Whisky
Page 5
There’s yet I have forgotten
Which ye prefer to roast or sodden,
Wine and wastle, I dare say,
And that is routh of usequebay.
The verses are poor things; the observation was no doubt accurate.
Smollett says that ‘The Highlanders regale themselves with whisky, a malt spirit as strong as Geneva, which they swallow in great quantities without any signs of inebriation.’ That they had many opportunities for doing so, we gather from The Lyon in Mourning10 which snobbishly dismisses the hospitality of Skye, ‘all the publick houses there being mere whiskie houses’. But it is doubtful if the Highlanders were so free from the consequences of over-indulgence in whisky as Smollett would have us believe. There is evidence that the crafty Hanoverians found a way of employing whisky to loosen Highland tongues and loyalties, as a letter written by Lieutenant-Colonel Watson from Fort Augustus in 1747 shows: ‘How soon the posts are fixed the commanding officer at each station is to endeavour to ingratiate himself in the favour of some person in his neighbourhood by giving him a reward, or by filling him drunk with whisky as often as he may judge proper, which I’m confident is the only way to penetrate the secrets of these people.’
But whisky has a graver and more honourable association with the Jacobite romance than any that has yet been mentioned. On the crucial night before Culloden, when Prince Charles was drinking in Culloden House, other men were finding a strange and sacred use for whisky. In Bishop Forbes’ Journal we read: ‘Mr. John Maitland, chyrurgeon for the Soule … a Presbyter of the Episcopal Church of Scotland … was attached to Lord Ogilvie’s regiment in the service of Prince Charles, 1745. He administered the Holy Eucharist to Lord Strathallan on the Culloden field (where that gallant nobleman received his death wound), it is said, with oat cake and whisky, the requisite elements not being attainable.’
During the greater part of the eighteenth century whisky was, in the Lowlands, an entirely unfashionable drink. Yet here one must distinguish. The cheap, popular whisky, distilled by Robert Stein at Kilbagie, who was easily the largest manufacturer, was poor stuff, worth no more than the penny a gill it fetched.11 It was this raw, fiery tipple that the claret-drinking Lowland gentry and professional people despised and this, no doubt, that the mob in Aberdeen tossed off in half mutchkins to celebrate the acquittal of Lord George Gordon in 1781. But the cultivated taste of the lairds and the merchants did not reject the finer whiskies—when they could be obtained. ‘Whisky in these days,’ says a writer on Glasgow clubs of the eighteenth century,12 ‘being chiefly drawn from the large flat bottomed stills of Kilbaggie, Kermetpans, and Lochryan, was only fitted for the most vulgar and fire loving palates; but when a little of the real stuff from Glenlivet or Arran could be got it was dispensed with as sparing a hand as curaçoa or benedictine.’
Part of the distillery complex at Kennetpans
These were the days of great drinking in the North, when Smollett’s Highland gentleman in Humphrey Clinker spoke for his class in thinking it a grave disparagement of his family that not above a hundred gallons of whisky were consumed at his grandmother’s funeral, and when an ancient retainer pleaded with the guests at his master’s funeral, ‘that it might never be said to the disgrace of the master’s hospitality that any gentleman that was his guest got to bed otherwise than being carried’. Whisky and funerals appear to have had a particularly close connection,13 for we have another account of a similar servant who barred the exit to the guests with the solemn words: ‘It was the express will o’ the dead that I should fill ye a’ fou’ and I maun fulfil the will o’ the dead’.14 Need it be said that the pious duty was performed to the letter? ‘I assure you, Sir,’ said Bozzy to his mighty patron and victim, ‘there is a great deal of drunkenness in Scotland.’ Whereupon the Doctor uttered this majestic and memorable tribute to Scottish doggedness and capacity: ‘No, sir, there are people who died of dropsies which they contracted in trying to get drunk.’ But that may merely be an expression of Johnson’s contempt as a port-loving Englishman for what was in these days the main beverage of the upper-class Scotsman. (‘Claret for boys’.) Whisky must not be blamed for the intemperance of eighteenth century Scotland, when judges took their bottle of claret with them into court and when the enlightened opinion on the use of alcohol might be found in the profound remark of a Lord of the Court of Session (himself no whisky drinker) in addressing a jury: ‘It is said, gentlemen, that the accused perpetrated this atrocious deed when he was drunk. Gentlemen, if he would do this when he was drunk, what would he no’ do when he was sober!’
Powerfully assisted by the taxes on malt and ale, the popularity of whisky spread in Lowland Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet the whisky which thus conquered new territories was the rawest, cheapest, and nastiest of its kind, consumed because it produced the desired result of drunkenness more speedily and economically than ale. Unfortunately, too, when whisky found its way into literature after so many centuries of exile, it was praised by poets whose taste was unlikely to be discriminating. Robert Fergusson, the impoverished Edinburgh clerk, certainly did not drink himself into Bedlam on Glenlivet; Burns, the arch-propagandist of the spirit, was an Ayrshire peasant with a peasant’s taste for what was fiery and instant.15 It is probable that the poet laureate of whisky had but the slightest acquaintance with a whisky pleasing to civilized palates and that his muse, as he calls it, was nothing but the abominable Kilbagie of his day. No word of Burns’ gives the slightest impression that he had any interest in the mere bouquet or taste of what he drank; on the contrary, his eloquent praise is lavished on the heating, befuddling effects of whisky. If this was all that Burns sought, it would be idle to suppose that he had any real appreciation of the merits whisky might have. And Burns’ attitude to whisky has, through the extraordinary popularity of his verse, become almost universal. Whisky has been sung into fame as a ploughman’s dram.16
The taxes on native liquors and the duties on foreign spirits gave whisky such a swift popularity in the eighteenth century that it became in its turn an object of taxation. The earliest known excise of twopence per gallon was imposed in 1660; when English enthusiasm for the drink awakened, an import duty of half a crown a gallon on Scotch whisky was introduced. Immediately a great smuggling trade sprang up—as much as 300,000 gallons crossed the Border in one year. Then came the charging of a license duty on the contents of the still used by the distillers—ingeniously circumvented by the Scots, who altered their stills so as vastly to increase the speed of production.17 The net result of all this legislation was to create an immense illicit distilling industry in the Highlands. As late as 1820 at least half the whisky sold came from unlicensed distilleries. In 1814 all distillation in the Highlands in stills of less than 500 gallons was prohibited. But it was almost as impossible to make such legislation effective as it is to prevent a free American citizen from killing himself with the hip-flask horrors of the era of Prohibition. There were thousands of stills in the glens and the shielings, and not all of the whisky they made was bad. Much of it, on the contrary, was better than the products of the licensed distilleries, for it was made in parts of the country where the science of distilling, like the art of playing on the bag-pipes, was an immemorial tradition, and where the qualities of water and soil favoured it.
Now dawned the heroic age of whisky, when it was hunted upon the mountains with a price on its head as if it were a Stuart prince, when loyal and courageous men sheltered it in their humble cabins, when its lore was kept alive in secret like the tenets of a proscribed and persecuted religion. If whisky has not degenerated wholly into a vile thing in which no person of taste and discernment can possibly take an interest, it is because its tradition was preserved, by men whose names ungrateful posterity has forgotten, during years when the brutal and jealous Hanoverian government sought to suppress in the Highlands this last relic of the ancient Gaelic civilization. It is an extraordinary thing that, while Jacobite loyalty has found i
ts bards, this loyalty to a thing far more closely linked with Highland history than a Lowland family ever could become, has not yet been sung.
In 1814, we have noted, all distillation from stills of less that 500 gallons capacity was prohibited within the Highland Line; the result of this piece of inequitable legislation was that in 1823 there were 14,000 charges of illicit distilling as compared with a total of six charges fifty years later. Still licenses were abolished in 1817 so far as Great Britain was concerned, but they remained in Ireland. The development of whisky distilling during the nineteenth century took very different paths in Scotland and in Ireland. In the former country the small, illicit home still was supplanted by large, commercial distilleries; in the latter, licensed distilleries grew fewer but the amount of illicit ‘poteen’ distilling probably remained constant.18 In 1799 there were 87 distilleries in Scotland; in 1817 there were 108; in 1825, there were 329; in 1833, there were 243; and in 1908, there were 150. In 1779 there were no fewer than 1,152 licensed stills in Ireland; by 1800 this had fallen to 124; and by 1908 to 27.19
So far as Scottish whisky is concerned, the era of the illicit distillers, the so-called ‘smugglers’, is of capital importance. For it was they and not the large-scale purveyors of cheap whisky who kept alive an educated taste in whisky and the true traditions of its manufacture. It is significant that the chief centres of the ‘smuggling’ have become classic districts of whisky, Glenlivet, Strathden,20 the Glen of New Mill. Glenlivet became the centre of the smuggling industry of the North. The farmers of the glen, discovering that a demand for their product was springing up in the outside world, made up parties with trains of pack-animals laden with the products of their stills to carry the whisky over the mountains to the South. ‘We have seen,’ says a contemporary, ‘congregations of daring spirits, in bands of from ten to twenty men, with as many horses, with two ankers of whisky on the back of each horse, wending their way, singing in joyous chorus, along the banks of the Aven.’21
To those pious law-breakers, who were more exercised in spirit because the necessities of their mystery compelled them to work on the Sabbath than because it brought them under the notice of the excise department, the modern connoisseur of whisky owes a deep debt. As late as the ’twenties of last century there was no legal distillery in Glenlivet, where 200 illicit stills were at work. The Duke of Gordon, who was the principal landowner in the glen, told the House of Lords bluntly that the Highlanders were born distillers; whisky was their beverage from time immemorial; they would have it and would sell it too, when tempted by high duties. But if the legislature would pass an act making it possible to manufacture whisky as good as the ‘smuggled’ product on payment of a reasonable duty, he and his brother-proprietors of the Highlands would use their best endeavours to put down smuggling and to encourage legal distilling.
The government took the hint and the result was an act of 1823 sanctioning legal distilling at a duty of 2s. 3d. per gallon of proof spirit, with a license of £10 for each still over forty gallons. Smaller stills were made illegal.22 This act is of capital importance in the history of whisky. It imposed moderate instead of grotesque burdens on the industry. And, at the same time, it killed whisky-distilling in the home as distinct from the factory.23 But it could not have succeeded in this, had it not tempted enterprising individuals to undertake the manufacture of high-quality whisky. This, it was clear, could only be done in the areas where, as the ‘smugglers’ had proved, natural conditions favoured production. The first man to open a licensed distillery upon this sacred soil was Mr. George Smith, whose courage, both physical and commercial, should be remembered gratefully by all who have tasted that great whisky, ‘Smith’s Glenlivet’.
George Smith was born in 1792, the son of a Glenlivet farmer. He was an educated man of good family and the possessor of an excellent Latin style; he was in the beginning an architect and builder. But on his father’s death he took over the farming of Upper Drumin, which, like his neighbours, he combined with illicit distilling of whisky. In the year after Waterloo the output of his ‘bothy’ was a hogshead a week. Mr. Smith has himself told the rest of his story:
‘At length, in 1824, I, George Smith, who was then a powerful robust young fellow, and not given to be easily “fleggit,” determined to chance it. I was already a tenant of the Duke, and received every encouragement in my undertaking from his Grace himself, and his factor, Mr. Skinner. The lookout was an ugly one, though. I was warned before I began by my civil neighbours that they meant to burn the new distillery to the ground, and me in the heart of it. The laird of Aberlour presented me with a pair of hair-trigger pistols, worth ten guineas, and they were never out of my belt for years. I got together three or four fellows for servants, armed them with pistols, and let it be known everywhere that I would fight for my place till the last shot. I had a pretty good character as a man of my word, and through watching, by turn, every night for years, we contrived to save the distillery from the fate so freely predicted for it.
‘But I often, both at kirk and at market, had rough times among the glen people; and if it had not been for the laird of Aberlour’s pistols, I do not think I should have been telling you this story now. In 1825 and ’26 three more small legal distilleries were commenced in the Glen; but the smugglers succeeded very soon in frightening away their occupants, none of whom ventured to hang on a single year in the face of the threats uttered so freely against them. In 1825 a distillery which had just been started at the head of Aberdeenshire, near the Banks o’ Dee,24 was burned to the ground with all its out-buildings and appliances, and the distiller had a very narrow escape from being roasted in his own kiln. The country was in a desperately lawless state at this time. The riding officers of the revenue were the mere sport of the smugglers, and nothing was more common than for them to be shown a still at work, and then coolly defied to make a seizure.’
The task of the revenue officers in the Highlands, as they complained in 1784, was made more difficult because the distilleries were strategically situated on high ground which could not be overlooked. The surrounding lands were usually owned by the proprietors of the distillery who declined to allow the officers to build their houses in the vicinity. And, finally, large and fierce dogs were loosed upon any unwelcome visitors to the distillery.
The illicit distilling of Scotch whisky was not confined to the Highlands. There were 400 unlicensed stills in Edinburgh in 1777, when the number of licensed stills was only eight.25 In 1815 a ‘private’ distillery of considerable size was found under an arch of the South Bridge in the Scottish capital.26 The only entrance was by a doorway situated at the back of a fireplace in the bedroom of a house adjoining the arch. Water was obtained from one of the mains of the Edinburgh Water Company which passed overhead, and the smoke and waste were got rid of by making an opening in the chimney of an adjoining house and connecting to it a pipe from the distillery. In the mid nineteenth century a yet more scandalous instance of the Scottish aversion from paying duties occurred in Edinburgh when a secret distillery was found in the cellars under the Free Tron Church. But by that time the battle for legalised distilling had been won. It would no longer be the case that the finest whiskies could only be obtained by dubious and subterranean means from sources which could be but vaguely conjectured.
The modern history of whisky is so intimately associated with the development of manufacturing processes, with the commercial and financial aspects of what has become almost as much a science as an art and an industry rather than either, that it may be considered more conveniently under separate headings. We leave the story of whisky at a moment when it is exchanging a past illustrious and obscure for a present infinitely more prosaic, conducted in the full glare of modern commercialism and with all the devices at the disposal of a highly-capitalized, well-organized, large-scale industry. Whisky emerges from the shadows of the hermetic arts into the harsh limelight of the age of trusts and cartels and mass-production. The blue smoke rising warily above the heat
her dissolves and in its place there rises the gigantic image of one whose monocle, scarlet coat, top boots and curly-brimmed tall hat seem strangely remote from the glens and the clachans.27
1 MacDonald is here suggesting a Greek origin for the art of distillation. This whole passage on the origins of whisky is perhaps more romantic than historically accurate; more recent scholarship should be consulted if the reader is concerned with establishing whisky’s genesis. Perhaps, as MacDonald suggests earlier, it is ‘a question of no consequence’ and his poetic approach contains a deeper truth than that revealed in any pedantic chronology.
2 MacDonald fails to remark on the link between early distilling and alchemy, and does not mention Jabir ibn Hayyan, also known as Geber, polymath and father of modern chemistry, despite his name appearing in at least one of his apparent sources. It also seems unlikely, but possibly he was ignorant of the later work of the German Hieronymus Brunschwig.
More surprising still is his omission of the Wizard of Balwearie, Michael Scott, whose writings refer to ‘aqua ardens’, the earliest name for distilled alcohol. He returned to Scotland from study in Oxford, Paris and Toledo around 1230. Arguably he could be considered the father of Scotch whisky.