Whisky

by Aeneas MacDonald

  Although blenders preserve jealously the secrets of the different ingredients and their proportions in the blends, it may be taken that the whiskies which are drunk over the greater part of the world are made up from equal quantities of Highland malt whiskies and grain whiskies, with the addition of a smaller proportion of Lowland malt. Islays or Campbeltowns are also used, but they should be previously blended with the Highland malts to which they will add their own noticeable but pleasant flavours. The object of the good blender is to obtain a smoothly finished liquor in which no individual strain will thrust its characteristic taste or aroma upon the palate. The unscrupulous blender, catering for the unthinking multitude, will cheaply and rapidly obtain a whisky of sorts by adding a small quantity of a strongly flavoured Islay or Highland to a large quantity of cheap grain whisky. But the good blender (may heaven be kind to him and grant him skill!)22 knows that no whisky that an honest man could sell without blushing is to be got by such crude means. And here it is that the Lowland23 malts play their part in the scheme of things. It is their function—for they are but slightly flavoured liquids—not to add an instrument to the well-balanced orchestra, which every fine blend is, but rather to act as the conductor, giving a steadiness of rhythm to the music. They are, as it were, catalysts; they act as a bridge between the pungent Highland malts and the sexless, neutral grain whiskies; without their presence a fine, smooth blend is impossible.

  Blends of malt whiskies without the addition of grain are practically unknown so far as the ordinary public is concerned. About twenty-five years ago, when the Highland distilleries had large stocks in hand, an attempt was made to create a market for blended malts. The attempt failed, in spite of a vigorous advertising campaign. People who had acquired a taste for the more insipid charms of the grain-containing blends were not to be won by the more definite flavours, the wider range of variations, the greater subtlety of the unblemished malts. The more’s the pity. Perhaps we are not manly enough to grapple with the really great whiskies. But some there are who have not succumbed to the degeneracy of the age. There is, for example, the patriarchal Professor Saintsbury who records24 that the best of all the blends he has tasted was one of Clyne Lish (a Sutherland whisky) and Smith’s Glenlivet. Grain whisky the same authority very properly describes as fit only for drunkards and for blending.

  Irish whiskies are not blended so frequently as Scotch. The best opinion is that the Irish distillations are better as ‘self ’ or single whiskies.

  The adulteration of whisky might well have a chapter to itself—if it were not for the fact that the consumer of a reputable whisky need not fear to be its victim.25 Vitriol was at one time added to whisky (in very small quantities, needless to say) in order to improve the ‘bead’ or bubble proof of the spirits. ‘The doctor’, by which was meant a mixture of vitriol and oil of almonds, was sometimes called in by Highlanders who wished to see a froth in their casks. The same effect was artificially produced in Canadian spirits by adding glycerine and ‘bead oil’. When the United States still manufactured whisky (or at least a liquid whose local name was whisky) a pleasing concoction called ‘Bourbon oil’ was sometimes added to give it a frothy appearance. Bourbon oil consists of fusel oil, acetate of potassium, sulphuric acid, and other equally attractive ingredients. If such things could be done before Prohibition, one need not be surprised at anything that happens after.

  1 The modern shell and tube condenser, first seen at MacDuff distillery c. 1962/63 is, of course, considered by its adherents to be a more efficient apparatus, but the worm tub continues to have its devotees, especially among the cognoscenti of single whiskies. Die-hard traditionalists are convinced of its superiority.

  Interestingly, and in support of that view, there have been instances ( for example at Dalwhinnie distillery) where worm tubs have been replaced by shell and tube condensers but subsequently reinstated as the spirit character was felt to have changed unacceptably.

  However, MacDonald is not strictly correct as there had been experiments at Hazelburn (1837) and later at Nevis, which will feature later in these notes, with partial condensers located on the stills or lyne arms. The idea that Scotch whisky production was unchanging until some unthinking commercial vandalism destroyed the values of a sacred priesthood is an appealingly romantic one, but not one that is supported by the historical record.

  2 Though the essential principles of distillation have remained unchanged since the earliest experiments, MacDonald gives here a description of practices in the 1920s. Since then, much advanced technology has been introduced, including highly computerised process controls and mechanical handling systems.

  Readers interested in a detailed description of the production techniques current when MacDonald was writing should refer to Nettleton; there are a number of contemporary texts describing the operation of distilleries in the twenty-first century.

  Notwithstanding the introduction of much technology and despite the impressive scale of many of today’s distilleries, I would hold, with MacDonald, that a distiller from centuries ago transported to a Roseisle or Inchbairnie would soon find the surroundings familiar.

  3 Few distilleries today maintain their own floor maltings; notable exceptions to this rule being Springbank, Bowmore, Laphroaig, Balvenie, Highland Park and Kılchoman. Even for most of these, a majority of the malt used will come from external suppliers operating large drum malting machines. The observant reader will have noted that four of the above have an island location—and Springbank is both small and remote from most major centres.

  Some of the latest generation of farmhouse or boutique distilleries have announced their intention to operate floor maltings.

  4 This represents a marked change from today’s practice where, with a few exceptions, peat (and ‘smokiness’) is not widely seen as a flavour note in other than island whiskies. It would not commonly be associated with Highland whisky in the modern era.

  5 Though steam-jacketed stills had been employed from the 1870s, the stills MacDonald describes would have been heated by a direct flame, fired by peat, wood and coal (or a mixture thereof) according to local practice and the cost and availability of various fuels.

  Direct firing was so commonplace that MacDonald does not think to mention it; it is quite simply a given and thus entirely unremarkable. Today direct firing, usually by gas, is the exception to the rule. Also missing is any description of the rummagers in the wash stills: the chain-metal device that slowly scoured the inside of the lower part of the still preventing solids in the wash sticking to the copper and giving a burnt or empyreumatic flavour—though some commentators considered a hint of this to be desirable.

  There is no mention of the use of soap in the wash stills to prevent foaming of the liquid which would then carry over into the lyne arm. Perhaps MacDonald was unaware of the practice, or possibly it offended his sense of the romantic.

  6 This is really quite a cursory description of distillation, here omitting mention of the foreshots and heads before the spirit cut—that part eventually destined to become whisky—is taken.

  7 What to say? This is plainly wrong. In pleading for MacDonald he is evidently an amateur and it is the case that the understanding and appreciation of the role and contribution of wood has grown immeasurably in recent decades. He is, at least, correct about their role in adding colour. Best to move on … But not perhaps until noting that he maintains the wood then in use to be ‘generally sherry casks’. A very great quantity of sherry was transported in cask to the UK at this time, a trade which has now ceased due to the decline in demand for sherry and legislative changes.

  Today a significantly greater number of ex-Bourbon and refill whisky casks are used; small numbers of casks formerly used for port and various wines are also used in finishing.

  8 The term ‘usquebaugh’ seems to have been employed with less discrimination in Smith’s time.

  9 Much of the preceding may be considered a ‘conjecture’ too far, though in Whisky and Scotland
(1935) Neil Gunn refers to the consumption of ‘clearic’.

  Paxarette (effectively a sherry concentrate used to prepare casks prior to filling) was prohibited by the 1990 Scotch Whisky Orders but had not been widely used for some years prior to that. Spirit caramel E150a is still a permitted additive for colouring purposes but remains controversial among certain groups of consumers and a number of brands make a point of emphasising that they do not use it.

  10 The reference to the extractive properties of casks would seem to contradict MacDonald’s earlier assertion that casks were largely inert, though he would doubtless argue that removing a fault does not impart a quality, merely removes an imperfection. Rather more is known today about the action of wood, and detailed scientific studies continue in the R&D departments and laboratories of all the major distillers and at the Scotch Whisky Research Institute near Edinburgh.

  11 The same Stein of Kılbagie of whom MacDonald is so dismissive earlier in the book. Stein was not alone in experimenting with the continuous still. Adam, Fournier, Blumenthal and others all developed similar apparatus.

  Eventually, the Coffey design became the most successful and widely used in Scotland, though Stein stills were operated until at least 1860 before being supplanted by the Coffey design. According to Nettleton, ‘the ruins [of Stein stills] were standing at more than one distillery as late as 1905, and may be yet’. He was writing in 1913.

  12 The reference is to the ‘What is Whisky?’ controversy of 1905/06 and the subsequent Royal Commission on Whiskey and Other Potable Spirits which followed. Its membership was largely comprised of English medical experts, leading to some complaints from Irish MPs. The trade were deliberately excluded from membership to avoid the charge of bias, but called to give evidence before the commissioners and did so in considerable numbers.

  The detail of the Royal Commission and the contrasting stances adopted by the grain distillers (essentially the Distillers Company Ltd) and representatives of the pot still industry is too complicated to relate here but, as MacDonald makes clear, the result was to promote the interests of blending.

  It is interesting to note that, whatever the shortcomings of the enquiry, it did at least establish a recognised legal definition of whisky, even if one that not everyone agreed with or felt accurate or fair. In doing so, the Royal Commission laid the foundation of the modern industry, and it is an irony that even MacDonald would appreciate that the survival of so many single malt distilleries today owes much to the success of the blends (and brands) that he so vehemently deplores.

  13 One might argue that the industry’s survival and commercial success owes much to the influence of the patent still and blending—not that our author appears inclined to reasoned argument. This is passionate advocacy at its most intense.

  14 An Account of the Manner of Making Malt in Scotland (1677).

  15 This would appear to be the Select Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufacture and Agriculture, who in 1755 offered a ‘premium’ for the best tun of whisky.

  16 Though he may have been a more prolific author, I can only trace Dunbar’s work Smegmatalogia, or the manufacture of soap. De Wijngaardenier was a Dutch vintner and brandy distiller operating in Amsterdam, c. 1736. He appears with his still in a copper engraving by Jan and Caspar Luyten.

  17 This may have been the case through custom and practice and the de facto case in the absence of any alternative, but there was no such legal definition while there was a problem of unknown extent with counterfeiting and adulteration at a wholesale and retail level. However, as late as 1888 the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that ‘malt whisky is the product of malted barley alone, distilled in the ordinary pot-still’.

  18 This is a rather obscure technical work, issued anonymously in 1880 but under the general supervision of Adam Young, then Deputy Chairman of the Inland Revenue. He retired in 1886, dying in 1897. Nettleton praises him lavishly, considering him ‘the greatest man the Excise service ever produced’.

  The book—correctly titled Instructions on Surveying Distilleries and Charging the Duty on British Spirits—is not one with which I would have expected MacDonald to be familiar, but Nettleton expounds upon it, making (at length) exactly the point that MacDonald summarises so trenchantly here.

  The significance of the date 1890 is that it marks the earlier Parliamentary Select Committee of 1890–91 that first attempted a definition of whisky and accepted grain spirit as within that term.

  19 The commentator was Nettleton. Like much of this chapter, this and the following paragraph are derived almost directly from his Manufacture of Whisky.

  20 Consideration of the impact on spirit character of different strains of barley is today a hotly debated topic. Some distillers, generally the larger firms making for substantial blended brands, hold that it is of little or no significance while others maintain with perhaps greater fervour that it is of considerable importance and that different flavours can be detected in the new make spirit when different varieties are employed.

  Both positions are defensible, for while it is demonstrably the case that different varieties do give different spirit character (and this has been proved to my satisfaction in distilleries in both Islay and Ireland) it is also true to say that such subtleties are swallowed up in the blending process, the blender’s aim being to produce a consistent product.

  The topic is further complicated by the undeniable influence of the finance department who constantly urge improvements in yield to increase profitability. Hence the introduction of many of the new barley strains, a trend and an influence that MacDonald would doubtless deplore.

  21 This process of marrying is described by Alfred Barnard in a pamphlet from the 1890s. The practice of first pre-blending the components is often attributed to A.J. Cameron of John Dewar & Sons, around 1914.

  22 Here, at least, MacDonald seems to extend some generosity to the blender.

  23 Alfred Barnard, eulogising the merits of Islay whiskies (in a promotional brochure for his client Peter Mackie, featuring Laphroaig and Lagavulin distilleries), describes the best makes of Lowland malts as ‘useful as padding’. They apparently ‘help to keep down the price of a blend’ and are ‘decidedly preferable to using a large quantity of grain spirit’—damned with faint praise one feels.

  24 Strictly speaking, Saintsbury records the opinion of ‘a friend of mine from Oxford days, now dead’ on this blend as ‘the best whisky he [i.e. the friend] had ever drunk’. He did, however, dismiss grain whisky in exactly the terms described. Presumably the heavily tattooed ex-footballer turned champion of a lavishly promoted brand of blended grain whisky is not a student of either Saintsbury or MacDonald.

  25 It may be that by 1930 MacDonald was able to take this sanguine view. However, it is undeniable that during his ‘golden age’ of whisky there was a problem with adulteration at both wholesale and retail level.

  The adulteration of whisky in the retail trade in Glasgow was thoroughly documented in the 1870s by the North British Daily Mail (see Edwards Burns’ Bad Whisky, Angel’s Share, 2009). The Irish pot still distillers railed against the indiscriminate use of ‘Hamburg sherry’, ‘prune wine’ and ‘cocked hat spirit’ in whiskies, and, as late as 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could write: ‘A common form of adulteration of whisky is the addition to it of spirit made on the Continent mainly from potatoes.’

  The related problem of counterfeiting continues to plague the industry and defraud the consumer.

  IV

  GEOGRAPHY

  IT IS fairly well known by this time (or some painstaking and persuasive authors have written in vain) that the wines of Europe are to be grouped in various more or less closely defined geographical areas. By degrees the assiduous oenophile learns to discriminate, in his infancy between Burgundy and Bordeaux, in his hobbledehoy days between, say, Maçon and Beaujolais, and, when he reaches years of vinous discretion, he has educated his palate to the nicer expertise required to detect
a Romanée Conti from a Richebourg. But who appreciates that there are geographical divisions in whisky? Too few, it is to be feared. Yet, even as there are in the kingdom of Bordeaux fair provinces, Médoc, Graves, Sauternes, Saint-Emilion, Pomerol, for this polity of the wine is no colourless cosmopolis but, indeed, a confederation or bund, so within the ethereal realms of whisky boundaries are fixed, marking off one lordship from another; there are territorial families in the north, at the fashion of whose marryings and giving in marriage we have already glanced. The geographical aspect of whisky is one which must receive the consideration of all who regard it as something more than a liquid whose taste, presumably offensive, one destroys with gaseous waters out of syphons.

  One does not pretend that the whole explanation of whisky’s divine variety is to be found in geography. In an operation so delicate and elaborate as distilling it is obvious that a considerable amount must be left to the highly-skilled technicians (artists one should rather call them) who control the mystery. But this would not account for the undoubted—though still somewhat puzzling—fact that whisky falls into well-defined classes corresponding to geographical areas.1 Geography exerts an influence, secret and subtle, upon whisky—and so far no one has been able to determine through what precise media it operates or to what degree each of the supposed factors is to be held responsible.

  A well-informed writer in a trade publication puts the position with admirable succinctness: ‘The malt distilleries … are surely among the most remarkable phenomena in British industry. Why a score of Highland distilleries should produce twenty slightly different types of whisky, all good and all apparently inimitable, no one seems to know with any certainty.’ Despairing of an adequate explanation of this along purely territorial lines, he arrives at the conclusion that the credit for the differences between one whisky and another is to be attributed to the nature of the utensils employed and to the local variations in the method of working, variations which, being preserved from generation to generation through the reverent conservatism of distillers, secure the permanence of each whisky’s character. Thus, the shape of the still in use has an undeniable influence upon the whisky distilled from it, for upon its shape depends the proportion of essential oils and higher alcohols which will be collected in the condenser. And, on the other hand, the still-man, that almost priestly functionary, fills a rôle of the highest importance.2 He has the final voice in determining the style of a whisky (within the limits imposed upon him by his utensils and his material) because so much depends on the precise instant, in the course of distilling, when, acting upon an intuition securely fortified by experience and tradition, he stops collecting the finished spirit and returns the remainder of the distillate to the still. Custom in manufacture, inherited and jealously guarded, necessarily plays a considerable part in bestowing traits of one kind and another upon a liquid which at the crucial moment of its birth assumes the delicate and impressionable form of a vapour. It is even held by some old distillers that a finer whisky is made if peat is used to heat the spirit-still.3 Far fetched as it may appear, there is almost certainly something in this contention, for peat does not give such a high temperature as coal, and therefore the wash in the still is brought more gradually and steadily to the boil.