moonshine whiskey, on its way to market in the southern Appalachians, 1860s

  But what really made Scotch whisky the power it still is today was the destruction of Europe’s vineyards by the phylloxera aphid. The French were making and selling vast amounts of cognac to the British; sales in the UK tripled in 15 years in the mid-1800s, to about 65 million bottles annually. Then the aphid struck, feeding on and destroying the roots of French grapevines. By the time the cognac producers had grafted their vines to phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks, they found that thirsty Britons had switched to the newly drinkable blended Scotch, and now it was selling around the world as the empire expanded.

  Though the market for Scotch whisky expanded tremendously toward the end of the nineteenth century, it crashed as the century turned and the speculative bubble burst. The Irish at first picked up the slack, only to crash along with the Americans when Prohibition burst onto the scene after World War I. Prohibition, far from being the free-for-all for whiskey smuggling portrayed by popular fiction, was a disaster for whiskey companies around the world. Imagine, after all, America as a thriving market for whiskey, from both its own distillers and distillers around the world, importing shiploads of whiskey from overseas and carloads from Canada, shipping Kentucky and Pennsylvania whiskey across the country on its modern rail system. Then suddenly the only way to move whiskey into the country was on tiny motorboats landing on beaches, and the only way to move it around the country was on rickety trucks on back roads. Production and sales plummeted. Things didn’t get a lot better after Repeal; there wasn’t any aged whiskey left in America, and Scotch and Irish whiskey hadn’t recovered.

  Then whiskey went to war. World War II demanded full mobilization of national industry, and whiskey distillation was deemed nonessential. (Churchill must not have been consulted.) Instead, whiskey makers converted to making industrial alcohol for chemical feedstock. When the war was finally over, whiskey had been banged around for decades, but distillers believed that the good times were coming back at last. As we all know from watching Mad Men, for at least a while they were right.

  In “Woman’s Holy War” (1874), armored women with lethal-looking battleaxes shatter casks of liquor. The crusade for temperance led to Prohibition in 1920, with devastating and long-lasting effects on the burgeoning whiskey industry.

  Fall and Rise

  The good times didn’t last. Beginning in the 1960s, consumers around the world began to turn away from whiskey and increasingly embraced vodka and light rum. The change hit hard in the early 1980s, when a glut of Scotch whisky — the “Whisky Loch” — led again to a crash in the industry. Bourbon and Canadian whisky began a long, gradual decline.

  Vodka would continue to rise in popularity until the 2008 recession, taking over a third of U.S. spirits sales. But the seeds of whiskey’s return had been planted in the scorched fields of whiskey’s fall. The 1980s saw an increase in single malt Scotch releases, a new thing for Scotch whisky. Independent bottlers such as Elgin grocers Gordon & MacPhail had for years been buying casks from local distillers, aging them in their own warehouse, and bottling them for sale as singles, but now single malts were being released on a much larger scale, led by Glenfiddich.

  Bourbon began its turnaround with the growth of Maker’s Mark, a smoother wheated bourbon, and the creation of Blanton’s single-barrel bottling and Booker’s unfiltered cask-strength bourbon. The small but growing acceptance of these bottlings would set an example for the industry and get bourbon some of the attention it deserved.

  Irish whiskey began the process of survival and revival by consolidating: by 1966 all the distillers left in the Republic of Ireland had united in one company, Irish Distillers. Ten years later they built a modern distillery in Midleton and bought Bushmills, the remaining distillery in the north. They decided to reformulate Irish whiskey as a lighter, blended whiskey, and that laid the groundwork for the tremendous growth that category has seen over the past 20 years.

  That’s about where I entered the fray, in the supporting role of whiskey media. The increasingly sure and respected voices of people like Michael Jackson (he’s best known in America as a beer writer, but in the UK his reputation is for whisky writing), Jim Murray, David Broom, John Hansell, Gary Regan, Charlie MacLean, and Chuck Cowdery brought respect and interest to the category, and the launch of two magazines for the whiskey consumer, Whisky Advocate, where I’ve worked for 17 years, and Whisky Magazine, made the reach even greater. Social media, blogging, and the instant “tell me more” magic of Google added powerful immediacy to it all.

  But whiskey truly works best at a personal level: face to face, glass in hand. When whiskey festivals, such as WhiskyFest and Whisky Live, were launched and began to thrive, they changed the public’s perception of whiskey. When the real aficionados thought of their brands, they didn’t think of Wild Turkey and Glenmorangie; they thought of master distiller Jimmy Russell and whisky creator Dr. Bill Lumsden. These were the people who’d been quietly working for years in relative solitude, known mostly only to the distillery workers they saw every day. These events brought them into the public eye; they made them rock stars.

  That changed things even more. It gave whiskey authenticity. It had always had it, of course, but now the public actually saw it. Real people made the whiskey, and the public could meet them, talk to them, ask them questions, and thank them. It was an explosively powerful shift, realized in such events as the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, the Islay Whisky Festival, and the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival — celebrations of whiskey right in the heart of where it’s made, and where tens of thousands of people now visit every year. They come to see where their whiskey is made, and has been made, for over 200 years.

  It’s been a wild ride for whiskey, this past 20 years. It was a complete turnaround, from declining sales to the most powerful force in the world of alcohol beverages, as beer falters (except for the flavorful, authentic craft category; see a connection?) and wine climbs out of a glut. We drank our way through the wonderful aged whiskeys left over from the glut of the 1980s, and now prices are rising. Production’s catching up, and there are more whiskeys to try than ever.

  We see more differences in whiskey as well, and this will be
a waking time for new tastes and flavors in whiskey. I remember something Anchor Distilling founder Fritz Maytag, one of the early pioneers of craft distilling, said a few years back at a rye whiskey roundtable interview we did for Whisky Advocate. We had 10 rye whiskey distillers, bottlers, and retailers sitting around talking about the renaissance of rye whiskey, and about the amazing super-aged stuff that was coming out of warehouses at the time.

  We knew the supply of older whiskeys wouldn’t last, but Maytag said that not only was it not a bad thing, but that it would lead to something else. “Broadly speaking, the whiskey world thinks that older whiskey’s better,” he said. “And older whiskey is different. Wonderfully different. But I submit to you that, especially because we have a big shortage of rye whiskey, you are all going to discover the beauty of young rye whiskey.” As I taste some very young, very interesting ryes from craft distillers these days, I know how right he was, and how true that thought holds for a lot of new whiskeys.

  That’s what whiskey’s been through, and where it is now. In the next chapter we’ll talk about how it goes from grain to the state of the original whiskey: raw, clear spirit. Let’s get to work.

  Making Spirit: Fermentation and Distillation

  If you want to learn about tasting whiskey, you need to find out what it is, how it’s made, and what goes into it. You could simply walk up to a glass, have a sniff and a sip, and taste it completely blind, ignorant of everything but the moment in front of you . . . but why on earth would you want to?

  That’s the kind of thing distillers and writers and other whiskey experts are asked to do in competitions, in formal judging situations. We’re not tasting for pleasure, for enjoyment, or for celebration; we’re working. That’s not to say there aren’t great moments! But it’s better when you’re placed in the full knowledge of where the whiskey came from, how it was aged, who picked the barrels. You can put the whiskey in context, and then you’ll not only know what it tastes like, you’ll understand something of why, and you’ll know more about what to expect from your next whiskey from that distiller, or that blender, or that region or type.

  The most elemental things to know about a whiskey have to do with how it is made. There are similarities in how the world’s whiskeys are made, but the differences, the delicious variations, are in the details. Almost everything can be played with, tweaked, or changed wholesale, and has been, by some distiller, somewhere, at some time. The good results are still around.

  There’s a simple start to it. The first thing you have to learn is that all whiskey starts as grain — no exceptions, no “potato whiskey” or “apple whiskey.” If it ain’t grain, it ain’t whiskey.

  Barley, corn, rye, and wheat are the most common, but there are whiskeys out there made with oats, quinoa, hybrid grains like triticale, and buckwheat (which is not technically a grain, but it malts like one and can be ground to flour like one). Sometimes it’s a matter of necessity — you make it with what you’ve got — but most often there was a choice, and usually either the most tasty or the most economical grain wins out. It’s not far off the process you go through when you look at the selection at the liquor store; that one tastes exceptional, but I can buy three bottles of this pretty good one for the same price.

  Grain may seem like an unnatural source of liquid upon first look: dry, dusty, and usually turned into bread or cattle feed. It’s what’s chemically bound in the grain that makes it an exceptional way to make whiskey (and beer). Take a kernel of barley, or corn, and slice it open. Inside you’ll find tiny, tiny clumps of hard, insoluble starches, held in a matrix of proteins. Whiskey needs neither. But the starches can be chemically converted to sugars, and that’s just the ticket for whiskey.

  Grain gets made into whiskey through a series of chemical changes, actually. We’ll get into each of the changes in general throughout this chapter, but here’s a general overview: after the plant does its chemical job of turning water and dirt and sunlight into stalk and grain, it is harvested and cleaned. If it’s barley, headed for Scotch whisky, it’s malted, a natural process that gets the grain to sprout. Sprouting releases enzymes that convert the hard starches to softer starches. The malt, as it’s now called, and any other grains, are then ground and cooked. Cooking activates plant enzymes that chemically convert the starches to sugars. (Distillers of other whiskeys, such as American bourbons, add malt to their recipes, not for the flavor but for these enzymes; Canadian distillers culture the enzymes and add them directly.)

  That’s the cue for the next player: yeast. This little fungus eats sugar, reproduces like mad, and gives off carbon dioxide and alcohol. Up to this point, the process is practically identical to that of brewing beer. But now the alcohol needs to be extracted and concentrated (that is, distilled). The mixture is heated in a still, where, with its lower boiling point, the alcohol evaporates faster than the water. The alcohol vapor is collected and condensed. It is usually distilled again at least once to clean it up a bit, and then it is reduced to a standard barreling proof (the percentage of alcohol in the whiskey) and put in oak barrels.

  That’s where the next chapter begins, though, so it’s time to dig into the details on grain, fermentation, and distillation.

  How to Make Whiskey

  The Mother Grain

  Whiskey is grain, as much as bread is, but in liquid, concentrated form. Think of how different breads are: a dark round of pumpernickel, a sweet golden wedge of cornbread, a dense and chewy loaf of whole wheat. Similarly, whiskey’s character derives largely from the predominant grain — the mother grain.

  Barley and Malt

  Each whiskey around the world has its mother grain. For Scotch it’s clearly barley, or malt, as it’s called when it’s been through the malting process. Although just about any grain can be malted, the overwhelmingly most commonly malted grain is barley (mostly because of the popularity of beer), and so it is usually generically referred to as “malt,” as in malt whisky or single malt whisky.

  Barley is a preferred grain for whiskey for the same reason that almost all the world’s beer is based on malt: it is relatively easy to malt, a controlled process of partial sprouting. The grains are stuffed with starches, which serve as concentrated food sources for sprouting and are easily converted to sugars. The sugars are the part of grain that eventually becomes whiskey. That’s another reason malt is used for making beer and whiskey: it tastes good.

  The barley grain’s endosperm holds the starches that are converted into sugar through the whiskey-making process.

  That’s why it’s been around for so long. Malting is an ancient discovery, dating back to the beginnings of civilization, in Mesopotamia. We know malting took place that far back because there is physical evidence and written records of brewing from the period of the Sumerians, around 4000 BCE.

  It’s a simple enough concept, though a bit more complicated in execution. Grains sprout in the spring, when they warm up from winter and are wet by spring rains. This sprouting, or germination, serves the true purpose of the grain: reproduction. When the conditions for sprouting occur, enzymes are released in the grain and break down the protein matrix that holds the hard starches in place. The shoot begins to grow, consuming the starches as they are converted to sugar.

  That’s not good for whiskey, though; distillers want to get as much sugar out of each kernel as they can. That’s called the yield, and it’s the kind of cost-crunching number that a volume business lives and dies on. So malting is a tightly controlled process, with temperature, humidity, and timing all carefully monitored.

  The barley is steeped in water for perhaps 2 days. Then it is drained and allowed to germinate. During that time, the barley has to be turned, either by hand or with machines, to keep the sprouts from intertwining and forming unmanageable clumps. The enzymes are at work during the sprouting, breaking down the protein matrix to expose the starches.

  Once soaked, barley kernels are spread across a distillery’s maltings floor to germinate, modifying the
starches that will eventually be converted to sugars and then whiskey. They’re turned regularly to keep them from clumping.

  When the conversion is at its peak, and before the shoot begins to consume significant amounts of food, the germination process is cut off by heating the malt in a kiln. Eddie McAffer, manager at the Bowmore distillery on the island of Islay, showed me an old maltster’s trick called “chalking the malt” to see if the malt’s getting ready for the kiln. He picked up a kernel of malt from the maltings floor at the distillery and scraped it down the grayish plastered wall. It left a white streak. “Close to done,” he said, explaining that the softened starches will make a mark, while a kernel that hasn’t changed enough — “undermodified” — won’t. He knows what he’s talking about; he started with Bowmore in 1966, turning malt by hand on that same maltings floor.

  When it’s fully modified, the green and still damp malt is put in a kiln, where hot air blows through it, drying it and killing the sprout. The idea is to get it hot enough to stop growth, but not so hot as to roast the malt or denature the enzymes.

  This is where peat smoke will be introduced, if desired. Malt kilns today use hot air that is free of any smoke or combustion smells, but 200 years ago that wasn’t so easy, and malt often had a smoky aroma from the drying process. There are two uses of malt where that smell is still wanted and steps are taken to preserve it: brewing in the style of the German rauchbier (“smoke beer”) and a significant number of Scotch (and Japanese) whiskies.