More about location

Arising from your location article, does the actual design and location of a distillery affect the flavour of its make?

This question allows me to start by looking back to days before distilleries were ‘designed’.

Obviously the bothies, caves and secret rooms in town houses in which illicit distillers set up their kit were not ‘designed’ in an architectural sense. Rather, they were located for secrecy and for a copious supply of clean water. The larger licensed distilleries, which emerged in the late eighteenth century – epitomised by Kilbagie and Kennetpans in Clackmannan on the Forth, which Professor Michael Moss described as “the largest manufacturing undertakings of any kind to emerge during the first decade of the industrial revolution in Scotland” – the distilling process was geared to produce as much spirit as possible, as cheaply as possible. Design developments here were largely devoted to finding way to limit Excise duties.

For example, after 1783 stills were licensed according to quantity of spirit which the stills might be expected to make in a year if they were charges once a day. So it was clearly in the interest of the larger distillers to speed up distillation, and they did this by developing shallow stills with broad saucer-shaped bases and tall heads, charged with stronger washes. In a memorial presented to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury in 1785 the London distillers complained that: “the Scottish distillers had, by the ingenuity of their contrivances, found means to discharge their stills upwards of forty times a week”.

By 1799 it was alleged that the wily Scottish distillers had developed a forty-three gallon still which could be discharged twenty-two times in an hour! Distilling at such a rate makes for little or no reflux and permits no interaction between the spirit and the copper walls of still, which is essential in removing certain unpleasant, even harmful, compounds in the distillate.

Notwithstanding Robert Burns’ famous lament, Scotch Drink (1786), the spirits made by such stills were rough, fiery and unpleasant, fit only to be sent to England, rectified and made into gin – which much of it was.

Following the conclusion of the Napoleonic War, there was a substantial rise in illicit distilling, which the chaotic excise legislation failed to stem, giving rise to landowners becoming increasingly nervous: if smugglers could bring the excise laws into disrepute, all laws might be brought into disrepute and anarchy would hold sway. The result was a highly significant piece of legislation, the Excise Act of 1823.

This effectively laid the foundations of the modern Scotch whisky industry by “positively encouraging the legal industry in the hope that many small distilleries would be established throughout Scotland”. But it went much further than this, as the presenters of the first Liquid Antiquarian podcast state: “[The Act] provides a detailed blue-print of how a distillery should be constructed and how the spirit should be distilled… a fundamental re-drawing of what whisky is and what it would become”.

Many formerly illicit distillers were encouraged, or persuaded, by their landlords, to take out licences, and many of them built their new distilleries on the sites of their former illicit operations – or at least near enough to use the tried and tested water source. Until modern times there was a widespread belief that the quality/flavour of the spirit depended upon the water it was made with. For the first time, a distillery’s location became important. In the Highlands many enjoyed – and continue to enjoy - attractive rural situations, which is one of the reasons why ‘whisky tourism’ is now so popular in Scotland.

But does the location/water source influence the flavour of spirit produced there? Even today this is debated, although all agree that there are many other more influential factors. From the mid-nineteenth century, many sites were chosen on account of their proximity to a railway connection and with the success of blended Scotch in the 1880s and 1890s this was essential.

Of course, location close to a railway line has nothing to do with flavour, but by the late-nineteenth century blenders – the distillers’ primary customers – were discerning flavour differences from region to region. [I have written at length about this elsewhere on this website].

First there was a clear difference between whiskies made above and below the Highland Line, based not only in law (different rates of duty applied), but also in process (distilling in the Highlands was on a smaller scale and more traditional) and raw materials (grain whisky was almost all made below the Line). Highland distilleries all dried their malt over peat fires and although this does not necessarily mean that the resulting spirit was very smoky – the phenol levels can be much reduced if the kiln is run very hot – even a tiny amount of smoky malt can dominate flavour in a blend.

Which is why blenders favoured the whiskies of Strathspey, generically known as ‘Glenlivets’ – the term ‘Speyside’ is more recent – which were generally sweeter, milder and less smoky, especially after Charles Doig invented his ‘ventilator’ (the pagoda-topped kiln, with adjustable vents which could increase the draft).

From the 1830s to the 1890s Campbeltown was ‘the whisky capital’, but it would seem that the flavour profiles of the whiskies made there were variable and during that decade it was eclipsed by Speyside: of the 33 distilleries commissioned in the 1890s, 24 were on Speyside.

By this time, blenders were identifying four regional differences in spirit character – Highland, Lowland, Campbeltown and Islay. Many blenders sub-divided the Highland malts, based on the contribution they made to a blend as ‘Top Class’ (all these were Speysides), First, Second and Third Class.

If the whiskies from an individual region share common characteristics, this surely suggests the existence of ‘terroir’, similar to wine making and based on location? Certainly, the concept has been exploited as a useful way of introducing novices to the flavour differences found in malt whisky: the leading example is United Distillers/Diageo’s six ‘Classic Malts’, each one representing a region.

But, in truth, there is no terroir influence, as strictly defined, in whisky making, unless you include tradition – what my colleague Dave Broom describes as ‘human terroir’: “This is the way we have always done it”- possibly epitomised today by Springbank Distillery. After all, flavour profiles may be varied: regional styles may be replicated to a degree, beyond their original region – for example, many distilleries are now producing peated variants of their traditionally non-peated spirit, and sometimes vice versa.

This article has gone on far longer than I intended, but let me conclude by saying something about distillery design and its potential influence on flavour.

Sales of Scotch whisky did not increase significantly between 1900 and the 1960s, so there was no reason to expand capacity or modify production. However, post-World War II demand increased massively – Scotch was hugely fashionable - and as soon as government controls and money allowed, distillers set about modernizing every aspect of process in the interests of expanding production and efficiency, guided by accountants and chemists.

With the best will in the world, the flavour profiles of both malt and blended Scotch whiskies changed. This was not so much to do with distillery design as with process, and – on the up-side – a far greater understanding of maturation.

Many of the new generation of distillers are looking to the past for inspiration – barley varieties, yeast strains, very long fermentations, direct-fired stills in a couple of cases, worm tub condensers. Their mantra is “flavour trumps economics”. Although distillery design may play a small part in this, there is no mention of location except for the requirement of a reliable water source.

Where the location and design have their greatest impact is aesthetic: malt whisky invariably tastes best at the place of its creation, and if that place is attractive the pleasure is enhanced.

Most malt whisky distilleries have rural settings. All are different, as are the spirits that each produces. All have stories to tell and unique charms. All are worth visiting.