Whisky

by Aeneas MacDonald

  3 A similar phrase appears in Raphael Holinshed’s 1577 History of Ireland. Appropriately enough, the Irish distillers John Jameson & Sons, then of Dublin, took this as the title of a charming little promotional pamphlet issued in 1950.

  4 It was, of course, Friar John Cor. It has been calculated that, with modern apparatus, around 1,500 bottles of whisky could be distilled from eight bolls (about 0.4 tonnes), though we do not know at what strength Cor would have distilled his spirit. Alternatively, other sources suggest that he would have produced around 130 litres of alcohol or 420 bottles in present-day terms.

  Cor distilled at the Tıronensian abbey at Lindores in Fife, destroyed by followers of John Knox in 1559 and long left derelict. However, there are now plans to build a small distillery and visitor centre there.

  5 There are some fifteen further references to aqua vitae in the Exchequer Rolls up to 1512; these may have been for experiments with gunpowder, cosmetics or even embalming fluid. We simply don’t know.

  6 The reference is to the 1609 Statutes of Iona, the precise meanings of which are hotly debated. The effect of the statutes was to permit local chiefs to buy both wine and whisky from Lowland suppliers but to prohibit tenants and ‘country people’— who were nonetheless permitted to make and consume their own spirits ‘to serve thair awne housis’—from purchasing it from merchants. The aim seems to have been to improve the economic condition of the poor.

  7 Though Burns was himself, towards the end of his short life, an Excise officer he was well aware of the unpopularity of that branch of government service and the widely held view that the taxation of malt and barley was a breach of the 1707 Treaty of Union. However, the Excise officers could laugh at themselves: Burns wrote his song ‘The Deil’s Awa Wi’ The Exciseman’ for his colleagues at a 1792 Excise court dinner, where doubtless it was performed with vigour.

  8 Regrettably, I have been unable to trace the source of this quotation though subsequent writers on whisky such as Robert Bruce Lockhart and Joseph Earl Dabney happily repeat it without attribution.

  9 The chronology is somewhat confused and confusing here: Cleland wrote his mock poem sometime before 1697 as a satire on the perceived fondness of Highland Scots for whisky.

  10 In The Lyon in Mourning, a collection by Robert Forbes, Episcopal Bishop of Ross and Caithness, of reminiscences about the Jacobite Rising, we learn that Bonnie Prince Charlie would ‘put the bottle of brandy or whiskie to his head and take his dram without any ceremony’. It is said that in later years Forbes permitted favoured guests to drink out of Prince Charlie’s brogues which he retained as a souvenir.

  11 MacDonald is being a trifle harsh here. James and John Stein were real pioneers and it can be argued that their distilleries at Kılbagie and nearby Kennetpans represent the crucible in which modern Scotch whisky was formed.

  Tax changes in 1786–88 led to the Steins being effectively blocked from the English market where much of their spirit (which was indeed produced rapidly in shallow stills but in truth designed for rectification into gin) was sold. Large quantities of this ‘poor stuff’ then flooded onto the local market. The Steins quickly went bankrupt, though they subsequently reopened.

  The scale of their operations was very considerable even by today’s standards and they were significant innovators in whisky production. Robert Stein pioneered an early form of continuous still (1826) at the Kırkliston distillery, near Edinburgh (now closed). An improved design was patented by Aeneas Coffey in 1831 and soon enjoyed widespread success.

  Funds are now being raised by a charitable trust to stabilise and eventually restore the few remaining buildings at Kennetpans—for more information search ‘Kennetpans Trust’ online.

  12 The writer on Glasgow clubs is John Strang (1795–1863) in Glasgow and Its Clubs (1st edition, 1856), quoted in T.F. Henderson’s Old World Scotland: Glimpses of Its Modes and Manners (1893). That appears to have been a major source for MacDonald, notably in this ‘History’ section, as he draws freely on Henderson’s chapters ‘On Wine and Ale’ and ‘Usquebagh’. He will doubtless have had other sources, particularly Bremner’s Industries of Scotland (discussed later) but Henderson’s work is evidently a major influence.

  13 Indeed, whisky and funerals are closely linked in the literature. As a further example, in 1616 the funeral expenses of Sir Hugh Campbell of Calder are said to have amounted to nearly £1,650 Scots, of which fully one quarter was accounted for by whisky for the mourners.

  14 From Notes and Sketches Illustrative of Northern Rural Life in the Eighteenth Century by William Alexander, 1877. He is describing the funeral rites observed for Sir Alexander Ogilvy, Lord Forglen, a Judge of the Court of Session in 1727. The servant was Forglen’s clerk, one David Reid. As the story ends, ‘he did fulfil the will o’ the dead, for before the end o’ ’t there was nae ane o’ us able to bite his ain thoomb’.

  15 MacDonald’s attitude is surprising to contemporary taste, and his judgement seems to me harsh.

  In Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (OUP, 2010) Professor Nıgel Leask reassesses Burns’ reputation and places him as arguably the most original poet writing in the British Isles between Pope and Blake, and the creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry. In particular, Leask places Burns’ work in the context of the revolutionary transformation of Scottish agriculture and society in the decades between 1760 and 1800, thus setting it within the mainstream of the Scottish and European enlightenments. As opposed to MacDonald’s dismissive view, we may see Burns’ writing on whisky as both perceptive and politically challenging.

  Burns continues to be celebrated around the world, not least every January 25th, and a full appreciation of his global significance and the accessibility of much of his language is overdue. A majority of Scots have long understood this.

  To characterise Burns’ attitude to whisky as one of indiscriminate consumption careless of quality fails to take account of the incendiary political stance of many of the poems on whisky. Moreover, as Alex Kraaijeveld has illustrated, Burns’ private correspondence with John ‘Auchenbay’ Tennant does on at least one occasion show a vivid appreciation of the qualities of good whisky.

  16 Burns was far from alone in lamenting the state of whisky. Distilling had been suspended in 1795 due to two consecutive poor harvests. When production resumed an anonymous chapbook, Cheap Whisky, celebrated the change of policy, and the renowned Perthshire fiddler Nıel Gow composed his jaunty Strathspey ‘Welcome Whisky Back Again’ which is played to this day.

  17 As so often in MacDonald there is an inconsistency apparent; here, between his professed admiration for the ingenuity of the Scots’ distillers in increasing the speed of their production and his earlier description of the output of the self-same altered stills at Kılbagie as ‘abominable’ and ‘poor stuff’, a ‘raw, fiery tipple’.

  18 There was a great flurry of pamphleteering by interested parties and other commentators in the late eighteenth century; this led to a major Parliamentary Enquiry which in 1798/99 issued two voluminous reports of 485 pages in total, with extensive illustrations and a map.

  Under the chairmanship of the indefatigable Rt Hon. Sylvester Douglas, evidence was taken, witnesses called and examined, and excise reports pored over, but the resulting legislation was largely ineffectual and overtaken by the 1822 and 1823 Acts. However, the 1798/99 Report is an important record and demands a detailed appraisal in its own right.

  19 There were draconian penalties for illicit distilling of poteen in Ireland during the early part of the nineteenth century. Despite a spirited defence of the government’s policy by Aeneas Coffey, then Acting Inspector-General of Excise for Ireland (later the inventor of an improved continuous still) these were heavily criticised by the Rev. Edward Chichester in two powerful pamphlets. His Oppressions and Cruelties of Irish Revenue Officers brought to public attention the abuses which were further exposed in the important Edinburgh Review (March
, 1819). Later, the Irish industry, once the largest in the world, faded dramatically. It is only in recent years that the Irish whiskey industry has been able to stage any kind of a meaningful recovery and once again take its rightful place on the world stage.

  20 Strathden is presumably Strathdon, and Glen of Newmill is the Keith region.

  21 Quoted in Lectures on the Mountains or the Highlands and Islands as they were and as they are by William Grant Stewart (1860).

  The ‘Aven’ is the River Avon which runs from the loch of the same name to the Spey. Shortly before it joins the Spey is found the single-estate Ballindalloch Distillery, opened in 2014.

  22 MacDonald acknowledges the huge significance of the 1823 Act. He perhaps should also have mentioned the 1822 Illicit Distillation (Scotland) Act which set the scene for the more enlightened legislation which was to be passed in the following year. Also in 1823, the now familiar spirit safe, recently invented by one Septimus Fox, was made mandatory for licensed distilleries.

  Nor should Sir Walter Scott’s part be forgotten. Scott orchestrated and stage-managed Kıng George IV’s state visit to Scotland in August 1822, an extravaganza of tartan and the conspicuous consumption of whisky that a grateful industry built on for the next hundred years and more.

  23 Perhaps not. Ambrose Cooper’s The Complete Distiller, first published in 1757, was still in print in 1826, retitled as The Complete Domestic Distiller and described as for the use of ‘distillers and private families’. And, as late as 1903, Mrs Charles Roundell and Harry Roberts would publish The Still-Room with its instructions for the domestic-scale distillation of ‘Waters and Cordials’.

  In recent years, judging by the easy availability of small distilling plant from various websites, private distilling flourishes still.

  24 This was the Banks o’ Dee distillery which was indeed burned down by angry smugglers. According to Craig in The Scotch Whisky Industry Record the precise location is today unknown. The danger continued for some time: in 1841, nearly twenty years after the liberalising 1823 Act, rival bootleggers burned down the original Lochnagar distillery after a former colleague decided to mend his ways and invest £10 in a distilling licence.

  25 Though frequently repeated, this figure must be considered suspect. It is derived from Hugo Arnot’s 1779 History of Edinburgh in which he writes that there are ‘no fewer than four hundred private stills which pay no duty’ in the city. However, ignored by MacDonald and all subsequent commentators, he then goes on to frankly admit that this estimate is ‘only conjecture’ and as Arnot was a fervent opponent of whisky drinking and wished to prohibit all private distilling his claim has to be treated with some caution.

  26 This wonderful tale appears in David Bremner’s The Industries of Scotland: Their Rise, Progress and Present Condition (1869) which had first appeared as a series of articles in the Scotsman newspaper.

  The chapter on distilling appears to have been an important source for MacDonald. Remember also that around this time, under his own name of George Malcolm Thomson, he was researching and writing his major polemics on the condition of Scotland. With his keen interest in economic affairs and his robustly outspoken style MacDonald/Thomson will have recognised Bremner’s earlier work as a useful basis for comparison between mid-Victorian industrial ascendancy and the distressed condition he observed in the 1920s and 1930s.

  27 The reference, of course, is to the iconic striding man of the Johnnie Walker brand, then and now the best-selling Scotch whisky in the world.

  The figure is believed to have been modelled originally from an old photograph of the real Johnnie Walker by the artist Tom Brown. His style has been followed in this advertisement by Leo Cheney.

  Throughout the book, but particularly in this chapter, MacDonald would appear to have been heavily influenced by the work of J.A. Nettleton, in particular his pointed comments on the ‘What is Whisky?’ question and the work and findings of the Royal Commission.

  Nettleton was an important figure—perhaps the most important—in the Victorian and early Edwardian distilling industry. His lasting legacy is his book The Manufacture of Whisky and Plain Spirit (1913) which remained for many years the standard text on the subject and is still consulted today.

  He was utterly convinced that the Royal Commission had made a huge mistake in its recommendations and was a vehement critic of their verdict, describing it as ‘a concession to a powerful commercial syndicate interested in the promotion of a modern innovation [which] sacrifices the interests of those who had obtained a reputation built up during centuries of development and enterprise to the interests of others who cannot boast of as many decades’. By this, he meant the DCL (the Distillers Company Ltd, forerunner of today’s Diageo) who had actively promoted the cause of grain. It is strange that MacDonald does not specifically cite Nettleton’s work but a close examination of the relevant texts leaves me in no doubt that he was heavily in the latter’s debt.

  Likewise George Saintsbury, revered amongst drinks writers for his Notes on a Cellar-Book and one of MacDonald’s professors at Edinburgh University, regarded the Commission as an exercise in futility and ‘mischievous’. When we consider that it examined 116 witnesses over 37 days to produce a 724-page report that changed next to nothing we might concur with that verdict—other than the knowledge (with hindsight) that it was to profoundly influence the future shape and direction of the industry.

  The debate, of course, centres round whether that was for good or ill, and there is no doubt in which camp we would find Nettleton, Saintsbury and their eager student MacDonald.

  III

  MAKING AND BLENDING

  SOMETHING of a noble and elegant simplicity charac terizes the apparatus employed in the manufacture of whisky. Reduced to its bare essentials it consists of two main instruments, the still and the worm condenser. The still is a retort of copper with a broad, rounded bottom and a tapering neck. The worm condenser, connected to the still by a short pipe, is a spiral tube, also made of copper. There is nothing vital in the equipment of a distillery which a village blacksmith could not make and a small cottager could not buy. Moreover, no marked improvement of any note has been made in the machinery of whisky-distillation during long centuries. We can now make purer industrial alcohol, we have perfected the technique of treating the barley and making the malt, we understand something more of the chemical processes which take place when whisky is produced, we leave less to chance than our fathers did, but we have not devised a still which will make better whisky than the old pot-still which has been in use since the dawn of our knowledge of whisky, and we have not been able to construct a more practical method of condensing the vapour of the still1 than the worm pipe kept cool by running water. The Highlander of the fifteenth or sixteenth century might be bewildered for a few moments if he were suddenly introduced into a modern malt distillery but he would speedily recognise in their larger bulk and greater elaboration the familiar instruments from which he was accustomed to obtain his beloved usquebaugh.

  A promotional card for pure malt whisky (note age) from Sir Walter Gilbey’s Glen Spey distillery. Gilbey wrote passionately in defence of the pot still.

  There are two main descriptions of whisky, depending on the raw materials used. Whisky is either made from barley malt alone (the great Scottish whiskies all belong to this class) or from a mixture of barley malt with unmalted grains of different sorts (all—or almost all— Irish whiskies come under this category). The process of distillation may best be studied by observing the manufacture of a pure malt whisky, such a whisky as will be found by the fortunate possessor of one or other of the classic brands. The essentials of the manufacture are as follows:2

  The barley is brought from the farm into the barley-receiving room of the distillery where it is cleansed by being passed through screens; the smaller, inferior grains are discarded. The selected barley is then taken in bags into a barn from which it passes into the malt house.

  Here it falls into tanks called ‘s
teeps’ where it is soaked in water. The softened, swollen grain is spread out on a malting floor3 for about three weeks, being sprinkled with water at regular intervals and occasionally turned over. As a result of this, the barley begins to grow or germinate.

  When the proper time has arrived the water supply is shut off; growth stops immediately and the grown barley is withered. In this state it is known as ‘green malt’. What has actually been happening is that the starch of the barley has been partly converted into sugar by means of the ferment whose technical name is diastase.

  The next step in the process is that of drying in the kiln. This is a supremely important operation for it is at this time that the malt acquires characteristics of flavour which it will later on impart to the whisky. Thus the chief distinction between the two main classes of Scotch whisky, Highland and Lowland, is that the former has its malt dried by means of peat fires. The combustion gases of the peat endow the whisky with that subtle ‘smokiness’ which is present, in discreet combination with other flavours, in genuine Highland whisky.4

  The kilned malt passes into the mill room where a wire screen removes the ‘culm’ or sproutings produced during malting. The malt is ground in a mill. It is now passed into the mashing tuns where it is thoroughly mixed with warm water. Being later cooled, the resulting liquid, known as wort, is drawn off. The mashing process enables the diastase to convert the remainder of the starch in the malt to sugar and to dextrine, which dissolves in the wort. The wort passes through a refrigerator in the tun (or fermentation) room on its way to the wash backs, yeast being added to the liquor on the way. Fermentation now takes place, the sugary substance in the wort being transformed by the yeast into alcohol and carbonic acid gas. The diastase converts the dextrine into sugar, which the yeast in its turn converts into alcohol.

  The wash, or alcohol-containing liquor from the fermentation room, is now introduced into the wash still. This is the crucial operation, for now the liquid, leaving the world of earthly things behind, enters the realm of spirit. The result of the first distillation is a weakly alcoholic distillate known as low wines, which, after being condensed in the worm, passes to a receiver in the spirit-receiving room and is then returned to the spirit still in the still house to be re distilled.5 This time the distillate is collected in two parts.