Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  Stealing Canadian Flavor

  When craft whiskey makers start their businesses, they always have a need for product, and they often buy bulk whiskey to bottle and sell. Some of it comes from places like MGP Ingredients, the old Seagram plant in Indiana, while some of it comes from distilleries that don’t like to share their names. Recently, some of it has come from Canada, where craft whiskey makers are buying bulk flavoring whisky.

  It’s perfect for the craft bottlers. American whiskey drinkers aren’t familiar with the character of straight Canadian flavoring whisky (few people are!); it’s likely rye whisky, and that’s hot right now. And the stocks are more plentiful than they are in the United States, where bulk whiskey stocks are drying up. You just have to know someone in Canada.

  Some of the Canadian-stock whiskeys are quite good, command a good price, and garner critical acclaim: WhistlePig, for instance. The question that comes to mind is easy: Why don’t the Canadians do this? They’d get a whole new market; a niche market, true, but one with a nice profit margin.

  The answer, I’ve decided, after talking to people in the Canadian whisky business, is that they’re just not interested. That’s not how they make whisky. Rick Murphy, the production superintendent and master distiller at Alberta Distillers Ltd. in Calgary, told me that Canadian whisky makers develop a blender’s mind-set. “It’s a unique landscape,” he said.

  Who am I to say they’re wrong?

  Toronto’s Distillery District, formerly the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, is now home to a variety of shops and entertainment venues, including Balzac’s Coffee Roasters, housed in the former pump house.

  Comprehend the Blend

  I have to be honest with you. I really understood how Canadian whisky was made only in the last few years, when I began visiting Canadian distillers and talking to Davin de Kergommeaux, the author of Canadian Whisky: The Portable Expert. Coming to Canadian whisky from the outside is not easy. The way the distillers make this whisky is different from how other whiskies are made.

  The fascinating thing for me is that tasting Canadian blended whiskies both before and after I fully understood how they were made and what they were intended to be has led me to reconsider some long-held prejudices about Canadian whisky, blended Scotch, and grain whisky. The frustrating thing now is encountering whisky drinkers who clearly still have those prejudices and not being able to get through to them with my newfound enlightenment.

  The Canadians don’t help this situation. Take the terminology, for instance. The people in production tend to be blunt and honest and call a thing what it is without looking over their shoulder to see what the marketers would rather they called it. The marketers, meanwhile, seem stuck in the 1980s, promoting Canadian whisky as a lifestyle product, when the growing interest in whisky worldwide has made focusing on the whisky itself a much more effective way to promote it.

  For instance, when I toured the Black Velvet distillery in Lethbridge, Alberta, the technical staff flat-out called their base whiskey “GNS.” That’s industry-speak for “grain neutral spirits,” the flavorless commodity alcohol that’s distilled as pure as it can feasibly be done (you run into problems with water absorption above 96 percent purity). In America it’s the stuff that’s added, unaged, to bargain booze as a cheap enhancer; that’s how Americans make “blended whiskey.” Black Velvet’s base whisky is as clean and pure as GNS when it comes off the still, but it’s absolutely not used as a cheap booze enhancer; it’s aged in wood and develops flavor and character of its own, a real contribution to the blend. For once, over years of visiting distilleries and talking to distillers, I thought the conversation maybe could have used a marketer’s touch.

  Similarly, I was interviewing Andrew MacKay, the revered master blender for Crown Royal, for the Whisky Advocate blog a couple of years ago, and he casually defined base whisky as the stuff that “comes off the still with the characteristics of a vodka.” He then explained that the base whisky is aged in used barrels: “If you have a barrel that had just contained bourbon, and put that vodka in it, it pulls out the fruity aromas and flavors from the wood. That’s part of our arsenal.” He was explaining exactly how base whisky is used in Canadian whisky blending, but the blog readers seized on the word “vodka” and beat Canadian whisky to death with it.

  Interestingly, when I toured Black Velvet and the Hiram Walker distillery (home to the Wiser’s and Lot No. 40 brands; Canadian Club is also made there), they both offered their unaged base whisky for tasting (with plenty of water!). It was, in both cases, a briskly clean spirit, with the same bond-paper aroma I prize in a high-quality vodka, and just the slightest hint of dry grain. (Do you remember what good bond paper smells like? Dry, like well-washed linen, with a tiny tang of acid?) But the people at Walker also offered their Polar vodka as a comparison, and the difference was distinct; the vodka was not as zesty, though just as hot with alcohol. It was rounded and clean, as if the interesting bits had been sanded off, whereas the base whisky was lively, especially in comparison.

  Exceptions To The Rule

  Canada is developing its own small craft brewers, and like craft brewers in America and Europe, they do things their own way. There are also two established Canadian distilleries that make whisky in a different way from the rest of the country. The first is Glenora, a malt whisky distillery that makes its spirit in copper pot stills; appropriately enough, it’s located in Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”). Glenora took a good 10 years to find its feet, after a change in ownership and a long legal fight with the Scotch Whisky Association over its Glen Breton brand name. The SWA’s hackles are raised whenever a non-Scottish whisky puts anything Scottish on its label, and “Glen” is near the top of the list. Glenora, with its Scottish heritage, located in the town of Glenville, eventually prevailed. It didn’t hurt their case that their labels sport a large, red Canadian maple leaf.

  Glenora suffered a bit from a lack of distilling experience in the early years, and its whisky was a bit murky in flavor, with the off-putting soapy/green vegetation character typical of poorly made spirit cuts. That’s increasingly behind it, and it’s developing a better reputation.

  The other nontraditional distillery is Forty Creek, in Grimsby, Ontario, between the shores of Lake Ontario and the long, looming cliff of the Niagara Escarpment; it’s part of the Kittling Ridge Winery. That’s where John Hall uses the exacting care of a chemical engineer and the blending palate of a winemaker to craft his Forty Creek whiskies. He follows Canadian tradition to some extent: his whiskies are blended from different outputs. But he does it his way.

  Hall makes whisky from three grains: corn, barley malt, and rye. He mashes, ferments, and distills each one separately and then ages them separately, in different types of barrels for each grain. Once the whiskies are mature, he blends them. He will then “marry” the blend in another barrel (some used, first-fill bourbon barrels, some in Kittling Ridge Winery sherry barrels). It makes an excellent whisky, and Hall is a great ambassador for it.

  Glenora Distillery in Nova Scotia: It only looks like it’s in Scotland.

  Is that enough of a difference to make one alcohol “vodka” and the other “whisky”? Likely not, but that misses the point, and it’s an important one. Vodka is intended to be sold as is; base whisky is intended for aging and blending. Is it “really” whisky? It’s made from grain, it’s fermented and distilled, it’s aged in oak. It is for all intents and purposes the same product that is called “grain whisky” in Scotland, and no one in the industry questions whether that is whisky.

  If you’re still not convinced, let me tell you what convinced me. Part of my job as managing editor at Whisky Advocate is to review whiskies for the magazine’s buying guide, and part of that task is to pick a winner for the magazine’s annual awards from the categories I review. I was reviewing Canadian whiskies for a time, and the winner I selected in 2011 was Wiser’s 18-year-old. There were some whiskies that were more exciting that year, but the Wiser’s was a bette
r whole, a delightful whisky to sip, though I wouldn’t hesitate to mix with it as well because of its well-rounded character. As I described it, it has “a nose of hot cereal with a dusting of dry cocoa and oaky vanilla, and hints of figs and sesame oil. The palate yields clean grains — a real crack of rye among them — and oak, dried apricot, unsweetened licorice, and a long finish of warming rich cereal.” A delightful whisky, really, and Wiser’s 18-year-old is still one of my favorite Canadians, even after a much broader tasting experience than I had at the time.

  When I was at the Hiram Walker distillery and tasted the base whisky, as I related above, master blender Dr. Don Livermore had laid out a tasting of a huge range of whiskies and aging spirits from all the distillery’s different “streams,” at varied ages. One of them was the Wiser’s 18-year-old, and I enjoyed it again, and asked him what ages and streams went into the whisky.

  I was stunned — yes, “stunned” is not an exaggeration — to learn that the Wiser’s 18-year-old is made entirely from base whiskies, aged in barrels that had been already used once to age Canadian whisky. There’s none of the more complex, lower-ABV, “better” flavoring whisky in there.

  After I recovered my composure by having another sip, I continued tasting the other whiskies, but my mind was turning. This was it, the key to Canadian whisky. Things I’d heard, things I’d tasted, things I’d read — it all fit together now. It made me think of something Andrew MacKay had said about Crown Royal’s creamy, smooth, sweet character.

  “It’s designed to feel and taste this way,” he said. “It’s quite distinct from bourbon; it’s quite distinct from Scotch. We try to be very distinctive, and we know we have to make our distillate the best it can be; we can’t just depend on the wood. All the whiskies are aged separately, in individual barrels, different [batches].”

  “The calendar is really a guide,” he said. “You’re moving backward and forward in time. What I’m making today is for 10 years from now: these are the whiskies I need to make, these are the barrels to put them into. But I’m also looking back, seeing what I actually have from 10 years ago, and how it’s matured. You have to consider the evaporative loss, where it’s produced, the barrels you have, how much they cost.”

  I had told him at the time that this was exactly the kind of thing Canadian distillers should be explaining to consumers, why Canadian whisky is the way it is, and what a painstaking process blending really is. He laughed, and agreed, and confirmed what he’d said. “We make it this way on purpose,” he said again.

  Any marketers listening?

  Embargo!

  So there I was, tasting whiskies at Black Velvet, making my way around the table, and Jan Westcott, who is the president of the Association of Canadian Distillers and was along on the trip (great guy; no sense of direction at all), is getting nervous. I can’t figure out why, so I keep tasting, and I get to the Danfield’s 10-year-old — the what? “What’s this Danfield’s?” I asked. Not exported, is the answer. Oh, okay. But it’s got the wood shop/cedar-oak shavings aroma I’ve noticed in good Canadian, wrapped in sweet caramel, and a good flavor, but a bit of a drop-off at the end.

  Okay, let’s try this Danfield’s 21. Hey, nice stuff! A big nose of fresh-sawn oak, vanilla, mint, rye zing, and a deliciously luxurious mouth of sweet cereal and more of that wood and rye popping on toward the finish. “Hey, why don’t we get this?” I sang right out.

  “There’s not enough of it!” Jan quickly replied. “You can’t have any of it!” He was grinning, but you know? The Canadians do that a lot! For the longest time we didn’t get the good stuff. Gibson’s Finest, nothing from Alberta Distillers, Wiser’s, nothing from Highwood, the Canadian Club 20- and 30-year-old bottlings, and of course, the Danfield’s: they kept it almost all to themselves.

  Why? Well, they tend to underprice the stuff, so there’s not enough money for marketing and promotion (especially after they’ve paid Canada’s pretty stiff excise taxes), and that makes it hard to afford the education it’s going to take to get us to understand Canadian. They’ve got a great market for it at home that drinks up all the good stuff they make, so where’s the need? And they sell a lot of the regular stuff to us; the standard bottlings of Canadian whisky still do very well here.

  But they could be doing better if they brought the good stuff and helped folks understand what’s going on with this misunderstood whisky. Canada’s an export economy, has been for a long time, and they should think about exporting some of their top whiskies.

  Japanese: The Student Becomes the Master

  “The reason we started making whisky at Yamazaki was the very, very good water there. To make a good tea, you need good water. Tea master Sen Rikyu built his first teahouse there. Very humid air, which is important to whisky maturation; if it’s too dry, you lose too much whisky through evaporation. Even in the winter, it is not dry. Three rivers meet there, and the difference in temperature creates fog. The air is always filled with moisture.”

  Mike Miyamoto, the former master distiller for Suntory and now its global brand ambassador, was explaining to me why Shinjiro Torii built the first whisky distillery in Japan at Yamazaki, on the island of Honshu, back in 1923. Yamazaki is also situated between Kyoto and Osaka, two major markets. Although the distillery sits on the edge of town, with thickly wooded hills rising steeply behind it, it was built within shouting distance of the railway and near the old main road between Kyoto and Osaka; today the multilane Meishin Expressway tunnels under those background hills. Commercial convenience is not to be overlooked, but you can always find a way to ship good whisky — just ask the distillers on Islay — while good water is not always easy to find.

  As we’ve already learned, Torii’s first distiller, Masataka Taketsuru, left Suntory and Yamazaki in 1934, not too long after the release of the first whisky, which was not a commercial success. After some ventures in nonwhisky companies, he would, with the help of interested investors in the Nikka distilling company, build a competing distillery, Yoichi, on the northern island of Hokkaido. Yoichi sits on the west coast, a fishing town of some 20,000 people, noted for the quality of the local apples. It is almost as if Taketsuru wanted isolation to create the whisky he wanted to make.

  These are the Big Two whisky makers of Japan. Suntory and Nikka would each build an additional distillery. Suntory built the giant Hakushu plant in the 1970s, at the foot of the Japanese Alps, near Hokuto, west of Tokyo. Taketsuru would build Miyagikyo on the northern end of Honshu in the late 1960s, tucked into a valley west of Sendai, personally selecting the spot — reportedly for the water — and planning the distillery while in his 70s.

  And that is about it. There are four other whisky distilleries in Japan, all small and all on Honshu: tiny and independent Chichibu; Eigashima, where whisky is made only 2 months a year when the plant is not making sake and shochu; and Fuji-Gotemba and Karuizawa (which is currently mothballed, as is half of Suntory’s Hakushu plant, victim of the early 1990s crash of the Japanese economy), both owned by Kirin Brewery. Their whisky is hard to find even in Japan.

  Happily, the whiskies from Suntory and Nikka not only are easy to find in Japan but also are becoming easier to find in world markets. That’s leading to a reassessment of Japanese whisky, as the rest of the world discovers that it’s not only good but also distinct, despite its obvious Scottish roots and connections and similar label terminology.

  Japanese: Flavor Profile for Iconic Bottlings

  This chart rates five core characteristics on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being faint to absent, and 5 being powerful and fully present.

  An Irish Twist

  Japanese whisky making had its origins in Scotland, with the direct experience of Taketsuru-san in Campbeltown. But Torii-san quickly moved to put a Japanese sensibility on Suntory’s whisky, moving away from the bold character of Taketsuru’s first effort toward a more subtle and balanced whisky.

  Again, Mike Miyamoto explains. “Shinjiro Torii wanted to create whisky to appeal to the
Japanese palate, a delicate palate. We like well-balanced, mild, and sophisticated whisky. Once you sip it and taste it on the palate, you taste many different characters, different tastes coming out.”

  To get a Japanese palate from a Scottish type of whisky, Suntory (and Nikka) used a very Irish kind of process. Japanese distillers needed a range of whiskies, and unlike Scotland, they couldn’t just go out to other distilleries that made different whiskies and start trading to get what they needed. (Given the history between Torii and Taketsuru — which was never openly hostile, but distant — it’s not surprising that they don’t even trade between each other.) The only way to get different whiskies was the Irish way: make them yourself.

  Japanese whisky makers use wild variety in their fermentation and distillation processes to produce a wide range of whiskies from what is, for now, a small number of distilleries.

  Suntory and Nikka both vary every angle of the fermentation and distilling process to get that variety. They use different yeasts, vary fermentation times for different aromatics from the yeast, employ both wooden and steel washbacks (the wooden ones will harbor microflora that will add flavors to the wash), and use varying degrees of peated malt.

  Suntory’s stillhouses are not the uniform ranks of identical pot stills you’ll see at big Scottish distilleries like Glenfiddich and Glenlivet, but a somewhat jarring assembly of different designs, paired off with each other for different amounts of reflux; they can even be reconfigured to a degree as needed, all of which will affect the weight and mouthfeel of the spirit. The cuts of foreshots, hearts, and feints are varied. There are steam-heated stills and ones heated by direct contact with flame; Nikka uses coal at Yoichi, a delightful throwback to the old days in Scotland. The grain whiskies are changed up in similar fashion, though not as varied.