Latest / Whisky Stories Podcast / How did Ardnamurchan Distillery start?- Managing Director Alex Bruce

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How did Ardnamurchan Distillery start?- Managing Director Alex Bruce · Whisky Stories Podcast

• 0:00
  Great lads. We've all got dramas in front of
• 0:01
  our leave us. We've got dramas in front of us.
• 0:03
  We're all set. Sandra, bar guys, all the very
• 0:05
  best. Thanks.
• 0:05
  All the best. Bless me, Alex.
• 0:09
  Cheers. Lovely, great Angus.
• 0:13
  You know what to do. Clap us in.
• 0:17
  Welcome to the Whiskey Stories podcast.
• 0:20
  We had three casks which we just bought from Ian MacLeod
• 0:25
  Distillers. Over a long lunch, they were A
• 0:29
  butt of 1969 spring Bank, which was quite good and from memory,
• 0:36
  a couple of hogs heads 1 was a 15 year old Tam do and I think a
• 0:40
  12 year old good leader. But that was that was my stop to
• 0:43
  get Adelphi going again. You know, generally we're not
• 0:45
  we're not we're not trying to rewrite anything.
• 0:47
  We're just whiskey lovers who got behind the lucky enough to
• 0:52
  get behind the new distillery and do everything in the house.
• 0:54
  And if if if other people have the same taste buds, that is
• 0:58
  fantastic. Welcome along the Whiskey
• 0:59
  Stories podcast, myself, Greg Kogar.
• 1:01
  We're back in the athletic arms, back when it all began and guess
• 1:03
  what lads, we are going up in the world and I just don't mean
• 1:07
  with the calibre of guests that we've got on this evening.
• 1:09
  We are literally up in diggers. We're back in the snug, Ross.
• 1:13
  I'm quite upset when I get put down into that resale, although
• 1:15
  you guys quite like it, yeah. So I'm just getting through the
• 1:18
  Hatch. Too.
• 1:19
  I've got more breathing space in here.
• 1:20
  Got. A nice comfy seat up here.
• 1:22
  It's true. It's true.
• 1:23
  It's a. Space we're not kind of perched
• 1:25
  on a on a stool, no, there's. Something about the upholstery,
• 1:28
  you know? There any upholstery?
• 1:29
  Yeah, that's exactly. That's for a change I've seen,
• 1:31
  right? It's been a while since we've
• 1:32
  been here. And we've got drams in front of
• 1:33
  us. What you saw?
• 1:34
  I've got a couple of belt and drams in front of me.
• 1:36
  Actually, I've got Spring Mank 18 from this year, which got in
• 1:41
  recently. Last year's was all bourbon and
• 1:44
  which I really liked. This one's 50% bourbon, 40%
• 1:46
  Sherry, 5% rum. OK, it's very Spring Monkey,
• 1:50
  which actually is maybe not really my style of whiskey.
• 1:51
  Spring Monkey. Stuff it's not it's not really
• 1:53
  my style of whiskey, but I thought I'd give it a go. 12 lbs
• 1:55
  for something like that and the diggers.
• 1:57
  Great value. And I've got the new Feticare
• 1:59
  and 25 year olds which. Is ages tonight, Ross?
• 2:04
  I know, I know. It's going to be a travel.
• 2:05
  Those big ages, it's. Going to be a travel retail
• 2:08
  exclusive I believe, which is quite annoying, but it's a
• 2:10
  bourbon cask, 46.8% Petacare, which means I know I'm going to
• 2:14
  enjoy it. And I was just in the Diggers
• 2:16
  leaf before I came here and I was looking at the gantry and I
• 2:19
  thought Kev's done a really good job here.
• 2:20
  He's got more whiskey in and I seen an unopened bottle of beer
• 2:23
  having 30 and I said I just have to ask the question having been
• 2:27
  an Isla in January, said how much is that £35 a nip, £35 for
• 2:31
  35 mils? I've been having 30 so I had to
• 2:33
  crack that open. So I've had a very good.
• 2:35
  You wouldn't even get, you wouldn't even get that cheap on
• 2:36
  your own staff discount. I mean, there's a world.
• 2:40
  It's a very well priced salmon the diggers is what I'll say.
• 2:42
  There's a there's a world, I guess, where a lot of people can
• 2:44
  sometimes go through a large part of their life or they'll
• 2:47
  never have a whiskey older than the age that they actually are.
• 2:49
  Whereas Ross actually, it's usually, you never really drinks
• 2:53
  it. What have you got I guess?
• 2:54
  I've got October morning 12. Very, very nice.
• 2:58
  Yeah. And I've gone Arden American
• 3:00
  Fidelity, I can't go. Why is that?
• 3:04
  It's probably in sales for the month.
• 3:05
  I've got your heritage barley release great and Pete and
• 3:10
  Sotternes super. Glad.
• 3:12
  Graham you. Have you gone the same way?
• 3:14
  I've got 2 Arden Americans on either side of a Glen Allocate
• 3:17
  15 and I've gone this is because you've you've viewed Billy
• 3:23
  Walker the other day and you've just gone all out yeah Glen Alec
• 3:26
  right well yes yeah, we I saw Billy speaking at the end
• 3:29
  Whiskey conference. I'll give these guys a shout out
• 3:31
  later on. It was, it was a great as we
• 3:33
  were recording, I still got a few weeks after it, but it was a
• 3:35
  really, really successful conference.
• 3:36
  But Arden, Merkin, Sherry, which people of the podcast will know,
• 3:41
  That was my 2025 DRAM of the year.
• 3:43
  I believe you said you could bathe in it.
• 3:45
  I said I would love to fill a bath full of that.
• 3:47
  What? Was nice is when I went to the
• 3:49
  bar, I went after you. So I can actually see pretty
• 3:51
  much which Arden Merkins you've gone for us.
• 3:53
  I went right go for the ones. Well, I said and there was a
• 3:55
  tasting here as we're recording this a couple of weeks ago.
• 3:58
  So all the Arden Merkins have been brought.
• 3:59
  Forward to the edge, to the shelf, and I've also gone for
• 4:02
  the Arden Merkin tent, which I think just a a cracking drama.
• 4:06
  As well Dark Label the New 10. Yes, but we are ardent American
• 4:09
  daft because tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we have the managing
• 4:13
  director of Adelphi Man, who is in charge of it all for Adelphi
• 4:17
  and ardent American, Alex Bruce. Alex, how are you?
• 4:19
  I'm very well, thank you and delighted to be here.
• 4:22
  Yes, very kind of you to welcome me in tonight.
• 4:25
  Well, thank you for coming along.
• 4:27
  And we're sitting here enjoying all these drams.
• 4:29
  You've got a ginger in front of you because you're driving.
• 4:31
  But look, we would drive them on your behalf.
• 4:33
  And I'm sure they're, you know, I would say you've probably had
• 4:35
  that much, you're sick of it, but I just don't think you can
• 4:37
  get sick about the market. You guys must be nice to beg
• 4:40
  Carl. If Carl was able to say to Alex,
• 4:43
  no, it's all right, it's safe. These boys are OK.
• 4:45
  Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I mean that's one of the
• 4:47
  other. Reasons I'm not careful that
• 4:48
  I've turned up for this one, Carl.
• 4:50
  I do, I think Carl Kraft says he is on Instagram.
• 4:54
  One of the heroes of modern WW sales folk.
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  Just. But I like the accent, as you
• 5:01
  know. American wife and all the rest.
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  Yeah. And he's he's under, he
• 5:04
  understood that he he doesn't pronounce it Glasgow.
• 5:06
  Yeah. Yeah, we've had to beat that
• 5:09
  into the and Carl. Carl Ossigrave is one of the
• 5:12
  great podcast moments. We had him on the pod and about
• 5:14
  two weeks later he was out in America and somebody who listens
• 5:16
  to the pod drove about 6 hours. Scott Moore drove about 6 hours
• 5:21
  to go and meet him in Saint Louis.
• 5:23
  He's he's back out at the moment.
• 5:24
  He's in, I think Austin tonight. Was he?
• 5:26
  Yeah. Or 19 only if you're listening
• 5:30
  Scott, that's. Another 8 hours drive from
• 5:33
  Memphis I think but. But no, Alex, it's great.
• 5:36
  I mean, I think we, what we'll all say is we'll mention on the
• 5:40
  market a lot tonight and the day of course we'll talk about that.
• 5:43
  But you're not paying, you're not paying us to do it.
• 5:45
  We genuinely, I mean, not that we would speak about a brand if
• 5:48
  we weren't being paid to talk about, but we're being paid.
• 5:50
  Sorry, but we are just massive Arden market fans on the podcast
• 5:55
  and and genuinely, and we were actually talking.
• 5:58
  In fact, the last last week's episode we're talking about, it
• 6:00
  was Flor Outram was on the pod and it was one of her, what, 3
• 6:03
  drafts? European Brandon Master for
• 6:05
  international beverage. Yes, that's correct.
• 6:07
  And we were asking, she asked about how does Arden American
• 6:10
  pop up a lot, and I said, yeah, it does.
• 6:12
  It was Charlie Hume who first put it up and it was that Paul
• 6:15
  Noir champagne, but he got to try it before that actually came
• 6:20
  out. And I said I was really annoyed
• 6:23
  and I'm repeating myself. So if you listen to last week's
• 6:25
  apologies, but I'm but I was really annoyed that night for
• 6:29
  two reasons #1 I'd never heard of Arde Marcus, so I didn't have
• 6:32
  a clue how to spell it. And if you look back at my
• 6:35
  phonetic spelling of what I thought he'd said.
• 6:37
  And then of course he's stuck Paul Louise Noir or whatever it
• 6:40
  is on top of it. Well, that's a nightmare for a
• 6:42
  dyslexic straight away. But secondly, I was actually
• 6:44
  really annoyed because the first time I'd ever heard of Arde
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  marking and the first time I'd ever we'd ever had somebody on a
• 6:49
  walk 3 drams bringing in a new distillery on a walk 3 DRAM
• 6:52
  Charlie. His walk 3 drams were incredible
• 6:54
  that night and I was semi disappointed going why?
• 6:59
  I've never heard of these guys. Why would you, why would you
• 7:01
  bring that and how wrong a year and a bit later am I?
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  Because the the range and scope of the whiskey that's been
• 7:08
  produced there is absolutely fantastic and we've just enjoyed
• 7:12
  so many different releases. Angus, anyway.
• 7:13
  Absolutely. I think, I think particularly
• 7:15
  when there was a moment we had when we were at the Edinburgh
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  Whiskey Festival and we were recording something at the time.
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  So we were kind of mid conversation.
• 7:21
  Somebody who we we know for the Jeeves, Jeeves we know as a
• 7:24
  listener came up and he had a bottling of your cherry cap,
• 7:29
  your cherry release. I think it might have actually
• 7:32
  been a single cast version, a private bottling of that.
• 7:36
  And he kind of just Glenn Kern glad.
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  Like we didn't really even see necessarily what he was pouring.
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  They put it in, couldn't tell us what it was.
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  It was just, you know, that point, right?
• 7:46
  OK. And we tried it.
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  And I remember Graham and I just kind of.
• 7:50
  Gave a look because we're again on camera.
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  We chatted mid conversation conversation with somebody else.
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  Somebody else was talking. He's coming on camera and
• 7:57
  porters and Graham just made the eye contact and went right.
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  Wow, that's. Really, really nice whiskey,
• 8:02
  Yeah. Look, and we, I think the end of
• 8:05
  the day, we, I mean, I think Carl probably explained this
• 8:09
  previously, but everything's in house, including the blending
• 8:13
  team. And I think that's hugely
• 8:14
  important. We're not wearing lab coats.
• 8:17
  We're not masters this and masters that, We're just people
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  who love whiskey and have been in alcohol for a number of years
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  and have gained experience both in terms of what we like and
• 8:29
  also what we think works. And having that all together not
• 8:35
  only gives you a bit of consistency, but if we're having
• 8:40
  a bit of fun, that can shine through as well.
• 8:42
  Definitely say that one. I spoke to Carol, you know, but
• 8:45
  talk, talk us through then where they're all how they're all
• 8:47
  start from your own point of view, where do you start by
• 8:50
  getting involved in in whiskey? So I actually started on the
• 8:56
  wrong side of the channel. I did my sort of post student
• 9:01
  training with Remy Remy Mahtan and I was very lucky to build a
• 9:07
  Blogger job through Highland Distillers, who were then in the
• 9:09
  mid 90s in a joint venture. So I got a beautiful office on
• 9:14
  the Ron Vine de Chauncelyze and I had an amazing few months.
• 9:19
  But what it taught me was, well, it gave me this, this desire to
• 9:24
  get back into or to get into spirits.
• 9:27
  And it was logical that that would be Scotch because it was
• 9:30
  back home. So I came back kind of going
• 9:32
  right get a job in Scotch whiskey.
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  And it was just about the time when we were ploring our way
• 9:37
  back out of the last dip and the last jobs to come back are the
• 9:41
  sales and marketing jobs, which is what I was going for.
• 9:44
  So various people said look, just get into the industry
• 9:47
  anyhow you can. And I managed to get a job in
• 9:50
  wine because I ended up working for J&B.
• 9:53
  But on the wine side up here in Scotland, I had about 8 years
• 9:56
  with them and then formed my own little wine business in Leith.
• 10:01
  And two years into that, we opened a retail shop.
• 10:06
  It's now I think ALDI, it's we started ALDI the the building is
• 10:15
  that ALDI? It's just next soon as this
• 10:18
  goes, oh, it's in. I started the middle ale.
• 10:24
  Yeah, Anyway, yeah, next to Kinloch Anderson there and it,
• 10:27
  it had a back entrance onto the Main Street, you know,
• 10:31
  commercial. Yeah.
• 10:32
  Commercial St. Yeah.
• 10:33
  So directly opposite Tom Kitchens and in fact we were his
• 10:36
  first wine supplier when he opened because we took, we took
• 10:38
  it across on a trolley. You just pass it right?
• 10:40
  Straight. Ahead so people said why, why
• 10:43
  don't you adapt? You're doing wholesale, why
• 10:46
  don't you do retail at the back door?
• 10:48
  So we opened like a wine warehouse, Majestic style thing.
• 10:52
  Lots of people came in they bought wine and then gradually
• 10:54
  they started complaining that they that we didn't have the
• 11:00
  full shelf. You know, where's your gin?
• 11:02
  Where's your whiskey? So I went out and I rang up my
• 11:06
  old friend Jamie Walker, who owned Adelphi, and Adelphi I've
• 11:10
  known for years because we used to buy it, J&B and all the rest
• 11:13
  of it just for these exceptional single casks.
• 11:17
  Almost eccentric in how exceptional they were.
• 11:19
  They, him and Charlie McLean had spent hours over each selection.
• 11:23
  I mean I think the ratio back there was something like 1 cast
• 11:27
  selected in 40 tried. Albeit it was different back
• 11:32
  then because you just got all kinds of cars coming through.
• 11:34
  You didn't get any kind of pre selection.
• 11:37
  What time? Of year, sort of when, what,
• 11:38
  what, what page are we talking here then?
• 11:40
  So this would have been summer 2004.
• 11:46
  Right, OK. Jamie then said I've just sold
• 11:50
  the business. You need to go meet a guy who
• 11:53
  lives in Banton. He's bought it with a guy who
• 11:56
  lives in AD American. I said where?
• 11:59
  So anyway, I met, I met the lovely Keith Faulkner in Barnton
• 12:02
  on a Saturday afternoon. We got on really well and he
• 12:05
  said, I want you to go and meet my business partner Donald.
• 12:08
  He lives in Adam American tomorrow.
• 12:10
  I said, why? I just want to buy some whiskey
• 12:12
  and he said no, no, we want you to come and work for us.
• 12:14
  I was like, oh Christ, well there's, there's a, a new route.
• 12:18
  So I trundled my way up to Adam American on Sunday, met Donald
• 12:21
  and on the way back they offered me the job and I then shipped
• 12:24
  the wine company on to my great friend Philippe, who has now
• 12:28
  progressed it into a very good company called Luck Duvan, who
• 12:31
  was still trading successfully anyway.
• 12:35
  So that that was that. That was me into whiskey.
• 12:38
  I arrived at Adelphi, which is actually my attic bedroom.
• 12:44
  The office wise, the fax machine, I don't think e-mail
• 12:47
  was really kicking off properly then.
• 12:49
  And we had three casks which we just bought from Ian MacLeod
• 12:56
  Distillers over a long lunch. They were a butt of 1969 Spring
• 13:01
  Bank, which was right quite good.
• 13:06
  And from memory a couple of hogsheads. 1 was a 15 year old
• 13:09
  Tamdu and AI think a 12 year old good leader.
• 13:12
  But that was that was my stop to get Adelphi going again.
• 13:15
  Wow, so Jamie Walker then was in business with it was the other
• 13:20
  chap you said that was up in Ardemirkin was?
• 13:22
  No, no, no. So Jamie was pre.
• 13:24
  Pre Jamie Walker, Yeah, Jamie Walker sold the business to to
• 13:27
  chap up in, well, the guy in Barnton.
• 13:30
  Yeah. And Ardemirkin.
• 13:31
  And Ardemirkin, yeah. And so then, so that back then,
• 13:35
  you're saying that they were still an independent bottler.
• 13:38
  Yeah, but you were literally these small parcels of casks.
• 13:42
  But at the same time, like you're saying, Charlie McLean
• 13:43
  was involved at that time as well.
• 13:45
  And Charlie was actually a director when when I joined and
• 13:48
  he was beginning to branch out. He was beginning to write a lot
• 13:51
  more for and taste a lot more for other companies in the
• 13:55
  industry. So he felt it was a legitimate
• 13:58
  reason to then back down or come off the board and just remain as
• 14:01
  a consultant. And what what at that time we
• 14:04
  because we talked with Carol on the episode about the history of
• 14:07
  Adelphi, where the name comes from the Adelphi distillery in
• 14:09
  Glasgow. There was a great what was the
• 14:11
  disaster? Where the was it?
• 14:12
  The wash back broke and rang beer down the area.
• 14:15
  So if you want to hear about that, listen to Carl.
• 14:18
  Stop this episode and go back and listen to Carl's because it
• 14:21
  was it was good with that. But I'm interested at the time
• 14:23
  what was Adelphi as an independent bottler and how big
• 14:26
  a scene was independent bottling in the sort of early 2000s.
• 14:31
  So Adelphi was a bit of a loner, not as an independent bottler,
• 14:35
  but but in the style of independent bottler.
• 14:39
  So you had obviously the famous historical names like Gordon
• 14:42
  Macphail, Caden, the Heads, and just before Adelphi was
• 14:48
  signatory, Andrew Symington. But all of these independent
• 14:53
  bottlers, they all had built stock of young whiskey.
• 14:56
  So they were like a sort of virtual distiller.
• 14:59
  They built exactly. Yeah, young anyway, so filling
• 15:03
  contracts, all the rest of it, Jamie and Jamie never had enough
• 15:06
  money to do that. I mean, literally he was hand to
• 15:09
  mouth. So he he would buy a cast, he
• 15:10
  would bottle it at Broxburn Bottlers, he would sell it, and
• 15:13
  then they'd give him enough money to buy the next one just
• 15:15
  in time. And that was what what I
• 15:17
  inherited. And it was unique.
• 15:21
  There was no one really in the market doing that.
• 15:24
  But what it did give you, even though you'd never make a huge
• 15:27
  amount of money doing it, and you were at the risk of the
• 15:31
  distillers closing their doors to supply you, what it gave you
• 15:36
  was the ultimate chance to select the best you could get.
• 15:41
  Yeah. So that was where he was always
• 15:43
  at that level. And he would never allow
• 15:47
  anything to be bottled that hadn't been passed by him in
• 15:49
  charge. And in my experience when I
• 15:51
  first got into whiskey, Gordon Macphail and Adelphi with the
• 15:57
  two bottlings that I've seen most commonly in the luxury
• 16:01
  market. And it was always didn't
• 16:04
  necessarily have to be big names in whiskey for I remember having
• 16:06
  a Glen Keith. Yeah, and he's 21, bottled by
• 16:09
  Adelphi, but thinking this is the very best cask.
• 16:13
  So is that what Adelphi came? Oh, always.
• 16:16
  Well, even then I remember having a six year old Khalila
• 16:19
  that was like I looked like a paint of Guinness, it was that
• 16:21
  dark. But obviously because it was
• 16:23
  exceptional at that age, that's why it had been bottled.
• 16:25
  But it always felt that the out turns were not necessarily that
• 16:29
  consistent from Adelphi, but they were always focused on the
• 16:31
  quality of what was coming out. So you were always really
• 16:34
  excited when you seen there was a new Adelphi outturn coming
• 16:37
  out. Even now all the Adelphi's that
• 16:40
  I have are old 27 year old Clyde Leish, 40 year old Milton Duff
• 16:46
  and mid 30s bourbon cask mortlike.
• 16:52
  Yeah, like it's it's all top, top stuff.
• 16:54
  So and that. Carried on right away through.
• 16:56
  I think. I think it has from from my
• 16:59
  point of view, but you don't see as much anymore.
• 17:01
  I I must admit, like I from that from that, you know, Alex, from
• 17:05
  if you've not listened to the podcast, I don't blame you, but
• 17:08
  but equally I have Angus and I we approached whiskey from we
• 17:12
  we're whisking opposite. So we've always said from this
• 17:14
  podcast, you know, we needed to get somebody on the podcast with
• 17:18
  us that knew they were talking about.
• 17:19
  We tried with Ross, but then we realized we're just going to
• 17:21
  have to get a guest on everybody.
• 17:23
  But but I'll be honest, Adelphi is just a brand that I've only
• 17:28
  since doing the podcast. I mean, before we started doing
• 17:31
  the podcast, Angus, we weren't drink, we weren't drinking
• 17:34
  single cast whiskey really. No, not really.
• 17:36
  We weren't drinking independently bottled stuff
• 17:38
  really. So this is all a fairly new part
• 17:41
  of the journey for us. But then it is it isn't until
• 17:44
  you you, you until you walk into and this is like we did the the
• 17:49
  spotlight with Morrison distill. Morrison.
• 17:51
  Yeah. Scott Frisky Distillers.
• 17:53
  And I was saying to Tam who was doing it with us.
• 17:56
  You know, you don't see car more.
• 17:59
  Yeah. On the shelves and diggers.
• 18:01
  No. And he was like, because we're
• 18:02
  so focused on trade, we we off trade, we go into the off trade.
• 18:06
  And it's similar to Adelphi. You know, you guys, you would
• 18:08
  be, I would be guilty of thinking Adelphi were a fairly
• 18:11
  new guy in the game of independent bottlers because I'd
• 18:14
  never heard them before. And I think naively, and Chuck
• 18:17
  always said it just when you think you're at the peak of
• 18:20
  ignorance, when you think you know absolutely everything about
• 18:22
  whiskey. But I would sit there and go.
• 18:23
  These Adelphi guys must be fairly.
• 18:25
  New and I would have never seen them.
• 18:26
  Before. And I would have said to you,
• 18:29
  Graham, and I guess we are getting into whiskey, that
• 18:31
  independent bottling was kind of a fairly niche thing for whiskey
• 18:34
  drinkers mostly, but just drank what they got in the
• 18:36
  supermarket. So once you got into independent
• 18:38
  bottling, you realize how interesting things could be.
• 18:40
  And then you would go to independent bottlers, you'd have
• 18:42
  your preferences, whoever you go for in Edinburgh, Fragrant Drops
• 18:44
  and Woodrow's do really well, but Adelphi felt like that
• 18:48
  little next step up. But when I first started, I felt
• 18:51
  like not only do I know independent bottling, but I
• 18:54
  liked Adelphi's selection. And Adelphi's selection for me
• 18:58
  was, although it was more few and far between, it was always
• 19:01
  something that you would kind of take your time, sit down and
• 19:04
  take notice of. I've got, for example, Ben Nevis
• 19:09
  Adelphi in my house that was bottled for Loch Fine Whiskeys.
• 19:12
  So again, off trade success, looking at an independent
• 19:15
  retailer who have said they want to get their own single cask.
• 19:17
  And again, this was a young Darker's Knight Sherry cask.
• 19:21
  But my best experiences are distilleries I hadn't.
• 19:24
  And then I'd never heard of Glen Keith.
• 19:26
  The first Glen Keith I can remember tasting is this
• 19:28
  Adelphi, because and that was then my representation.
• 19:32
  Representation and thoughts of the distillery.
• 19:35
  And just as we've talking about, you know, Glenbergie, Milton,
• 19:38
  Duff, Tormore, Longmore, and all these distilleries reputations
• 19:42
  have been built on the shoulders of independent bottlers because
• 19:46
  they've never done official bottlings themselves.
• 19:48
  And so I always thought of Gordon Macphail in Adelphi.
• 19:51
  If they were, it was well aged and it was an interesting cast.
• 19:53
  You were getting to experience a decelerant maybe you wouldn't
• 19:56
  know much about, which I thought was really interesting.
• 19:58
  And from your own point of view, then you're talking about 2004.
• 20:01
  I just want to go back by the way and just say selling wine at
• 20:03
  the back door and leaf was probably but.
• 20:08
  It was what we had to clear off the doorstep every morning.
• 20:11
  It was more. But what, how how long had the
• 20:15
  like? So you're talking about 2004,
• 20:17
  maybe 2005 area time with a Delphi and that's what they've
• 20:21
  been doing. How long had the Delphi been
• 20:22
  going prior to that then? So Jamie started the company in
• 20:26
  1993. Wow, so it was all very well
• 20:29
  and. I think even at the peak of his
• 20:32
  ability to by cast himself, I don't think he did more than
• 20:36
  probably 50 cars a year. Yeah, something like that.
• 20:38
  So when was the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society?
• 20:40
  What was that? Oh, the 1980s, Pip Hill, I think
• 20:44
  1883 or something like that, right?
• 20:46
  So there've been a bit of time, but even it's funny you talking
• 20:49
  about we've, we've, you'll see the peaks and troughs of the
• 20:51
  whiskey in the stray and you'll, you'll know better than most.
• 20:54
  We've talked a lot of independent bottlers that we've
• 20:56
  had on the podcast and we hear about the processes.
• 20:59
  And you go back just two years when we were speaking to Gregor,
• 21:03
  Kurt and a few other independent bottlers and they were saying,
• 21:06
  we at the time, it was like you'd get if you had the
• 21:09
  relationship with one of the guys that could pass your cast
• 21:12
  on. You got a spreadsheet of a list
• 21:15
  of casts and it was like you have to buy that parcel and if
• 21:18
  you even tried to ask them, can we get a regauge on that or can
• 21:21
  we get some samples sent? I was like, no, you buy it as
• 21:23
  is. That's what it is.
• 21:26
  Some people will tell you, independent bottlers will tell
• 21:28
  you. Right now things are easing off
• 21:29
  a little bit because casts are becoming more available and
• 21:31
  things like that. But it's interesting going back,
• 21:33
  you're saying that Jamie had already had that relationship
• 21:36
  where he was saying try getting the opportunity first of all to
• 21:39
  try 40 casts for. The the black book, which was
• 21:42
  literally a black book that he gave me of all the contacts, the
• 21:46
  supply contacts was probably the most valuable thing.
• 21:48
  Yeah, because that's I got, I think I got a battered filing
• 21:51
  cabinet, the fax machine and this black book and that was it.
• 21:54
  I. Mean you came in.
• 21:56
  Was was it a case of keeping doing what he'd done?
• 21:59
  Before or was there a change? In terms of buying casks,
• 22:02
  because you said the stock was kind of freecast basically when
• 22:05
  you came in? There was an assortment of
• 22:07
  bottles as well, which he hadn't sold.
• 22:10
  So yeah, we had that. No, that was all that was.
• 22:13
  He had made the decision, I'm guessing probably about 2001,
• 22:17
  too, to sell the business. And he'd been looking for the
• 22:21
  right people. And Keith had walked in on the
• 22:28
  suggestion of a cousin, I think a mutual cousin, because she
• 22:32
  said if you, because Keith wanted to buy a single cask and
• 22:35
  share it with Donald, basically. And he'd walked in.
• 22:39
  Jamie had been introduced by this cousin.
• 22:41
  And he said, I want to buy a single cast.
• 22:42
  I hear you've got some good ones.
• 22:44
  And Jamie sold them the business.
• 22:46
  He walked out with three casts, filing cabinet, black book.
• 22:50
  So I mean. Within a year or two you'd gone
• 22:53
  up and cast volume. I take it a bit.
• 22:55
  Well, yes and no. So the, and that was the reason
• 22:57
  Jamie had sold it to them, was he'd finally found someone who
• 23:00
  respected what he'd done and would then continue it.
• 23:03
  At least that's what do. You hope buying again.
• 23:05
  So retaining Charlie, who then became my mentor because I had
• 23:09
  to switch from a kind of wine pallet into a whiskey pallet
• 23:12
  fairly quickly. And yeah, no, you're right.
• 23:15
  We we bought more now. And just to put it into
• 23:17
  perspective on what you've just said about doors opening and
• 23:20
  stock availability. So 2004 we had good
• 23:24
  availability, really good in fact.
• 23:26
  And if I give you one example, a number of some of the most
• 23:30
  exciting cars I ever bought were from Drambuy.
• 23:33
  Really. OK, so Drambuy were based out at
• 23:37
  Glen Warranty where you know where they were, shared the
• 23:39
  building there at the time. And I walked in to meet the the
• 23:44
  the supplier guy there. And he offered me on that day
• 23:50
  something like 10 Sherry Hogsheads of McAllen, 30 year
• 23:54
  old Glenn Livett, 40 year old, you name it.
• 23:57
  And I said, well, what do you do with all this stuff?
• 23:59
  And he said we're chucking it into Drambu.
• 24:01
  They literally had that stock and they were putting it into.
• 24:04
  Drambu yeah, 30 year old. McAllen because they bought it
• 24:07
  when it was young. The Drambu brand had tailed off
• 24:09
  a little bit, so they still had the stock.
• 24:11
  They had to use it. So I was, I was, you know, like
• 24:14
  his fairy godmother. I was paying him more money.
• 24:17
  Yeah, so have you. I was delighted.
• 24:19
  So if anyone can get. Themselves a bottle of Granby.
• 24:21
  From two years onwards, yeah. Yeah, you probably.
• 24:25
  Got some pretty decent, right? Yeah.
• 24:26
  Because when you talk about that time, I mean, we're, well, I, I
• 24:31
  worry that on the podcast over the last few weeks, we've become
• 24:36
  not the doom merchants of the, of the, of the industry.
• 24:39
  There's a lot of bad news. There it is, but the.
• 24:41
  Adju share price has been mentioned.
• 24:43
  Yes, it has been mentioned, but we offered them an opportunity
• 24:47
  to save their share price by buying some of Moira's DRAM jam
• 24:50
  and putting out in the shelves. But I think I mentioned it I was
• 24:54
  at that in whiskey conference as we were recording this last week
• 24:57
  and it was fascinating. It was the first time they've
• 24:59
  ever done it big KD media, they did a great job putting it on.
• 25:02
  I didn't know what to expect. That's great.
• 25:04
  I was kind of going along there going we'll see what this is
• 25:08
  like. Well, how well attended it'll be
• 25:09
  what the and I'd seen a little bit online about who we're who's
• 25:12
  going to be speaking and look, it was on the IT was on the
• 25:16
  topic of conversation, the industry.
• 25:19
  But they also said at the start of the conference, we have to
• 25:21
  talk it up. We're not going to be talking it
• 25:23
  down. What we if we are going to be
• 25:25
  talking about the challenges that we're facing, we have to be
• 25:27
  talking about it on a positive, you know, how do we fix it
• 25:30
  rather than just everyone getting in a circle or having a
• 25:33
  cry and thinking how bad things are and it gets worse and worse
• 25:35
  and worse. But very interestingly, the
• 25:38
  aforementioned Billy Walker was speaking and it was funny
• 25:42
  because he said, I remember when I, when I, you know, there's
• 25:47
  only a few people, there's only one person in this room that can
• 25:49
  say something like this effectively is he said, I
• 25:52
  remember when I bought my first distillery, right, right.
• 25:56
  You know, I didn't go, oh, well, good for you, Billy.
• 25:59
  But he said it was 2004 and he said for context, there were 14,
• 26:04
  I think it was 14. There was 14 distilleries in
• 26:06
  Scotland that had been mothballed that were being made
• 26:08
  available, right? And he said, just let that sink
• 26:11
  in right now when everyone's sitting here today thinking
• 26:14
  we're in our turmoil at the moment.
• 26:16
  It's 2004. There were 14 distilleries that
• 26:19
  we could have picked from that would be officially mothballed.
• 26:22
  So OK, you're hearing about people being paid off and it's
• 26:26
  terrible. And we've seen, you know,
• 26:27
  closures of different areas and people are distilleries going
• 26:30
  down to certain levels. But he was saying that that's
• 26:32
  where the industry was in 2004. So from your point of view,
• 26:36
  Alex, you know, being involved in the industry back then, did
• 26:38
  you see it as a tough time or was it a A, you know, whilst
• 26:43
  it's tough for some, is there's an opportunity for others?
• 26:45
  I think, I think I've been incredibly lucky over the years
• 26:48
  at timing things right. And it's not by design, it's by
• 26:51
  default. But with Adelphi, I landed just
• 26:55
  a single malt was beginning to take off while the supply doors
• 26:59
  were still open. And that's a very difficult
• 27:01
  balance to have. And it wasn't long before they
• 27:05
  started to close. I'm talking three years.
• 27:08
  Well, the doors started to yeah, yeah.
• 27:10
  And even even for someone like yourself who had that black book
• 27:13
  had already said. So suddenly instead of it was
• 27:16
  going back to like what we've just talked about where instead
• 27:19
  of you being able to say, come on guys, you were selling us
• 27:20
  these casks and giving us samples and letting us kick the
• 27:23
  casks and try like and what have you to a few years later, even
• 27:27
  with the relationship order in place are saying sorry.
• 27:29
  So what you've got to remember is, well, what you have to
• 27:33
  realise is that that Black Book, 95% of the names on it were
• 27:38
  brokers or they were distillers, some of them.
• 27:42
  But where I was getting whiskey in terms of the brands, it was
• 27:47
  more often than not not the original distillery.
• 27:49
  Yeah. So it wasn't the fact that my
• 27:53
  contacts were saying no, it was the fact that their. 1.
• 27:57
  Their suppliers one thing no calm down.
• 28:00
  You know, we can't supply that much this year.
• 28:03
  And that's the way with all of the way the independent bottlers
• 28:06
  works, whether some people in the industry have referred to us
• 28:10
  as parasites, some like to see the more symbiotic relationship,
• 28:14
  which is great. And certainly we help out when
• 28:17
  times are tough and, and, and it's a good way of spreading the
• 28:20
  word. But with all of these things,
• 28:25
  you've got to remember that the original supplier is at the end
• 28:28
  of the day governing everything that's happening.
• 28:30
  Yeah. And this this includes and I, I
• 28:33
  always drum tell this story. So when we do, for example, a no
• 28:38
  named whiskey, so we call up call it some fictitious name.
• 28:42
  It's not because we don't want to tell the customer where it
• 28:44
  comes from. I mean, in theory we actually
• 28:46
  don't know, but maybe we do. It's not because, you know,
• 28:50
  we're protecting ourselves. We're protecting our supplier
• 28:54
  because we need to make sure that their supply arrangement
• 28:56
  continues. Yeah.
• 28:57
  And if we suddenly say that is a McAllen or whatever, yeah, then
• 29:01
  it potentially dries up at the other end.
• 29:03
  Yeah. So it's a much bigger picture
• 29:04
  we're looking at. I remember speaking to Dougie a
• 29:06
  little about that, and I think it might have been a Cline leash
• 29:10
  that had been, I wrote about it in the the newsletter actually,
• 29:15
  because it's the first time you actually look at the dynamic
• 29:17
  from the other side. And I think at the time it was
• 29:19
  either I might have been Royal Mail.
• 29:21
  Whiskey's had the chance to bottle a Cline leash and they
• 29:24
  had the naming rights on the cask.
• 29:27
  They call it Sutherland. No, it was, well it was, it was
• 29:30
  about 16 year old or I thought I can't remember what age it was,
• 29:32
  12 to 16, what somewhere in between there.
• 29:35
  But the problem was they could have stuck that on the shelf.
• 29:37
  That would have been the direct competition, recallingly 14.
• 29:40
  Yeah, right, but they also said, well, we can't stick it too high
• 29:43
  up because then people would go, well, why would we buy that when
• 29:45
  we can get a coin leash 14 and then they couldn't undercut it
• 29:48
  because then that would piss off their supplier and they go hang
• 29:51
  on, really guys, we're giving you this.
• 29:52
  You can't suddenly start putting that out.
• 29:54
  So what they decided was they made the choice to make it a
• 29:56
  Highland and they put a cat on the label.
• 29:58
  Maybe Sutherland, maybe they did that, but but if you knew, you
• 30:02
  knew. But what they were able to do is
• 30:03
  they were able to put it on the shelf.
• 30:04
  I can't remember what he said, but it was like, you know, a £50
• 30:08
  if that a 50 LB bottle of what they knew was 16 year old
• 30:12
  claiming what if you knew you knew and you were getting a
• 30:15
  bargain. And we that's that's what these
• 30:17
  things can work in two ways. And if it's a single cash,
• 30:19
  you're not going to do too much damage.
• 30:22
  But as if you're consistently buying lots of stock and you
• 30:25
  know, everybody knows what a Williamson is now at this point
• 30:28
  or a burn, you know what Williamson is.
• 30:30
  No. Well, for the people who are
• 30:31
  like, I don't. Know, I don't know.
• 30:35
  Well, I do. You've had it on the podcast.
• 30:36
  So William Williamson is a Lafroy.
• 30:38
  Yeah. It's like the name you put for a
• 30:39
  Lloyd because Bessie Williamson was the one of the.
• 30:42
  Remember Ruskin Novices, Ross. I know that's true.
• 30:44
  It's true. Or Burnsides.
• 30:46
  Or Ward Heads. Or Westport.
• 30:47
  Burnsides is an interesting 1 though.
• 30:49
  Because cabinet. Yeah, well, that's true.
• 30:51
  But. And that has well.
• 30:52
  We do, Megan. Well, because I, I I've was
• 30:56
  speaking to a bottler that's that was heavily featured in the
• 31:01
  podcast in the last two years who have casks of Burnside that
• 31:06
  are going to release it as an unknown space.
• 31:07
  I'd soon because they don't want to get themselves.
• 31:09
  Involved oh look, we we put one out not realising Burnside
• 31:12
  Burnside. Those were well again and
• 31:15
  immediately got a phone call phone call because we know them
• 31:18
  pretty well and I'm really sorry I've no idea We'll we'll stop.
• 31:22
  We've got one more. So I kind of scratched my head
• 31:24
  and said what we're going to call this and I, I called it
• 31:27
  distilled in Duff Town. OK, we seem to have hit this.
• 31:30
  Yeah, why not? And so people have WW sponge
• 31:34
  whiskey land have come out of sideburn.
• 31:37
  Yeah. Equally annoying that our
• 31:38
  friends at can heads. But it's one of those things.
• 31:40
  What do you do with these? You're not naming it so also, I
• 31:44
  know for a fact that the, you know, the owners of these cast
• 31:47
  and William Grant and sons are no longer making burn sides and
• 31:51
  selling them or ward heads and selling them.
• 31:53
  That's not, they've stopped that since early 2000s.
• 31:56
  So that's why it's always debated when there's young stuff
• 31:58
  that comes out now you'll hear from Charlie Metcalf's then
• 32:00
  actually that can't be a Burnside because they've not
• 32:02
  sold any Burnside and and and and since it's XYZ.
• 32:05
  But it's interesting to me you're bottling all these
• 32:08
  whiskeys. You must have seen, you must
• 32:10
  have seen Adelphi really pick up when when you took over then in
• 32:14
  the in this first couple of years and started to do slightly
• 32:16
  bigger outturns. I came back from one of the
• 32:18
  clinch moments in terms of sort of where we got to, in terms of
• 32:23
  so well, I'll just, if I just regress to an earlier
• 32:27
  conversation, what I was going to say around the fact that you
• 32:30
  hadn't seen Adelphi very much. So the availability or lack of.
• 32:34
  So bearing in mind, I was coming out of a wine business and we
• 32:38
  were looking after hotels and restaurants in Scotland
• 32:40
  predominantly and it was just me.
• 32:43
  So I had to try and work out what the easiest way to market
• 32:46
  was and, and with potential growth in mind as well.
• 32:50
  So the first thing of, of that was to go back to my wine, my
• 32:53
  restaurants and my hotels. So we had some really good
• 32:56
  relationships with some good, you know, like Andrew Fairley's,
• 32:59
  places like that. So I could get an exclusive on
• 33:01
  the whiskey trolley for that. Then I went right.
• 33:05
  If I appoint an, an importer in one market, they'll then appoint
• 33:09
  lots of me and they can, you know, take over.
• 33:12
  And it was also a commercially, it was a cash flow issue
• 33:15
  because, and it's even worse nowadays.
• 33:16
  But if you're selling in the UK, you have to pay the duty upfront
• 33:22
  as the manufacturer, as a producer.
• 33:24
  And yes, you'll get paid, but you may be 30 days after.
• 33:27
  So that's a lot of cash if you're building a brand.
• 33:29
  So I thought export, no, no duty requirements, shove it out the
• 33:32
  door. Broxman bottlers will handle it
• 33:34
  because we use them for everything then.
• 33:36
  And so places like Germany took off and the Netherlands and the
• 33:40
  US, these were all really good markets for us in the early
• 33:43
  days. And the catalyst for me coming
• 33:46
  back to my shareholders and saying we need to think about
• 33:48
  the future was a whiskey fair in Essen.
• 33:52
  I think it was about 2007. And it was in this sort of town
• 33:56
  hall in Essen, my first time there.
• 33:59
  And I remember coming along, normally you'd go to a whiskey
• 34:01
  fair as an exhibitor maybe an hour before the doors open.
• 34:03
  And here we were, nice sunny day walking in and there was a queue
• 34:06
  sneaking all the way back from the doors around the corner or
• 34:09
  at least two or three corners. And I said to my importer Tila,
• 34:12
  I said you must be really pleased with it.
• 34:14
  You know, they're all queuing for tickets.
• 34:15
  And he said, Nah, they're queuing for your cask of.
• 34:18
  Really. So we'd done a, we'd done a, an
• 34:20
  exclusive cask of our beg for the whiskey for that weekend,
• 34:25
  which in those days was available.
• 34:26
  Yeah. Where's?
• 34:26
  Where's Essen? Angus, Germany.
• 34:29
  Good in tag. Hello, Germany.
• 34:31
  Good. In tag Germany.
• 34:32
  They they, they said it was 1 bottle per person and it sold
• 34:37
  out within an hour and a half. That's mental.
• 34:38
  So I came back slightly cap in hand, but also really
• 34:42
  optimistic. And I said, you know, to Donald
• 34:44
  and Keith, I said, going forward, we're going to have an
• 34:46
  issue. We can either flat line the
• 34:48
  business because that's kind of what supply is doing now, or we
• 34:52
  can take control of our production of our, you know,
• 34:58
  bulk whiskey, you're like, or we can just lock ourselves in the
• 35:01
  warehouse and drink what we got left.
• 35:04
  And they, and they actually, option 3 was definitely got a
• 35:07
  big tick. But no, you can see, I mean,
• 35:10
  Donald's an engineer. He's an extraordinary mind and.
• 35:12
  You can see this, this idea of a distillery, it wasn't there when
• 35:18
  you took over the company at all.
• 35:19
  It wasn't an ambition necessarily of your owners.
• 35:23
  This is something that came. Out no they they wanted this to
• 35:25
  be a hobby that I can make a little bit of a profit profit
• 35:28
  every year and give them a dividend that was it so suddenly
• 35:31
  I had this and Donald's you can see the cogs going and you see
• 35:34
  it right distillery an American what's going around that where's
• 35:38
  the circular economy and all of these things started clicking
• 35:41
  into place so. That was that was the decision
• 35:43
  that they. Had 2007 two thousand and we
• 35:45
  then we engaged in architect pretty quickly.
• 35:49
  Yeah, the wrong one. And he came up with this
• 35:54
  monstrous great factory on the hillside, you know, like
• 35:57
  architects drawing thing. And it just wasn't the right
• 35:59
  place. It wasn't the right volume.
• 36:00
  It was all wrong. So you had a site fairly
• 36:02
  quickly. No, no, we didn't.
• 36:03
  At that stage, it was just Plunkett somewhere in an
• 36:06
  American as a design. And then we'll work out, you
• 36:08
  know, how to build. It the rest of.
• 36:10
  So we kind of then felt really despondent because the cost was
• 36:13
  obviously horrific. And then another trip, this time
• 36:17
  to Japan. And I think it was 2010.
• 36:22
  I got invited last minute. I was out in Tokyo for the
• 36:24
  whiskey fair and Anthony Wills was there and he was invited to
• 36:28
  go and visit Chichibu, which was the same age as as Kilhoman.
• 36:33
  And there was a journalist, a British journalist as well.
• 36:36
  And, and he said, why don't you come along?
• 36:37
  It'll be fun. It's like a three hour train
• 36:39
  journey. We're in Tokyo.
• 36:41
  So I went out and what a place. I mean, my eyes just open to the
• 36:45
  the simplicity and on the flip sides, the quality out of that
• 36:49
  simplicity, you know, So there was, I can't remember it was
• 36:52
  you, me or whoever it was back in the day, but there was
• 36:54
  someone stirring the Mizanara wash back.
• 37:02
  Sorry, a mash ton by hand with an awe.
• 37:06
  Everything was Yeah. Yeah.
• 37:08
  Well, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck's been to Chichibu.
• 37:10
  I think he just turned up and asked if.
• 37:12
  He can have a look. He does.
• 37:12
  He went back to Chichi Chichi Whiskey Festival and favorite is
• 37:16
  Yeah. Yeah, it's great.
• 37:17
  It's really good. Yeah.
• 37:18
  So anyway, came back full, full of optimism.
• 37:20
  We don't need to go big, we can do it small scale.
• 37:23
  I think Chichibu was probably around 80,000 litres.
• 37:25
  Yeah, 'cause you're about a million litres, aren't?
• 37:27
  You. No, we're not.
• 37:28
  We're not. We originally planned for
• 37:29
  100,000 and one of my, by then I'd, I'd encouraged a few more
• 37:35
  mentors to kind of appear on the scene.
• 37:37
  One of them was Colin Ross, who was forever the manager at Ben
• 37:42
  Nevis Discovery. And it was what I wanted was his
• 37:45
  historical knowledge. So the peaks and the troughs,
• 37:48
  what did he do? All these kind of things.
• 37:50
  And he said, right, what are you building?
• 37:52
  And I said it's 100,000 litre, it's going to be off grid
• 37:55
  because we kind of had worked that out.
• 37:57
  It's going to be an Adam Mercan. He said best water in Scotland
• 38:00
  isn't that great. And he said right, I'm going to
• 38:02
  stop you there. He said 100,000 meter all wrong.
• 38:05
  You either go in for a kind of cellar door, tiny, tiny, tiny
• 38:09
  thing like 20 thousand, 30,000 meters that you can pretty much
• 38:12
  sell direct to consumer or you get at least 200 to 250 because
• 38:18
  otherwise to grow the brand, you'll never have enough
• 38:21
  advertising promotional collateral, especially in the
• 38:25
  big markets like America. So that's when we shifted it up
• 38:28
  to we could do, we could do 750, we could do 500 comfortably, but
• 38:35
  we settled at about 400. 400 wow there.
• 38:37
  We go it's a good size. So that's because to hear it
• 38:41
  like that, to hear the story about the fact that you wanted
• 38:45
  to get the, you know, you saw that there was a market there,
• 38:49
  you saw what you had and going to Germany, seeing the queue
• 38:51
  around the block and things like that and going right where,
• 38:54
  because that is the, it's funny. The, the, the question over
• 38:58
  being an independent bottler of where they start versus where
• 39:02
  you end up is a lot of these guys will start.
• 39:05
  And it's, it's kind of like hand to mouth.
• 39:07
  That's you buy a cast, you get a bald, you get enough money to
• 39:10
  buy your next cast. Or maybe you have a, because
• 39:12
  we've talked about it so many times, a cast sitting on the
• 39:15
  shelf. There's a, there's a hole in
• 39:17
  your pocket. It just burns a hole in your
• 39:19
  pocket. You maybe buy that, but you go
• 39:20
  well and it ties up your cash flow.
• 39:22
  You don't know when are you going to get that bottled?
• 39:24
  You maybe know it's a crack in whiskey.
• 39:27
  And as soon as it's ready, well, once that goes, that is going to
• 39:30
  sell. But at the same time, until it's
• 39:32
  ready, it's not. So there is that that element of
• 39:35
  at some point an independent bottler has to jump in and go
• 39:40
  right, it's time to do it. You said cap and and a little
• 39:42
  bit go Yep, go investors and say can we, can we actually start
• 39:45
  laying down? Cash so we.
• 39:46
  Could do it badly to go to go to the next stage instead of just
• 39:49
  going listen guys, I think when we start laying down more cash,
• 39:51
  we could be we could really make a go of it.
• 39:53
  You've gone all in. Let's get bulk.
• 39:56
  Let's get going. And move that must have been
• 39:57
  kind of fundraising challenges. I mean, how how did you raise
• 40:00
  the capital to build the distillery itself?
• 40:03
  Was that something that came from your owner?
• 40:04
  Yeah, look, we're very lucky. We've never used them.
• 40:07
  We've never used a bank so well, not not for overdraft or loan
• 40:12
  facilities over. The years?
• 40:12
  No, it's not somewhere. No, as Donald said, you know,
• 40:19
  he's a typical philanthropic investor, Scotsman.
• 40:23
  He's got deep pockets and short arms.
• 40:28
  But we managed to structure it or they managed to structure it
• 40:31
  as as principal shareholders through loans and a bit of
• 40:36
  capital we got. We would because we were ahead
• 40:39
  of the big growth in new distilleries.
• 40:43
  We managed to get 2 quite decent grants as well, one from
• 40:47
  Scottish Government and one from Highlands and Islands and in
• 40:51
  fact the Highlands and Islands one, I'm sorry HIE Islands and
• 40:55
  Islands Enterprise was only available if we built a retail
• 41:01
  element on site, so a visitor centre and that was the last
• 41:04
  thing we wanted people that come to our.
• 41:08
  Just to create those few more jobs.
• 41:11
  Yeah, exactly what it was. It's about bringing, you know,
• 41:14
  more, more jobs. So they, they, they say, well,
• 41:16
  we need to see a feasibility study if you're going to build a
• 41:18
  visitor centre. And, and we got some guy from
• 41:21
  down South to come up and scratch his head and, and avoid
• 41:25
  the midges for a few months. And he reckoned that when we got
• 41:29
  to full maturation, as in you know, 20304050 years down the
• 41:32
  line as a brand, not as a whiskey, but as a brand, we
• 41:35
  might be lucky to squeeze 10,000 people down that single track
• 41:38
  route. Last year we got over 10,000
• 41:40
  people. That's amazing.
• 41:41
  So it has changed. It's really changed, not, not
• 41:46
  the way things work in Adam Merkel, but just the, the, the
• 41:50
  support, the natural support it's brought to the area, which
• 41:54
  is more than we could ever wish. And tell me Alex before you the
• 41:58
  distillery really kicks off and the development of Adelphi at
• 42:01
  this point, are you filling spirit into cash Philadelphia at
• 42:04
  this point or are you still buying kind of ready made liquid
• 42:07
  and. So what we've, we've kind of got
• 42:09
  onto phase, I don't know if it's 234 or whatever, but it's, it's
• 42:12
  beyond phase one of Adam Merkin. So phase one of Adam Merkin was
• 42:15
  to bottle a single malt. And we did that stupidly or
• 42:19
  luckily during COVID when everyone was sitting, sitting at
• 42:21
  home and wanting something to do.
• 42:24
  Phase two, let's call it that was to start using a proportion
• 42:30
  of Adam Merkin to benefit Adelphi, OK, by that I mean
• 42:34
  trading bulk, sure. So we're now actively trading Ad
• 42:37
  American with some of the quite big guys football lending.
• 42:41
  Trading spirits rather than. Sometimes mature, sometimes
• 42:45
  Billings, and we're getting mature stock back more often
• 42:49
  than not that we can then shove through Adelphi much more
• 42:52
  quickly. And I think it was something
• 42:53
  that should be admired about a new distillery and new feels
• 42:56
  very established now in all reality.
• 42:59
  You were the lowercase. Then it really does.
• 43:00
  It does you. See many grey hairs.
• 43:02
  Like it does feel you're very established now, but we've seen,
• 43:04
  you know, all these new distilleries open in the 21st
• 43:06
  century. Anyway, your policy on wood has
• 43:10
  been quite exciting for a new distillery and adventurous.
• 43:14
  Did I say as well, does that come from a confidence of having
• 43:17
  used lots of stuff for a Delphi and having an interesting wood
• 43:21
  management policy or is it go well, we're bringing really
• 43:24
  interesting spirit here. Let's see how it tastes and
• 43:27
  sauteed, you know, repeated sauteed for example like.
• 43:31
  I oh, there's so many things feeding into this and I'll try
• 43:34
  and keep it short. The first thing that's always
• 43:37
  ringing in the back of my head, and this might sound a bit kind
• 43:39
  of flippant or whatever the word is, my great, great, great
• 43:42
  grandfather. Four times great grandfather was
• 43:47
  many call him the first blender or first commercial blender.
• 43:51
  Yeah, my mother's side. Andrew Asher.
• 43:53
  Yeah, I mean, we, we need to talk about.
• 43:55
  That we don't. We don't.
• 43:57
  Well, the reason I'm bringing him up.
• 43:58
  He's effectively the first man that put grain in spirit, but
• 44:01
  grain commercially. Whiskey.
• 44:02
  Commercial all together. But beyond that, what he did,
• 44:05
  and this is what's ringing in my head every day when I get up, is
• 44:08
  you have to have consistency. Sure.
• 44:10
  So even when it comes to the blend, we've got lots of, you
• 44:13
  know, multiple components from multiple distineries, you've
• 44:15
  still got to get that consistency, right.
• 44:18
  So one of the aspects of being able to look at different wood
• 44:22
  types is that our new make spirit is consistent.
• 44:26
  And yes, we do unpeted and yes, we do petered and occasionally
• 44:30
  we'll go off and do a heritage or whatever, but the DNA is
• 44:33
  there throughout. And we're just very lucky.
• 44:36
  And there's a number of reasons for this too.
• 44:38
  We're very lucky that the DNA is quite powerful.
• 44:42
  It's it's got a real West Coast character to it.
• 44:44
  So it allows it to shine through even when you go off and shovel
• 44:48
  it in a so turn or report or whatever.
• 44:50
  But even then I was still nervous.
• 44:52
  I was very traditional in that when we started, it was all
• 44:56
  bourbon, it was all Sherry. And the other important factor
• 45:00
  was that I had to work with source.
• 45:02
  So I wasn't going to work with a cooperage or a broker.
• 45:05
  You know, I literally in 2013, I went to two places.
• 45:09
  I went to Kentucky and I met with the then seller of Jim Beam
• 45:15
  in terms of casks, and then I went to Spain and down to Hare F
• 45:19
  and met Miguel Martine. Both really good introductions.
• 45:22
  And the Jim Beam 1 ended up falling flat on its nose because
• 45:25
  they got sold to Santori the day before I placed my first
• 45:30
  container order. But just to show you how the
• 45:35
  international industry works, I, I put the phone down really
• 45:42
  despondent. I knew we were starting to
• 45:44
  distill in six months time. We had no wood on the water.
• 45:49
  And I remembered one of my oldest friends from back here in
• 45:53
  Fife, he had married, he'd married an American and
• 45:57
  emigrated years ago, lived in Virginia.
• 45:59
  I remember the last time I'd spoken to him, we were talking
• 46:02
  about distilling and stuff and he'd said, oh, you must meet my
• 46:05
  friend who works for Brian Foreman.
• 46:07
  And I, I thought, I wonder what his friend does at Brown Forman.
• 46:10
  So I, I waited till the time was right in the day and I rang up
• 46:14
  my mate Sean and I said, who's your friend at Brown Foreman?
• 46:17
  And he said, oh, it's my friend and my wife, but he's currently
• 46:20
  in Australia. He's he's like the manager right
• 46:21
  there for Brown Foreman. What?
• 46:24
  What is it you want? I said I need cast.
• 46:26
  I need a container of cast empty.
• 46:27
  And he said OK. And, and half an hour later the
• 46:31
  phone rang in my office from the head Cooper at Brown Foreman.
• 46:35
  Wow. So he'd gone from Virginia to
• 46:36
  Sydney back to Kentucky, and this guy who had an, you know,
• 46:43
  he everyone knew he was always grumpy and wouldn't speak to
• 46:46
  anyone Here he was. And he said, I've been told to
• 46:48
  speak to you and I've been told to send you some cars, but I
• 46:51
  don't want to. Terrible American accent, by the
• 46:55
  way, I. Wasn't going to try.
• 46:57
  The car so and so this is anyway, but he has phoned you
• 47:01
  straight away, yeah. Phone me straight away and he
• 47:02
  said you're really lucky because what's happened?
• 47:04
  And basically with a whole revamp of cooperages and who
• 47:08
  owns what, the space side cooperage had been sold to the
• 47:11
  French. The French had then decided to
• 47:13
  try and get into Kentucky to almost get rid of the supply
• 47:17
  chain and, and make it their own.
• 47:18
  That had pissed off all the guys who were selling to, you know,
• 47:23
  XY and Z in Kentucky. So Brian Foreman had gone, this
• 47:26
  guy who was on the phone, he got his nephew to start up a new
• 47:30
  cooperage business, independent cooperage.
• 47:32
  And he said, I'll supply you all the brown Foreman casks.
• 47:34
  Wow. So I was his first customer.
• 47:36
  That's brilliant. Yeah.
• 47:37
  Yeah. And we're still with him today.
• 47:38
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 47:40
  Ex. Ex Jack Daniels casks.
• 47:42
  Originally and then we decided they were just a wee bit too
• 47:45
  late so we moved to Old Forester and Woodface.
• 47:48
  Right, let's go, let's go back a lot.
• 47:50
  So you you, you briefly, I mean to just casually drop and I
• 47:56
  think a fourth great grandfather of mine was was Andrew Usher and
• 48:00
  expect us to brush overnight. But Angus?
• 48:03
  Angus is Angus is our head of research.
• 48:06
  On what's coming now. He's the historian as well of
• 48:09
  the Whiskey Stories podcast. Ross has a phrase is tail, Ross
• 48:14
  sometimes says when he gets excited about something.
• 48:16
  He says my tail was wagging. Angus's tail was wagging today
• 48:19
  when he was like, you know. Reading about Andrew Usher.
• 48:21
  Yeah, it was, it was terrific. I mean, especially when I, I was
• 48:24
  looking online, I saw we we've recorded one episode at
• 48:27
  Bennett's Bar in Tall Cross and I was on.
• 48:31
  That is Andrew Usher. Spirits, there's a glass window.
• 48:34
  And I mean, you know, everyone in Edinburgh knows about the
• 48:37
  Usher Hall as well and this guy, but you know, it was one of the
• 48:41
  of course founding N British distillery as well.
• 48:45
  The guy just has the whiskey history CV to rune all others.
• 48:49
  There was some he'd. Be a great guest on the podcast.
• 48:51
  He really would be. We've got his 4th grade
• 48:54
  grandson. No, there was some irony on the
• 48:57
  North British thing and I'm sure you're aware of, but just in
• 49:00
  case you aren't or you're the listeners aren't.
• 49:02
  So Andrew Usher. Oh, who else was it?
• 49:05
  It was it. Was Sandaman's.
• 49:08
  Yeah, but what's the brand in Leithnow?
• 49:10
  It's been resurrected. Oh, we've seen the crabbies.
• 49:13
  Crabbies. Yeah, yeah, it's John Crabby,
• 49:15
  probably Thompson and other people.
• 49:17
  So they were Edinburgh merchants, basically grocers who
• 49:21
  were all into blending it by that stage.
• 49:23
  And they relied on what was, would it have been DCL?
• 49:28
  Yeah, it was DCL. Yeah, yeah.
• 49:29
  So what is Diagio? Basically today they relied on
• 49:33
  DCL for their grain element. And so, you know, not their
• 49:37
  supply chain. So they said, right, let's start
• 49:39
  our own grain distillery and we'll we can look after our own
• 49:42
  and supply tip who owns. North British well.
• 49:46
  Yeah, 50%, yeah, yeah. It's funny how these things go.
• 49:48
  And of course. The irony as well with William.
• 49:51
  We've talked about the story with William Grant and sons
• 49:54
  where they were in the same situation, not in charge of
• 49:56
  their own grain supply chain. So what did they go and do?
• 49:58
  They founded. Girvan.
• 50:00
  In the 60s. And now they bought the famous
• 50:02
  grouse which used a lot of North British.
• 50:04
  Graves could close N British. Yeah, exactly.
• 50:06
  So it's it's all these things kind of come.
• 50:09
  When you, when you, when you look, when you look back
• 50:12
  through, when you look back when you, you started.
• 50:15
  So let's go through. So you're saying 2007 was when
• 50:18
  the conversation started to happen about opening a
• 50:20
  distillery? I found a single piece of A4 the
• 50:23
  other day. I can't remember what I was
• 50:24
  looking for, but I found it in an old file with scribbles on it
• 50:28
  and there was a meeting, a board meeting in an American when that
• 50:31
  question was posed. Shall we open a distiller?
• 50:33
  Shall we just, shall we just create a distillery?
• 50:35
  And there was like two or three things saying do this, do that,
• 50:38
  and I also had to go off and do them.
• 50:40
  Yeah, that was it. And then when?
• 50:41
  When I went from the next stage, then what's that way?
• 50:44
  Because again, so the question about Arden Market, then you're
• 50:48
  on the western peninsula right up in the middle of bloody
• 50:51
  nowhere, which even the fact that 10,000 people, it just
• 50:56
  shows you that like genuinely is.
• 50:58
  You can get the ferry from off the mainland on the back off of
• 51:02
  but but. The fact is there is an element
• 51:05
  of. I mean, there is an element of
• 51:07
  that to travel all the way there.
• 51:11
  What's the word I'm looking for? Pilgrimage.
• 51:13
  Yeah. Pilgrimage.
• 51:14
  Genuinely. Yeah.
• 51:16
  To be able to be in that position at such a young age as
• 51:18
  well, where people are just like we have to go and see this
• 51:20
  because, you know, you could be a 200 year old distillery and
• 51:23
  almost. Maybe that's what makes it more
• 51:24
  exciting is the fact that, you know, you could be 150 or 200
• 51:28
  years old and you've been there for so long.
• 51:29
  Everyone's like, we can go there whenever we want.
• 51:31
  It's like the story about Edinburgh Castle.
• 51:32
  How many people in Edinburgh visited Edinburgh Castle versus
• 51:35
  all the tourists? But as I said, you know, it's
• 51:37
  there so you can always go, you know, Glen FedEx there, so you'd
• 51:39
  always go. But Arden Market is new, so it's
• 51:41
  like you have to go and see it because what's going on.
• 51:43
  But what I want to know is, first of all, was it always
• 51:45
  going to be just we have to build it on in Arden Market and
• 51:48
  why was that conversation? So it was basically going to be
• 51:52
  in and around that area. So Keith and Donald both had
• 51:55
  farms, if you like one. Keith had his farm on the Morven
• 51:59
  Peninsula, which is across the water where where Nick Neon is
• 52:02
  actually now. And Donald had his farm on
• 52:05
  American. And it wasn't like they were
• 52:07
  fighting for rights to the distillery.
• 52:10
  It was about finding the right place.
• 52:12
  And even though it's pretty much the wettest point of anywhere in
• 52:17
  the UK, because it's literally as, as we say on our bottles,
• 52:20
  headland of the great seas, the Atlantic just get dumped on us
• 52:25
  regularly. Even though it rains all the
• 52:28
  time. There are very few holding
• 52:30
  locks, unlike, you know, we're in central belt and and space
• 52:34
  side especially. You have a lot of hill water,
• 52:36
  you have snow melt. We don't get that on the West
• 52:38
  Coast. Just right off, straight into
• 52:39
  the. Sea it literally comes pouring
• 52:41
  down. It looks like Coca-Cola because
• 52:42
  of the peat, and it pours into Locksuner, which is the second
• 52:46
  longest sea lock in Scotland locks.
• 52:49
  Soon it turns brown and then it clears up again so that's what
• 52:53
  you're left with. We looked at 7 sites and only
• 52:56
  one had a proper amount of holding or holding locks.
• 53:01
  I think it's got three above us in the distillery and even then
• 53:05
  we feared we wouldn't have enough water and we put
• 53:08
  recycling things in place now, so it's not an issue we.
• 53:11
  Find a borehole opportunity. No, because we're too close to
• 53:14
  the sea water really. It's going to be brackish.
• 53:17
  So it was just. The point is, so it was always
• 53:20
  going to be in that area, yes, you would never looked at and
• 53:22
  going because I remember Alastair, Dave Rassie, well he
• 53:26
  spoke about it. He said, he said, look, we
• 53:30
  could, we could start a distillery here.
• 53:32
  And, and again, it was an investor who he had or a partner
• 53:37
  that he had well. The investor came in and said
• 53:39
  well. It was a cheap hotel that was
• 53:41
  for sale and the investor's wife was originally from Rasi.
• 53:47
  Rasi been offered objected by this, just nobody was wanting
• 53:50
  this this closed hotel. Alice today was from the borders
• 53:53
  and in his mind it had always been there'll be some of the
• 53:54
  borders, there'll be some of the borders.
• 53:56
  But this investor came in and he said we can have this distillery
• 53:59
  but it's going to be in Rasi but also.
• 54:01
  Equally though, like what like what Alex has just said is, you
• 54:04
  know, how easy is it to all right, land price and all the
• 54:09
  other things that go along with it.
• 54:11
  But also, you know, Scotland will probably throw more at you
• 54:17
  if you can bring people to rural area where you're talking
• 54:20
  grounds and things, stuff like that, where you can send
• 54:22
  something safe and. On Lastly, they also happened to
• 54:24
  put a borehole, but 50 yards behind where that old hotel was
• 54:27
  and hit water. Yeah, which is a fortunate thing
• 54:30
  to do. Yeah.
• 54:31
  So it was always going to be. So it was always going to be up
• 54:34
  that neck of the. Way it was always going to be
• 54:35
  there, but we had to try and work out.
• 54:37
  It wasn't just about building the distillery.
• 54:38
  We had to work out how all our raw materials.
• 54:41
  Well, this is an excellent thing for.
• 54:43
  Construction so this is where Donald's cogs were, you know,
• 54:45
  moving and he could visibly see the brain and gear.
• 54:49
  He has this estate which apart from a multitude of sheep and
• 54:53
  cows and a wind turbine and that's about it except for one
• 55:02
  at that .1 crop he could not use or could not benefit from.
• 55:07
  And that was thousands of acres of forestry, some of it standing
• 55:12
  dead because of previous forest fires.
• 55:14
  But the majority of it costs so much to get it out to the
• 55:17
  nearest mill in Fort William to actually fail it.
• 55:20
  Absolutely not. It made no sense.
• 55:22
  So he said, right, what we're going to do here is you're going
• 55:26
  to be, but we are going to be the first distillery to use 100%
• 55:30
  wood chip fueled. By a mass boiler.
• 55:33
  It, it had been tested as a backup in places like Temartin I
• 55:37
  think for a few years before that.
• 55:39
  But no one had relied purely on wood chip for obvious reasons.
• 55:44
  So that was the first thing and we had to go to Switzerland to
• 55:46
  find someone who could build a big enough steam boiler, A
• 55:49
  biomass steam boiler, because no one in the UK could.
• 55:52
  Then he said, right, I'm going to have to feed you quite a lot
• 55:54
  of wood chip. So I'm going to build a plant 2
• 55:57
  miles down the road and that plant is going to process all
• 56:00
  your by products as well. And I can benefit from that
• 56:04
  because my cows can now eat your giraffe and your butt ill and I
• 56:08
  don't need to get food. Lorries come and feed.
• 56:11
  Sorry, cattle feed lorries. So not only were you cutting
• 56:14
  down on cattle feed lorries coming in, we were cutting down
• 56:16
  on what would have been timber lorries going out.
• 56:19
  So we're actually, even though we had to bring cast in and out
• 56:21
  and a bit of barley. Or malt.
• 56:23
  We're actually cutting down, Yeah, well, the infrastructure
• 56:26
  we were cutting down on long term heavy haulage on the single
• 56:30
  track Rd. So we kind of naturally form
• 56:33
  this, this sort of circular economy, I suppose you can call
• 56:36
  it that. So we buy the wood chip often.
• 56:40
  We burn about a ton every two hours.
• 56:43
  It's delivered by tractor and trader and the tractor then
• 56:47
  pulls the draft back, which gets palletized.
• 56:50
  And meanwhile there's 2 miles of pipe going over the hill, which
• 56:53
  takes the pothail into an evaporator that gets evaporated.
• 56:58
  The heat coming from biomass as well from wood chip and the
• 57:04
  syrup from the pottel and the pellet from the giraffe get
• 57:08
  mixed together and sent out to to feed the cows.
• 57:11
  It's as simple as that and it is and I love saying this because
• 57:16
  it is completely true and I'm not making it up our distillery.
• 57:19
  Going back to what you were saying about output, our
• 57:22
  distillery is sized in a classic tail wagging dog situation
• 57:27
  because the number of carries dictates how much whiskey we can
• 57:30
  produce. I love it.
• 57:33
  That is, I've actually worked on a biomass plant.
• 57:36
  What have you not done? What have you not done?
• 57:43
  It was, I mean, I don't know if anyone, I mean, my previous
• 57:46
  employer no longer exists so they can't come back at me.
• 57:49
  But it was a cursed project from the very beginning.
• 57:52
  I remember it, but I remember the biomass thing really kicked
• 57:56
  off in this sort of two. You're talking what, 2008 to
• 58:00
  2012? There was a big push for
• 58:02
  biomass. But one of the biggest problems
• 58:04
  which you've managed to solve immediately in that process is
• 58:07
  the source of wood, because there's a lot of people who
• 58:10
  cynically will talk about wood. Where does the wood, where does
• 58:12
  the wood pellets come from to force to feed the biomass plant?
• 58:16
  And that's always something that a lot of people have have have
• 58:18
  critical criticised biomass for. And this is not only local wood
• 58:22
  chip because it's tractor and trader delivered.
• 58:24
  Yeah, but it's, it's also replanting behind it.
• 58:26
  Yeah. So they, they look at the
• 58:28
  forestry as a, you know, we look at Bali.
• 58:30
  As a well are you are you replanting the forestry?
• 58:32
  No, they're they're I'm sorry, they're they're as but so it's
• 58:35
  it's it's like planting Bali, except it's a 30 year this.
• 58:38
  Is remarkable because it was a forestry that was not
• 58:40
  economical. And now?
• 58:41
  It is because you've got the solar.
• 58:42
  So again, another reason to put well, but still it in that I.
• 58:44
  Have to ask you as well, have you tried the beef?
• 58:48
  So, yes, and I'll tell you exactly where you need to go.
• 58:52
  You need to go to other American restaurant in Glasgow, right?
• 58:55
  Really, they haven't. They serve beef from.
• 58:57
  So they serve beef from other American and Mull and venison
• 59:01
  from other American. They also get, you know, if
• 59:03
  they're really feeling hungry, they can come and eat the cow's
• 59:05
  food. So yeah, you can basically
• 59:08
  guarantee that a steak in the other American restaurant has
• 59:11
  got some other American whiskey, my product in it.
• 59:14
  Fantastic. I think we need to make a trip.
• 59:18
  I want to talk about then building a distillery and we
• 59:23
  mentioned we were talking a little bit before.
• 59:25
  We did that. I'm gonna let you introduce this
• 59:26
  with. Sorry, Yeah.
• 59:26
  Ross. Ross.
• 59:28
  Ross, Ross, this is Smokey. I wonder if I'm going to
• 59:32
  introduce one that's first if. That's OK.
• 59:34
  So you. Brought a couple of drums,
• 59:35
  actually. What are we having?
• 59:36
  Very first, yeah. Well, first of all, I should
• 59:37
  probably tell you why there's very little left in the bottle.
• 59:42
  A very surreal tasting event I had to do after we beat France
• 59:48
  at Murrayfield last weekend. 55 the weekend before.
• 59:52
  Bonjour to our French. Hello, France.
• 59:54
  So. Congratulations on your title
• 59:56
  actually. I'll say an old school friend of
• 59:58
  mine was an ex captain of Scotland rugby and every now and
• 1:00:01
  then we'll do something to raise money for Doddie Weir and you
• 1:00:04
  know the MND and everything. So we were having a meeting in
• 1:00:08
  the office the previous week. And I was sharing with the
• 1:00:12
  board, I was sharing something on screen, probably a
• 1:00:14
  spreadsheet showing how little money we got in the bank.
• 1:00:19
  Anyway, my WhatsApp. The whiskey business, The
• 1:00:22
  whiskey industry is great. I.
• 1:00:24
  Suppose we're spending it. Exactly.
• 1:00:27
  It's all been reinvested. The WhatsApp starts going and it
• 1:00:31
  I've got it on the computer as well.
• 1:00:33
  So there's Rob Wainwright calling, comes across the screen
• 1:00:35
  and they're all going, oh, answer it, answer it and I'll
• 1:00:38
  go. No, no, I'll call him back
• 1:00:39
  after. So basically this is like the
• 1:00:41
  Thursday of that week. I called him back and he said,
• 1:00:43
  can you do a tasting in the in the the Eagles townhouse on
• 1:00:47
  Saturday night? It kind of be after dinner.
• 1:00:50
  And I said yes. I said, OK.
• 1:00:53
  He said just just pitch up like half nine and we'll you know,
• 1:00:57
  we'll get you in. Bring four or five good
• 1:00:59
  whiskies. And I don't know who this is.
• 1:01:02
  I don't know. So anyway, I pitched up and also
• 1:01:06
  another friend, Marc Beaumont, he was there.
• 1:01:09
  So these are guys are all just bicycled to Dublin.
• 1:01:11
  Yeah, I was just going to say. You powered the Duke that
• 1:01:13
  powered off of them. That is the third time I've
• 1:01:15
  given them a whiskey tasting the day or two days before they've
• 1:01:17
  gone on these massive bicycles. So I don't know.
• 1:01:21
  Anyway, so Mark and I are going, you know, we're going
• 1:01:25
  downstairs, apparently. So we got LED in and it's a
• 1:01:28
  secret room in the townhouse. It's like a sort of library
• 1:01:30
  door. Big Thing swings open like
• 1:01:31
  halfway and right in front of me with his back to me.
• 1:01:34
  He's Prince Albert Monaco, so it was his dinner and we have done
• 1:01:39
  stuff with him in the past. I've been out to Monaco.
• 1:01:41
  Connell's been there. He actually opened the
• 1:01:44
  distillery site. Not the distillery, but the the
• 1:01:47
  construction site. So when when shovels went in.
• 1:01:49
  The ground, he opened it, he clipped the ribbon in order he
• 1:01:52
  did so there's a connection anyway.
• 1:01:54
  So he was. He was, yeah.
• 1:01:56
  He jumped up and shook hands and that was lovely.
• 1:01:59
  He introduced me to his 2 French friends on his right and as I
• 1:02:03
  was speaking to them the door was closing so I could get the
• 1:02:06
  picture on the left hand side of the table.
• 1:02:08
  So bearing in mind this is 9:30 which and the match started at
• 1:02:12
  2:30 and finished at what 430? Yeah, sitting next to Prince
• 1:02:16
  Albert on his left was Finn Russell was.
• 1:02:19
  It. Oh wow.
• 1:02:22
  And sitting next to Finn was Jamie Ritchie, who had crutches.
• 1:02:26
  Yeah, that was just like the most surreal evening I've ever
• 1:02:29
  had. Anyway, had a great night.
• 1:02:32
  And the reason I took those two whiskeys, so there were a couple
• 1:02:34
  of others, but the Fascadel, which is an Adelphi brand, which
• 1:02:38
  I created in 2007, I think it was on the back of us deciding
• 1:02:43
  to build a distillery. And I thought maybe in the
• 1:02:46
  future, if we were lucky enough to produce a decent whiskey, we
• 1:02:49
  should, we might have some of our whiskey named after places
• 1:02:54
  in the peninsula, on the peninsula.
• 1:02:56
  And Fascadel is this beautiful smuggler's curve right on the
• 1:02:59
  sort of northwest point of the peninsula.
• 1:03:02
  No smuggling going on these days, you know.
• 1:03:05
  There's a story there, but I won't go into tonight.
• 1:03:09
  Anyway, Fascadel for Adelphi or for Adelphi purposes was always
• 1:03:15
  styled. So the make that we filled into
• 1:03:17
  it was always going to be similar, we hoped, to what we
• 1:03:20
  could produce in Adam American. So that is not in Adam American.
• 1:03:23
  No, but this was. Because I was actually just
• 1:03:25
  tasting that they're going that taste.
• 1:03:27
  I was, I was a bit worried because I've just put that in
• 1:03:29
  the glass. I've just had an hard mark.
• 1:03:30
  In it you can almost assume it's a benchmark.
• 1:03:33
  It was one of the things we were aspiring to do.
• 1:03:35
  So this is a 10 year old tender cask batch, all bourbon, bottled
• 1:03:38
  at 46% of an unnamed. Back in the day it was
• 1:03:43
  definitely unnameable distillery on an island off the West Coast
• 1:03:47
  with a bridge there. You go on an island off the West
• 1:03:51
  Coast with a bridge. Yeah, I guess knows.
• 1:03:53
  Yeah, I know. You know them, you do all right?
• 1:03:56
  OK, you'll work on that. Later.
• 1:03:59
  Yeah, that's amazing. And that, that if you imagine,
• 1:04:01
  and I, I said this in some previous interview somewhere, if
• 1:04:05
  you imagined a bucket of all my favorite drams mixed together,
• 1:04:10
  that was what I'd hoped an American would turn out to be.
• 1:04:12
  And that was one of the main ingredients for that.
• 1:04:15
  So that's why I brought it along.
• 1:04:15
  Tonight is a kind of succession draft.
• 1:04:17
  There's a single cast then. There's 10 cast batch. 10 cast.
• 1:04:21
  Yeah, because actually I've just seen bottle #1 of 3797.
• 1:04:25
  So, Angus, is this the first time that we've ever sampled a
• 1:04:27
  DRAM after the from the same bottle?
• 1:04:30
  Of Prince Albert, Monaco and Finn, Russell and Jim.
• 1:04:34
  Actually, yeah, I would. Say no in.
• 1:04:35
  Fairness, Finn wasn't right. Of course.
• 1:04:38
  I. Remember, Jamie was or not, but
• 1:04:40
  yeah. I gave you Prince Albert was
• 1:04:43
  getting. Yeah.
• 1:04:44
  Play salute. Well, thank you for bringing
• 1:04:49
  these in. And then this next bottles looks
• 1:04:51
  much more like something we have seen many times in this podcast
• 1:04:55
  dressed sample. That's what I read inside of
• 1:04:58
  this. It does look a bit like a sample
• 1:04:59
  bottle. It's about having the official
• 1:05:01
  label. But I have a question.
• 1:05:03
  This is from Ben Nevis distilled at Ben Nevis 197037 years old,
• 1:05:09
  which is all very exciting. This is blended Scotch whisky.
• 1:05:14
  You're going to need to explain that one to me.
• 1:05:17
  Well, the reason I brought along tonight was A, that was
• 1:05:20
  something left in it and B again was one of our influencing West
• 1:05:24
  Coast, you know, West Highland distillers, Colin Ross,
• 1:05:27
  etcetera. But it does have a bit of a
• 1:05:30
  story behind it. So during prohibition in the
• 1:05:35
  USA, Canadian called Joseph Hobbs made a fortune by
• 1:05:39
  smuggling Scotch whiskey down the Great Lakes as penicillin
• 1:05:43
  and various other things. And when the prohibition ceased,
• 1:05:49
  he had his fortune and he decided to reinvest it in
• 1:05:52
  Scotland as best as he could because he felt, you know,
• 1:05:55
  that's where he got his money from.
• 1:05:57
  So he came over to Scotland and he bought Ben Nevis Distillery
• 1:06:00
  and Lock Side distillery in Montrose.
• 1:06:03
  He also bought in Velocchi Castle Hotel.
• 1:06:06
  It wasn't the hotel then but the building.
• 1:06:10
  And not wanting just to rest on laurels of having bought
• 1:06:13
  distilleries, he then decided to be a bit different and he put in
• 1:06:19
  the whereabouts basically to make grain whiskey on both sides
• 1:06:22
  alongside the malt whiskey. Wow.
• 1:06:25
  Column stills, etcetera. And even then he didn't stop.
• 1:06:29
  He then decided to blend at birth some of his stock.
• 1:06:32
  OK, so this is a blended at birth grain and malt bend.
• 1:06:35
  Nervous. It's a single blend single.
• 1:06:37
  Blend so this is grain and malt spirit being blended as we've.
• 1:06:40
  Talked about that not that long ago.
• 1:06:41
  That's the question that was asked.
• 1:06:43
  You're no longer allowed to do it Yeah at new make spirit but
• 1:06:49
  we I think. We we talk.
• 1:06:51
  About it. About House of Hazelwood.
• 1:06:52
  Who done? No, no, no, no.
• 1:06:54
  You went for drams with Chuck and Fraser maybe.
• 1:07:00
  And he talked about blending at like blending at birth.
• 1:07:04
  Chuck then asked Craig Urquhart on the on the podcast a couple
• 1:07:07
  weeks a few weeks ago about it and Greg said because it was the
• 1:07:09
  Dunhill, the Alfred Dunhill blend that we tried was a
• 1:07:12
  blended at birth blend that Dunhill had had and they got,
• 1:07:16
  they shipped it off and Glenn Glenn Moore then that picking up
• 1:07:18
  all them refine, refine. But we were asking about that
• 1:07:21
  and it was, it's, it's an interesting concept because it
• 1:07:24
  economically it almost doesn't make sense to do because you'll
• 1:07:27
  never know what the, you know, at least when you're blending,
• 1:07:30
  you can suddenly go. You've tried to finish, you've
• 1:07:32
  tried to product. To add a little bit of that and.
• 1:07:33
  You've balanced them out. Yeah, whereas actually can blend
• 1:07:36
  at birth. So I take it this so?
• 1:07:37
  So what you're saying is blending at birth is no longer?
• 1:07:39
  Allowed. No, I think it.
• 1:07:40
  Is my understanding is you cannot currently blend spirit
• 1:07:44
  grain and malt. Ah, sorry.
• 1:07:46
  Grain and malt not not distilleries.
• 1:07:47
  Yeah, OK. Yeah.
• 1:07:48
  Yeah, of course you can make a blend.
• 1:07:50
  Yeah, absolutely. Of course you can.
• 1:07:52
  You can combine stouts, but I don't think you combine grain
• 1:07:54
  and malt, mature it and call it blended.
• 1:07:56
  Scot. Is that why Loch Lemon doesn't
• 1:07:58
  do it then? It might be the last time I had
• 1:08:00
  it was a House of Hazelwood 1964 or 1966 called Blended at Birth
• 1:08:06
  and again it was 2 space side malts.
• 1:08:08
  He never told who it was and it produced this amazingly tropical
• 1:08:12
  fruity spirit which is in the top three drama of all time for
• 1:08:16
  me, is what I mentioned. I think I also.
• 1:08:18
  This is 1 of 135 bottles by you. Very much.
• 1:08:22
  From 1970, I don't know what you guys were doing in 1970.
• 1:08:25
  My father was. Ross Barover what he started
• 1:08:27
  with a 3030 year old Ben. I haven't this.
• 1:08:29
  Afternoon. My father was born in 69.
• 1:08:31
  But this is the year old who means.
• 1:08:33
  So there you go. There you are.
• 1:08:34
  Yeah, thank. You very.
• 1:08:36
  Much, Ross. No thanks, Alex, don't thank.
• 1:08:39
  You, Ross, I will say sorry brings on a nice subject here.
• 1:08:43
  Talk about Finn Russell sitting there.
• 1:08:46
  You are also been tucking into a little sample bottle.
• 1:08:49
  That's the first thing you can already try.
• 1:08:51
  I am, and it's actually blowing my socks off.
• 1:08:54
  Yeah, it's great. But Bob cutting the whiskey
• 1:08:57
  shed. Long time listener whiskey.
• 1:08:59
  Shed, yeah. A long time listener, long time
• 1:09:01
  contributor to the Wishy Story's Facebook page.
• 1:09:03
  If you're new to the if you're new to the podcast, join the
• 1:09:06
  Facebook page. It's very active people from all
• 1:09:08
  over the world. Facebook group, Yeah.
• 1:09:11
  The whiskey shed 6 Nations blend now I absolutely love the label
• 1:09:16
  here as well. Alex, I'll give you this the
• 1:09:18
  half of this to take home. It's actually fantastic It's
• 1:09:21
  got. This has got, so it's got.
• 1:09:23
  Pretty well it's got single from all of the Six Nations.
• 1:09:26
  Yeah, the. Constituents were they put the
• 1:09:29
  constituents of the blend. Out.
• 1:09:30
  I'm going to be honest, Bob, cutting this is not only not
• 1:09:35
  shit, which is what I would occasionally say to say is
• 1:09:37
  something that's all right, it's actually very tasty.
• 1:09:40
  I like of course, that you're not selling this because some
• 1:09:43
  ABV official sample probably wouldn't work, but bottled 2026,
• 1:09:48
  it's just fantastic. Well, he said that, let me tell
• 1:09:52
  you, okay, the 2027 Six Nation blend is in the cask already.
• 1:09:58
  Excellent, right? A Chianti season, cask season
• 1:10:02
  for most of the 2026. Here's the blend.
• 1:10:06
  Saint Patrick's cask. Is this for this year?
• 1:10:09
  Yeah, for no, this is this. Is next year's?
• 1:10:11
  Oh, tell us. Tell me what's in this.
• 1:10:13
  I've got no but next, so next year's that we can look forward
• 1:10:17
  to it. We've got 12 months to Saint
• 1:10:20
  Patrick's Cask Strength, Ireland, Cotswold Founder's
• 1:10:23
  Choice, England, Pune Darkness, Italy, Glen Allocate, QV Cast
• 1:10:27
  Scotland Glen Lossy Red wine Break Scotland, Cortoise single
• 1:10:33
  malt France hate Club Green Scotland and Bellevue blue-green
• 1:10:38
  France. So that's so.
• 1:10:40
  I mean, tell you what, right? Honestly.
• 1:10:42
  And do you know? There's got to be a Welsh to,
• 1:10:44
  say, a Welsh system. There's the Pendennon or the.
• 1:10:49
  Yeah, from the list that you from send me.
• 1:10:52
  Bob, you need to go back. Wales have had an unlucky last.
• 1:10:58
  Year you cannot kick them out. You've left a well train of
• 1:11:01
  that, but but what I would say is.
• 1:11:04
  That Lee label is brilliant as well.
• 1:11:05
  He's. Done his label yeah look at
• 1:11:07
  that. It's it's it's great.
• 1:11:08
  And he does whiskey shed. He's got his only whiskey and he
• 1:11:10
  does his videos. 6 Nations video has been fantastic.
• 1:11:13
  What I was saying? And what are 6 Nations It's been
• 1:11:14
  by the way. So Alex, were you at the
• 1:11:16
  Scotland France game? No, I've been to the England
• 1:11:19
  one, which was more than enough enjoyment.
• 1:11:21
  Hi, Bob. Thanks for sharing that
• 1:11:26
  properly. World class draft.
• 1:11:27
  It's the 1st 19 I think. Is this the first single blend
• 1:11:30
  we've had on the podcast? So we'd bottled some of those.
• 1:11:33
  We also bought some oxides over the years, also single blend.
• 1:11:36
  But just so we know, you see the strength is 50 points. 50.9.
• 1:11:40
  Yeah. So for a 1970, albeit bottled in
• 1:11:44
  2008 or whatever to be that high strength, that was one of the
• 1:11:48
  positives of doing a blend at birth was the grain was much
• 1:11:51
  higher strength. Yeah.
• 1:11:52
  So you got longer maturation potential that's.
• 1:11:55
  Delicious. Both, that is.
• 1:11:57
  It's a fruit bomb. It's also quite cheesy though.
• 1:12:00
  Yeah, they're a bit cheesy in there, that kind.
• 1:12:01
  Of Benedis element I guess. So I'd say.
• 1:12:06
  Really, really cool. No.
• 1:12:08
  And not many distilleries that could do that as well, even
• 1:12:11
  around the. World.
• 1:12:11
  Not many bottles that would have thought of doing that for sure.
• 1:12:14
  Talk to us about the Arden American process then we I find
• 1:12:18
  it fascinating that new distilleries get this
• 1:12:22
  opportunity to create something from scratch.
• 1:12:25
  We've we've spoken to so many people on the television has
• 1:12:30
  just come on. Excellent.
• 1:12:33
  Just in time for colleague, but we've spoken to so many people
• 1:12:36
  on the podcast, you know, you, you speak to older, you know,
• 1:12:39
  distilleries and they talk about this the, the, the heritage that
• 1:12:42
  they have and about how. And one of the things that I've
• 1:12:46
  always said, and I said that even just a few weeks ago, the
• 1:12:48
  Aberrargay inaugural tasting that we had with, with the
• 1:12:51
  Morrisons guys and Tam Cuthbert, there's no one alive today that
• 1:12:57
  has been able to sit there and swirl a glass of spring back
• 1:13:00
  when FedEx, Balvani or anyone that goes when far.
• 1:13:03
  Let's go. Can't wait to see what it's like
• 1:13:05
  at 10, you know, But at the same time, the whiskey that we know
• 1:13:10
  today has been built on so many different factors like your
• 1:13:13
  great, great great grandfather, Andrew Usher is part of that as
• 1:13:17
  well, where people making decisions and then we'll just
• 1:13:20
  learn from them and move on. People have made mistakes, so
• 1:13:22
  we've learned to move on. So when you get an opportunity
• 1:13:25
  to actually build a distillery from scratch, how much of it is,
• 1:13:30
  I mean, do you, are you sitting there?
• 1:13:31
  You've already told us about this Adelphi release that you've
• 1:13:33
  said this is what I'd like Adelphi to taste like.
• 1:13:36
  So when? What's the process from there?
• 1:13:38
  So I was very lucky, as were a number of newer distillers, to
• 1:13:42
  have the amazing wisdom and scientific knowledge of Jim
• 1:13:47
  Swan. So we got in just just after
• 1:13:53
  Kavlan. So he's still involved in
• 1:13:55
  setting up Kavlan in Taiwan. He was still up and down the
• 1:13:59
  road to Pendaren, even though they had started way back.
• 1:14:02
  He came in later. And for those of you who don't
• 1:14:08
  know, Doctor Jim Swan very sadly died a few years ago now, but he
• 1:14:13
  was one of the original chemist, if you like, who would sample
• 1:14:18
  and rate a new mate from most of the small to medium
• 1:14:23
  distilleries. And the company which he set up
• 1:14:25
  with Harry Rifkin called Taplock and Thompson is still the go to
• 1:14:29
  for that process. So we still send samples to TNT
• 1:14:34
  every month we get a rating back.
• 1:14:38
  Most importantly, it's not what they rate it out of five,
• 1:14:42
  although it's quite nice to see. It's the spider diagram, and you
• 1:14:46
  want to be able to. If you imagine it on tracing
• 1:14:47
  paper, you want it to be the same spider.
• 1:14:49
  Yeah, well, you need it to look as it goes back.
• 1:14:51
  To the consistency. So that's why we used that lock
• 1:14:55
  and Thompson. That's why Jim set it up with
• 1:14:58
  Harry Rifkin. But Jim was not.
• 1:15:01
  I mean, he enjoyed whiskey, don't get me wrong, but he was
• 1:15:04
  not coming at the industry design, if you like, from a
• 1:15:08
  whiskey drinker's perspective. He was coming at it from a
• 1:15:11
  chemist perspective. How are flavours created?
• 1:15:16
  And he'd worked out how basically, and I, I'm no
• 1:15:19
  scientist so I don't know quite how it all works, but he'd
• 1:15:24
  worked out how to mature, sorry, how to create whiskey or
• 1:15:28
  pneumate spirit that did not require the oxidization process
• 1:15:33
  to mature. And it's a combination.
• 1:15:36
  It's like a jigsaw of different things.
• 1:15:37
  And I know this now because we've tried eliminating 1 and
• 1:15:41
  putting it back very quickly because we know it changes
• 1:15:43
  things. The combination of different
• 1:15:45
  things, starting at the the mash ton, going through fermentation,
• 1:15:50
  the cuts, the way the condenses work, all of these kind of
• 1:15:53
  things. And then the quality of the
• 1:15:55
  wood, that was another of his big things.
• 1:15:57
  And even though he was the guy behind inventing STR casts.
• 1:16:03
  I was just about to say, I don't think I've seen an armed
• 1:16:05
  American. So I, I, I didn't fall out with
• 1:16:06
  him. STR means what's.
• 1:16:08
  That shave dos of recharge. I never fell out with Jim, but I
• 1:16:11
  had a disagreement on 2 occasions, STR was 1.
• 1:16:15
  He said you've got to try. You'll be the first people to
• 1:16:17
  get these. And I said, well, can you tell
• 1:16:19
  me what they're going to taste like, what it's going to do to
• 1:16:21
  the spirit? And he said, well, I'll tell you
• 1:16:22
  what, I'll send you a bottle of Kavalan Soloist or whatever it
• 1:16:26
  was that it was 2 years old, but it obviously had that
• 1:16:28
  accelerated Taiwanese maturation.
• 1:16:31
  And for me it was too dry. It's a kind of Jim Swan's an
• 1:16:36
  absolute genius. So what did you have to do for
• 1:16:37
  these new distilleries? It's amazing.
• 1:16:38
  SCR is kind of a shortcut. Yeah.
• 1:16:41
  It accelerates some actuation. It's been really successful in
• 1:16:46
  Kings Barns as the example. I always I've got a lot of new
• 1:16:50
  distilleries have used it. Jim Swan at Lindo's Abbey as
• 1:16:53
  well. Wasn't it?
• 1:16:53
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:16:54
  Well, he had. Yeah, he had.
• 1:16:56
  Yeah, it was it was it's plaques on it was in the still house,
• 1:16:58
  London's Abbey. But but Kings Barns is probably
• 1:17:01
  the example of their dream to DRAM was it was just the STR and
• 1:17:04
  it was four or five years old. He went actually, that's that's
• 1:17:06
  palatable. I totally get it.
• 1:17:08
  It does. I am not a fan of STR casts.
• 1:17:12
  Either yeah, it's lovely red fruit, all those kind of things,
• 1:17:15
  and it's cheap. Or at least it was a lot
• 1:17:17
  cheaper. It's now bourbon class to come
• 1:17:18
  down again. It's not.
• 1:17:19
  Plus it isn't. I think I recently had an STR
• 1:17:22
  French Oak Kilholmen and that was interesting.
• 1:17:25
  They're effectively shaving the inside of the you're.
• 1:17:27
  Bringing the wood back to life. Yeah.
• 1:17:30
  It's it's almost I would describe it to a customer as
• 1:17:34
  taking a used cask and trying to bring virgin oak elements to the
• 1:17:38
  wood. Yeah, by shaving it and then.
• 1:17:40
  There are other ways to do it and we've we've seen through
• 1:17:43
  Adelphi and this is kind of where I was coming from over the
• 1:17:47
  years tasting with Charlie, selecting casks for Adelphi.
• 1:17:51
  It wasn't about the name, the age, the colour, it was about
• 1:17:55
  finding a DRAM that we would both sit down and happily have
• 1:17:57
  another. And it's about the drinkability.
• 1:18:01
  And within that there's a mouth texture, the flavours that it
• 1:18:05
  could have been completely off brand in terms of flavour
• 1:18:07
  profile. But if it was drinking well and
• 1:18:10
  you'd have another go to it, then that is a good whiskey to
• 1:18:12
  put in a bottle. And that's kind of what we tried
• 1:18:15
  to do without American too. And I didn't, I felt that that
• 1:18:18
  dryness would have made it difficult to have more than
• 1:18:22
  right you're. Right.
• 1:18:23
  There's so many times that you can have a DRAM where it's a one
• 1:18:26
  DRAM wonder where you can sit down and go.
• 1:18:28
  It might be there's there's whiskeys that I would go to that
• 1:18:31
  go. Do you know what that'd be the
• 1:18:32
  perfect end of the night whiskey for me.
• 1:18:34
  Where you have that, you have that's that's it.
• 1:18:36
  Equally, there might be a whiskey where you could say
• 1:18:38
  that's your starting whiskey where you have that.
• 1:18:40
  Yeah. And move on.
• 1:18:40
  But actually there's something to be said and I've said it over
• 1:18:44
  the last since I got back from India.
• 1:18:46
  I don't know if I've mentioned on the podcast a bit at the same
• 1:18:51
  time, one of the things is I I've said it, In fact, I've said
• 1:18:55
  it before. When I went, it was with code,
• 1:18:56
  It was the episode with Cody Reynolds.
• 1:18:58
  It's all age, how long it was. But sometimes we feel like we're
• 1:19:02
  under pressure in this podcast where you have to pick 3 or 4
• 1:19:05
  drams and every time you come in here you feel like I should be
• 1:19:07
  trying something else. But actually, sometimes you just
• 1:19:10
  want to come in and just say that is a DRAM I'd like to have.
• 1:19:14
  Graham from two years ago would have been delighted by Glen
• 1:19:18
  Alec, 15. Absolutely.
• 1:19:19
  Glenn Piero today delighted. Genuinely.
• 1:19:22
  You don't need to pretend to like Pete.
• 1:19:24
  You can enjoy this. You can really go back to what
• 1:19:28
  you love and. What you said, there is a lot to
• 1:19:31
  be said for that and I think that's where we've talked about
• 1:19:34
  it. We talked about with Tim Walker
• 1:19:36
  Ross, you know, in the luxury market, if someone's paying an
• 1:19:40
  awful lot of money for a bottle of whiskey and luxury, do they
• 1:19:42
  want to pay for something that they're going to be challenged
• 1:19:44
  with or do they want to just pay something that's going to be
• 1:19:47
  smooth and easy to drink and just down, you're not down the
• 1:19:49
  hard, but just they can sit and go.
• 1:19:51
  I don't even worry about how much water I need to add.
• 1:19:53
  I don't need to worry about that, you know?
• 1:19:54
  And so actually it brings on a really nice point about art and
• 1:19:57
  working as well. You're very reasonably priced.
• 1:20:01
  But. That's why I had that
• 1:20:03
  spreadsheet. But your single malt and the
• 1:20:06
  diversity of your single malt through different cask finishes,
• 1:20:08
  limited release single casks as well, always very reasonably
• 1:20:13
  priced. And really, it seems to me that
• 1:20:15
  you've always set out that Arden Merkin was to be a whiskey that
• 1:20:18
  was to be dragged. Yeah, which is an interesting
• 1:20:20
  dynamic when you look at the Adelphi element where you look
• 1:20:23
  at the exclusivity and possibly the premium premiumisation.
• 1:20:26
  But they always doubt. Yeah, they.
• 1:20:27
  Could have gone down the OR the port Helen root and gone we
• 1:20:31
  want. If you bought a bottle of this
• 1:20:32
  sealed now, yes it's interesting and it happens to be delicious,
• 1:20:38
  but you might be reluctant to not open it until a special
• 1:20:40
  occasion or a real reason to do it because it's it's liquid
• 1:20:43
  history. With Adelphi, we never put the
• 1:20:47
  prices up because we felt we were better because we were
• 1:20:50
  operating on a just in time method, which back then was very
• 1:20:54
  rare. Nowadays it's kind of everyone
• 1:20:56
  does it, but back then we were reliant on what it was, what it
• 1:20:59
  cost us to buy on that day. That was then plus margin, what
• 1:21:03
  we sold it at. So yeah, sometimes we were more
• 1:21:05
  expensive, sometimes we were slightly cheaper, but we just
• 1:21:07
  put it out straight margin. Here's something to drink.
• 1:21:10
  And Arden Merkin was always going to be the same principle.
• 1:21:13
  We managed to get, and this is again, Donald's brain in in gear
• 1:21:16
  as an engineer. We managed to get our cost of
• 1:21:18
  production for a reasonably small distillery to a very low
• 1:21:22
  level biomass wood chip delivered 2 miles away,
• 1:21:26
  hydroelectricity, all these kind of things.
• 1:21:29
  A, they don't fluctuate as much like oil and gas and B, we have
• 1:21:33
  a nice low, you know, no transport costs, all that kind
• 1:21:38
  of thing. So we've been very fortunate to
• 1:21:40
  build, being able to build and run a distillery of a small to
• 1:21:45
  medium size purely for single malt ish that can then translate
• 1:21:52
  into an affordable attainable. And you know, when do you make
• 1:21:58
  the decision? Because like everyone will say,
• 1:22:01
  we make the decision to put out our first release, our first
• 1:22:03
  single malt when it's ready. That's the line, isn't it?
• 1:22:07
  And I suppose it has to be the line because if you're not
• 1:22:10
  putting out three years in one day, yeah, then you suddenly go,
• 1:22:15
  well, why are you putting out after seven years?
• 1:22:18
  Or sometimes you might wait. Some people will make wait for
• 1:22:22
  the age statement to hit the den, but there's other.
• 1:22:24
  So was there a plan in place to go we will release On this date?
• 1:22:29
  Or was it just a case? Was it that?
• 1:22:31
  We'll release it when it's ready, Mark.
• 1:22:34
  So there were kind of two or three plans which you all got
• 1:22:37
  sort of mixed up. The first plan which wasn't was
• 1:22:41
  I bought off Miguel Martin in Spain.
• 1:22:43
  I bought some octaves, some little 50 litre nuked Sherry
• 1:22:47
  octave on our first lorry from him.
• 1:22:51
  So this had been 2014 and I didn't buy them to accelerate
• 1:22:55
  maturation, to be able to sell quickly.
• 1:22:57
  I bought them to accelerate maturation to see if we needed
• 1:23:00
  to change anything. And then yeah, it doesn't make
• 1:23:02
  difference. Yeah.
• 1:23:04
  And. That's an octave.
• 1:23:06
  How do we need to approach our butts?
• 1:23:08
  Yeah, just, you know, because it would means even though it's
• 1:23:10
  heavily Sherry, you'd be able to see, do you have enough DNA
• 1:23:13
  coming through? Do you have this, that the rest
• 1:23:16
  of it? Yeah, it might taste of
• 1:23:18
  strawberries and you want it to taste of raspberries.
• 1:23:20
  Yeah. So what actually happened was
• 1:23:22
  the complete opposite in that these things matured so well so
• 1:23:26
  quickly that we had to bottle them.
• 1:23:27
  Yeah. So we came out with these less
• 1:23:30
  than three-year old Spirit bottlings.
• 1:23:31
  OK. And it was AD for Anna Domini
• 1:23:34
  rather than Anna Mercantisuri, but it was also Anna
• 1:23:36
  Mercantisuri. AD 2016 20/17/2018 in 2019 all
• 1:23:42
  from octaves and they got a real cult following around the world
• 1:23:46
  even though they're kind of small batches.
• 1:23:47
  And they were called Spirit. They were called Spirit and it
• 1:23:50
  just kind of led people into waiting for the first single
• 1:23:53
  mole, which was great. So by that stage, by probably
• 1:23:56
  the second batch of those becoming quite successful, we
• 1:24:00
  then reckoned we'd be able to get something out at five years
• 1:24:02
  old that was good enough quality.
• 1:24:04
  What we didn't of course know was in in whatever.
• 1:24:07
  That would have been another three years time.
• 1:24:09
  Global pandemic. There was a global pandemic
• 1:24:11
  coming around the corner, so we decided to push ahead.
• 1:24:15
  The one thing that could have stalled it, and thank God it
• 1:24:18
  didn't, was that we weren't allowed out.
• 1:24:21
  And we had to literally, Connell myself, had to get time in the
• 1:24:25
  warehouses in order to start looking at casks.
• 1:24:27
  We hadn't been up there in months.
• 1:24:29
  I mean, Adam American literally had a roadblock.
• 1:24:32
  It was like no one in, no one out.
• 1:24:34
  So eventually we got let out in the, I think it was the late
• 1:24:37
  spring of that year, maybe the summer, I can't remember.
• 1:24:40
  We got up, we locked ourselves in the Warehouse 1, which was
• 1:24:43
  the only main, only warehouse really at the time, and we just
• 1:24:47
  started going through the 2014 and 15 stuff.
• 1:24:50
  That sounds like a terrible day. It was.
• 1:24:51
  It was, yeah. How did you spend your COVID?
• 1:24:54
  What I was I was making cakes and making bread.
• 1:24:57
  You're in the warehouse for the first time in.
• 1:25:00
  Well, we had both both families were up as well because they're
• 1:25:05
  in great fun on the beaches. Again, first time lied out and
• 1:25:09
  we ended up with something like 100 samples on this big table to
• 1:25:12
  start putting the first blend. Didn't know what what it was
• 1:25:15
  going to taste like. We literally we, we had nowhere
• 1:25:17
  to even, you know, start from. I remember Graham Mackay coming
• 1:25:21
  in for a sort of pseudo interview stroke.
• 1:25:24
  You're coming in, you know you're coming to work for us.
• 1:25:26
  But he didn't know that and they're kind of going crazy.
• 1:25:29
  What have I let myself into? And we ended up with three,
• 1:25:33
  three different versions. The first version was exactly
• 1:25:39
  the profile of stock that we were laying down.
• 1:25:42
  So it was 50% unpetered, 50% pitted, 75% verb and matured and
• 1:25:47
  25% sharing. And version two and three were a
• 1:25:51
  variation on that. And everyone that we took it to,
• 1:25:55
  including people like Dave Brumer, who just happened to
• 1:25:57
  appear in London American randomly because he was writing
• 1:25:59
  a book, everyone unanimously said version 1.
• 1:26:03
  And so we were lucky we got the recipe right from day one.
• 1:26:08
  But you never know. But then you've got some Connell
• 1:26:10
  then who thought Connell has been a big part of he's like
• 1:26:13
  your agent, isn't he? He's speaking like Conal gay
• 1:26:18
  Alex. And he said I'll let you see.
• 1:26:19
  And he he sent me your rider. He said he's got to have this
• 1:26:22
  year. There's no blue M and Ms. or
• 1:26:24
  Reddit. Where's the bubble bar, Christ?
• 1:26:28
  But but Conor, how long has Conal been at the distillery
• 1:26:32
  for? So I knew him from travelling to
• 1:26:34
  New Zealand to. And it's Conor.
• 1:26:35
  What's this? What's this film?
• 1:26:36
  And Conor McKay. The sales director, yeah.
• 1:26:40
  So I've been going out to New Zealand every other year for
• 1:26:42
  DRAM Fest, which is the best, by far the best whiskey festival on
• 1:26:47
  that side of the world. It's fun, it's big, it's it's
• 1:26:51
  quick, you know, which is good from both sides of the table.
• 1:26:55
  And it's a whole weekend of different things going on.
• 1:26:57
  And they look after all the Scots that come over.
• 1:27:00
  So everyone from the industry, they get taken on adventures and
• 1:27:03
  stuff. Anyway, Connell was, he comes
• 1:27:06
  through the hotel trade and then got employed by Whiskey Galore
• 1:27:09
  that run Gram Fest also right importers.
• 1:27:13
  He got employed as AGM, can't remember which year it was maybe
• 1:27:16
  20/15/16. And I met him, we did a road
• 1:27:19
  trip through New Zealand doing tastings and he was saying, even
• 1:27:24
  at that stage he was saying I might have to come back at some
• 1:27:26
  point. And so we just kept in touch and
• 1:27:29
  I wasn't actually looking, but he he got in touch and I said,
• 1:27:33
  you're about a year too quick. But let me let me see what we
• 1:27:36
  can do. And it's a similar sort of Carl,
• 1:27:39
  you know, Carl was, you know, working as an import, working,
• 1:27:42
  was it the Scottish Government? He was working part of the
• 1:27:44
  Scottish Government with American imports and stuff.
• 1:27:45
  Like that? Yeah.
• 1:27:46
  No, he was. And suddenly, but yeah, how
• 1:27:48
  big's the team? Because Carl's even talked
• 1:27:50
  about, you know, was it the mid J he was talking about where he
• 1:27:55
  said we were all just sitting there and no, there was a drama
• 1:27:58
  that he had. And he said, what if we just
• 1:28:00
  stick up Sherry button there and wait that everyone was sitting
• 1:28:04
  there and it was like round the table samples on the table.
• 1:28:06
  Everyone's trying to sampling like what's the next release
• 1:28:09
  going to be? And somebody said, what if we
• 1:28:11
  just stick a cherry button there and see what happens?
• 1:28:14
  And they went, OK, here's a set cherry sample.
• 1:28:16
  And everyone just went, yeah, that's yeah, that's it.
• 1:28:19
  So I mean, what's the team like? How big's the team?
• 1:28:21
  Because you're all the way up in the middle of of Ireland to
• 1:28:23
  market. You just.
• 1:28:23
  Wondered. We just hired Connie, who's
• 1:28:26
  fantastic. He's just.
• 1:28:27
  Started new UK sales manager. Yeah, it's good to get some good
• 1:28:31
  news in West. Yeah, yeah, people are hiring.
• 1:28:32
  Yeah, yeah, that's why I have even less beans than I did last
• 1:28:34
  week. No, look, so the if we're
• 1:28:39
  talking blending team or. Just the total.
• 1:28:41
  Like the total team. So we're split 5050 more or less
• 1:28:44
  between our American where we make the stuff and welcome
• 1:28:47
  people And, and, and just on that, you mentioned, you know,
• 1:28:51
  about people going up there like pilgrims from the other side of
• 1:28:55
  the coin. We are so delighted when someone
• 1:28:57
  walks through that door. Yeah, that it's a genuine West
• 1:29:00
  Coast hospitality and I've been out there a couple of times last
• 1:29:04
  year where the car park's overflowing onto the single
• 1:29:08
  track Rd. which doesn't help and everyone just is happy.
• 1:29:12
  It's great. So 50% of people up there, all
• 1:29:15
  local, got some early help in to train up and now it's all local.
• 1:29:20
  The distillery manager is the he was bus driver for the kids.
• 1:29:24
  That's right, in 2014. So even all the production team,
• 1:29:27
  everyone. Everyone's and I.
• 1:29:29
  Mean that's great because that's a bit like even the third
• 1:29:32
  episode we had we we spoke to he's from Harris.
• 1:29:36
  We spoke about Harris and how great they've been at employing
• 1:29:39
  local people, training, skilling people locally rather than
• 1:29:43
  bringing in people from. So we're we're looking at it not
• 1:29:46
  just for the here and now, we're looking at it for the future as
• 1:29:48
  well. So here and now is if someone
• 1:29:51
  leaves, we bring someone in at the bottom, which is not the
• 1:29:54
  worst job, it's just the the least training required, which
• 1:29:58
  is warehouse and then they get immediately trained up through
• 1:30:01
  warehousing. They get trained on the stills
• 1:30:03
  within six months to a year. They get offered to take the IBD
• 1:30:06
  exams. So everyone pretty much within a
• 1:30:09
  year or two of arriving has the ability to do anything on site.
• 1:30:14
  And, and long term, what we've done since the beginning, we
• 1:30:16
  teamed up with the Ad American Trust, which is like the local
• 1:30:19
  charity and we basically sell them a cask or casks every year
• 1:30:26
  a child or children are born on the peninsula.
• 1:30:29
  We sell them a cost price. It gets put away in their name.
• 1:30:35
  And when they turn of a legal age for alcohol, they can write
• 1:30:39
  to the trust and say I want to go to university, I want to
• 1:30:43
  start a business selling wool because I've got a sheep in the
• 1:30:46
  garden. You know, as long as it's a good
• 1:30:48
  case for it commercially, they then the trust then sells that
• 1:30:52
  cast back to us and we give them the going rate on that day.
• 1:30:57
  So when we started. This on the peninsula.
• 1:30:59
  And we kind of hope we then we then bring them in as well.
• 1:31:02
  We kind of say that. This is what you can.
• 1:31:04
  There's a whole story about Billy Brebner.
• 1:31:07
  Oh yes, so back it was back when got to qualify to play for
• 1:31:11
  Scotland, you had to be born in Scotland.
• 1:31:14
  And Billy Bremner was playing for Leeds and famously his
• 1:31:17
  wife's water broke and he trucked her in the car and drove
• 1:31:21
  from Leeds to cross the border because he didn't want, if he
• 1:31:23
  had his first son, he didn't want his son being born as an
• 1:31:26
  Englishman instead of Scotsman. So basically, if people are
• 1:31:30
  listening, if you're close. To the peninsula.
• 1:31:33
  Well, look, if you're sitting there going could. 4 hour drive
• 1:31:36
  from Edinburgh. You know, someone could be
• 1:31:38
  sitting there going, well, I've ready to pop in the next few few
• 1:31:41
  weeks. Get in a car up there on the
• 1:31:43
  working peninsula. You'll get yourself.
• 1:31:44
  We've just heard of it, the low operating cars, That's good,
• 1:31:50
  that's brilliant. That's a great, it's a great
• 1:31:52
  incentive. It's a practical, it's
• 1:31:54
  practical. We're not, you know, with
• 1:31:56
  everything we do, we some people say we're the greenest, we're
• 1:31:58
  not maybe where when we started, some people say we do this and
• 1:32:02
  that, but everything we've done has been pragmatic.
• 1:32:05
  It's been because of where we are and in order to benefit
• 1:32:09
  where we are. And the Highlands and Isles of
• 1:32:11
  Scotland need to this investment.
• 1:32:14
  Yeah, as you said, we mentioned them before Rassie and other
• 1:32:17
  distillery. I was there last week for the
• 1:32:18
  first time. There was 120 people on that
• 1:32:21
  island before the distillery. The latest census are expected
• 1:32:24
  about 188. Apparently that's a third of the
• 1:32:27
  island. Yeah.
• 1:32:28
  Because somebody has invested in it.
• 1:32:30
  Yes. And these rural communities,
• 1:32:31
  when you do go north, the central.
• 1:32:33
  The kind of brain drain and the. Ageing.
• 1:32:35
  Population, this is it's really important.
• 1:32:38
  Yeah, I I'm very successful. Holding it, yeah.
• 1:32:40
  And but at the same time it is bringing people into these areas
• 1:32:44
  to to get eaten alive by the midges because I the.
• 1:32:48
  Midget population up the. Other thing is I wouldn't want
• 1:32:50
  to say again, we don't want to cover what Carol had already
• 1:32:52
  talked about. If you want to find out the
• 1:32:54
  Midget, the hard American Midget, find out on the his
• 1:32:57
  episode, because he'll tell you all about the the reason mine
• 1:32:59
  it. But what we it says is it says
• 1:33:02
  that Arden markings are a brand and the distillery likes to have
• 1:33:05
  a bit of fun as well. That doesn't you know, it's
• 1:33:07
  important to be serious about whiskey and when you're putting
• 1:33:09
  out the whiskey that you're putting out, you can do that,
• 1:33:11
  but you can also have a bit of fun.
• 1:33:12
  But Mclean's nose as well? Talk about so.
• 1:33:15
  So Mclean's nose is what? What is Mclean's nose?
• 1:33:18
  I So the day we opened, we were very fortunate to have Princess
• 1:33:24
  Anne. She flew in to to the ceremony.
• 1:33:27
  It was 32° in an American, so we were dressed up in teads and
• 1:33:32
  kilts and stuff like this and. Like Ross, as if they did.
• 1:33:36
  Just really not enjoying the the heat.
• 1:33:39
  So we took her right through the process.
• 1:33:40
  I was involved in the early bit of it with the filling store,
• 1:33:45
  filling a bottle through her husband and of new make spirit.
• 1:33:48
  Then she progressed through production and she got to the
• 1:33:50
  still room. Now, bearing in mind it's 32°
• 1:33:53
  outside. Oh yeah, What's?
• 1:33:54
  That still room would have been 50.
• 1:33:55
  There's like our trip up to Glen Murray and one of the Snow Room.
• 1:33:57
  Is too hot. Yeah.
• 1:33:58
  We're not allowed. So all she did, there was never
• 1:34:01
  a bead of sweat. All she did was she removed her
• 1:34:02
  gloves and gave them to her lady in waiting.
• 1:34:05
  I can assure you when we went up to Glen Murray that last summer
• 1:34:07
  in the hot stadium, there was a lot of sweat.
• 1:34:09
  Yeah, anyway, she then flew out after, you know, handshakes and
• 1:34:13
  all the rest of it, and that was great.
• 1:34:14
  And we kind of, you know, everything relaxed.
• 1:34:16
  But it was a lovely day anyway and the next thing I do, I had a
• 1:34:20
  drama in my hand. I was looking out the still room
• 1:34:22
  window down the lock. You can just see Toby Mori at
• 1:34:25
  the end of the lock and just kind of feeling, not smug but
• 1:34:29
  just feeling really happy we'd got to that stage.
• 1:34:32
  I knew there was going to still be a massive journey ahead but
• 1:34:35
  you know, we'd got there. And the next thing I knew,
• 1:34:37
  Charlie Mclean's, there was his very sweaty arm around me.
• 1:34:43
  And he says to me, he says, you do realise you are now the
• 1:34:47
  closest distillery to my nose. And I thought that was the
• 1:34:51
  nicest thing he could have ever said.
• 1:34:52
  You know, we haven't even matured a whiskey yet.
• 1:34:54
  And you were saying it's the best thing you've ever had.
• 1:34:57
  And, and so I said thank you very much, It's really kind.
• 1:35:00
  And we passed our ways and that was fine.
• 1:35:02
  And it was several years later back in the still room, I'd just
• 1:35:05
  got come up from Fife. I was walking through saying hi
• 1:35:07
  to everyone and there was a stillman.
• 1:35:09
  We we basically, we have two shifts a day, 6 till 2 till 2
• 1:35:15
  till 10. So around about half one to half
• 1:35:17
  two, there's a changeover of shift and it was a lovely sunny
• 1:35:21
  summer's day. And whoever was coming off shift
• 1:35:24
  on the stills said to me, yeah, I'm just off to go and climb
• 1:35:28
  Mclean's Nose. I said, what do you mean climb
• 1:35:31
  Mclean's Nose? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:33
  The big rock that goes down to locks in it, it's off the back
• 1:35:35
  of of Ben Heehan, which is the highest hill.
• 1:35:40
  And I said, really? I said, so everything started
• 1:35:43
  clicking. So as soon as I go back to Fife
• 1:35:46
  the following week, I got onto our IP guys and I I got the
• 1:35:50
  brand locked. In SO, Mclean's nose is actually
• 1:35:54
  a dedicated area. There.
• 1:35:55
  So it is literally it's a, it's a, a, a nose shaped, well,
• 1:35:59
  Mclean's nose shape because they've got quite kind of Roman
• 1:36:02
  noses. It's a volcanic outpouring
• 1:36:05
  because Arden Merken is all volcano basically right from the
• 1:36:08
  far end all the way through. And it it, it would have been
• 1:36:11
  the lava spewing down into Lacuna and it just looks like a
• 1:36:15
  nose. But it's been, crucially, it's
• 1:36:17
  been at fundamental in navigational aid for boats
• 1:36:21
  coming in and around the Tobe Mori area.
• 1:36:23
  So they'll see that. See that they know where they
• 1:36:25
  are. I know where I am.
• 1:36:27
  Yeah. So.
• 1:36:27
  So it was all registered. That's fine.
• 1:36:29
  Parked it. And I can't even remember what
• 1:36:30
  year this was. And then bit by bit I kind of
• 1:36:33
  remembered, oh, we've got that brand, what we're going to do
• 1:36:35
  with it? And I thought, let's do a
• 1:36:36
  blended malt. And then everyone did a blended
• 1:36:38
  malt, so maybe we shouldn't do a blended malt.
• 1:36:41
  And then I said, well, and also the trouble with the blended
• 1:36:43
  malt is that you are, if prices start going up and they did for
• 1:36:49
  malt whiskey, you're then going to have to put your blended malt
• 1:36:52
  up as well. So we ended up deciding to do a
• 1:36:56
  whiskey that would always be affordable, or at least we'd try
• 1:37:00
  our best to be affordable that we had enough control over to
• 1:37:03
  make it consistent in price and flavor.
• 1:37:08
  And other than that, there was no criteria.
• 1:37:09
  So we didn't actually know that it was going to be a blend at
• 1:37:12
  that point. We just said it's got to be at
• 1:37:14
  this kind of area of price and it's got to be really drinkable,
• 1:37:17
  interesting whiskey. And we ended up going with a
• 1:37:20
  completely upside down blend. So 70% malt, 30% green.
• 1:37:25
  Really. Yeah.
• 1:37:26
  And of the 70%, a high proportion is from a certain
• 1:37:30
  West Coast distillery that we may or may not.
• 1:37:33
  That's not only support. So, yeah.
• 1:37:35
  And. You know where Mcleans knows his
• 1:37:37
  first reference on the podcast? Go on.
• 1:37:39
  It was. We did mention it.
• 1:37:41
  It was player distilleries, right?
• 1:37:43
  And we did the higher or lower game of price point top 50.
• 1:37:48
  It was, it was we, we picked 10 of the top fifth or it was in
• 1:37:52
  the top 20 drams in Royal Mile whiskeys, right, Right.
• 1:37:55
  So what I did was I went into the Royal Mile whiskeys top
• 1:37:57
  drams and then hit the filter button and went price highest to
• 1:38:00
  lowest. And then I picked the last 10.
• 1:38:03
  And then we played a higher or lower version.
• 1:38:05
  We played we, we did a player distilleries right.
• 1:38:07
  And Maclean's nose was the highest rated and cheapest.
• 1:38:13
  I'd say best value if you'd say that's amazing.
• 1:38:14
  But also then the other part of it was referenced with with when
• 1:38:18
  Carl was on the podcast because Maclean's nose played a big part
• 1:38:23
  in the Mccharles's Charles Maclean's sons who rode across
• 1:38:27
  roads all the way. Across was at the Pacifically
• 1:38:29
  Rd. Atlantic.
• 1:38:30
  Atlantic. No, no, no.
• 1:38:31
  Well, at First Pacific. Pacific this time.
• 1:38:33
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Which is extraordinary.
• 1:38:35
  It's like whatever 9000 miles they've had.
• 1:38:37
  With their brothers, I said yeah, I can't even, no, I'm not
• 1:38:39
  sure. Like the car with my brother
• 1:38:40
  from Edinburgh, Kirkhodie and. That was a real last minute
• 1:38:47
  thing because we'd obviously individually we'd all been
• 1:38:49
  helping, you know, just giving sponsorship as much as we could
• 1:38:52
  afford. Oh, it's unreal unaided to, to
• 1:38:55
  Rd. from Peru to Australia, which is what we did.
• 1:38:59
  So we've been helping as we could.
• 1:39:01
  And then I said to Charlie, I said, look, I really want to do
• 1:39:03
  something from the business. We haven't got a huge amount of
• 1:39:05
  money, but how about we say from now until you land?
• 1:39:13
  So there was still quite far out at that point.
• 1:39:16
  We'll for everything sold in the UK of Maclean's nose, we'll
• 1:39:19
  donate £5 to the the court. So it's basically the profit.
• 1:39:24
  I'm not going to get into my commercials.
• 1:39:25
  More or less a profit. And he said that would be great.
• 1:39:28
  And I said, well, you do realise that they'll make more more
• 1:39:31
  money if they stay out longer? Yeah, that outboard engine back
• 1:39:38
  in the boat. But I mean, Mclean's knows
• 1:39:39
  itself, you know, when you were talking about that ability to
• 1:39:42
  then buy from other distilleries and you know, some of it would
• 1:39:45
  go obvious into our Delphy, some of it's clearly going into
• 1:39:48
  Mclean's nose as well, potentially.
• 1:39:50
  And I mean, Charles McLean himself must.
• 1:39:52
  Did he have some say in the recipe?
• 1:39:54
  No, at the inception. He had a say in the so yeah,
• 1:39:58
  like like we did with the first single malt from an American.
• 1:40:01
  He got to choose between 3 versions, right?
• 1:40:03
  We we were the ones. If you put it together, I had a
• 1:40:05
  rough idea of what I wanted. Yeah, I wanted to use N British.
• 1:40:09
  That's the Green, because of their family, the history.
• 1:40:11
  Whether or not we'll always be able to use it, I don't know,
• 1:40:14
  but it's certainly up until this point it's been 100%.
• 1:40:18
  But we are fast approaching that time of the evening.
• 1:40:20
  Well, I've got one last question.
• 1:40:21
  I know I'm allowed one. Had an hour and a half.
• 1:40:23
  Angry. I know.
• 1:40:23
  I know well why. Why?
• 1:40:25
  Why? Why?
• 1:40:26
  Yeah, but we're talking one of the previous podcasts on it, Flo
• 1:40:32
  Uttrum on and we're talking a lot about the maturation and you
• 1:40:36
  know, she of old pulp name. She played great emphasis on
• 1:40:39
  that. The fact that it's all all the
• 1:40:41
  stuff that goes into single malt is matured in weck and the you
• 1:40:45
  know, the wind in the air plays a great part in the character of
• 1:40:48
  the whiskey. It's everything that goes into
• 1:40:50
  single malt. Armed American matured up at
• 1:40:53
  armed American and and does that have a part to play in the
• 1:40:57
  outcome of the whiskey as well? Because there is that
• 1:40:58
  maritimeness and that salinity there is there.
• 1:41:01
  I see it in an American as well. So with a very, very few
• 1:41:05
  exceptions, when we ran out of warehouse space and we're about
• 1:41:07
  to run out again and we had to take class off site for maybe
• 1:41:11
  six months. Everything's been matured up
• 1:41:13
  there. So there's there's two things I
• 1:41:17
  don't know what was said about totally, but if I give you my
• 1:41:21
  the impression, if you like, I mean, it's probably complete
• 1:41:23
  rubbish. But this is the way I see it.
• 1:41:26
  There are two factors by maturing on site, which will
• 1:41:29
  allow you allow the spirit to take on more of a unique style,
• 1:41:34
  specifically to the nature you're in the first one, and a
• 1:41:38
  lot of people forget about this. If you're maturing on site, more
• 1:41:41
  than likely you're filling your tasks at 63.5, unless you're
• 1:41:46
  really stuck for space, in which case you'll go up a bit.
• 1:41:48
  But you know, we all know in Scotland, 63.5 magic number
• 1:41:52
  they're filling a cask comes off the still around 70, just over
• 1:41:57
  70. That's quite a lot of water to
• 1:41:58
  add, sure. And if you're filling on site,
• 1:42:01
  more than likely you're going to be using your local water as
• 1:42:03
  well. Right.
• 1:42:05
  Certainly in our American when the water hits the hill, it goes
• 1:42:08
  into the hill. We've got Moss, Pete, sheet
• 1:42:11
  toenails, everything you like. What I'm trying to say is we
• 1:42:14
  have a credibly unique water up there.
• 1:42:16
  I mean, right to the point. We've had importers and agents
• 1:42:19
  from all over the world coming trying the water and thinking
• 1:42:21
  this is the best thing we've ever had to get back.
• 1:42:23
  The whiskey, the water, you know.
• 1:42:25
  So we have this lovely Peaky water coming off 3 springs on
• 1:42:29
  the hill, which yes, it goes through UV filters because we
• 1:42:32
  have to by law, but basically you are getting that mineral
• 1:42:36
  rich reduction water into the cask.
• 1:42:39
  I know that makes a difference. And then the second one, which
• 1:42:43
  is slightly more kind of, you know, not wishy washy, but
• 1:42:46
  certainly we'd like to think it has a big difference is the
• 1:42:49
  atmosphere. So if you park your car in a
• 1:42:51
  rainstorm outside the distillery, more often than not,
• 1:42:54
  if the sun comes out after it, it'll be white with salt.
• 1:42:57
  I was going to say, if you park it there for a few years, yeah,
• 1:43:01
  yeah. So we're constantly being dumped
• 1:43:04
  on from a hike with water and that is getting in.
• 1:43:07
  It's permeating, it's through the warehouses, it's all
• 1:43:09
  dunnage, it's all natural and we encourage it as much as we can.
• 1:43:14
  Brilliant, brilliant. Good question, and it's worth
• 1:43:16
  waiting for. Good.
• 1:43:17
  Good, good, good. That's great.
• 1:43:18
  Well, we are, we are getting to that point in the evening where
• 1:43:20
  we do ask our guests whether what 3 drafts.
• 1:43:21
  So Alex, it's, it's basically any 3 whiskeys that have a
• 1:43:24
  meaning story or some sort of association with yourself.
• 1:43:27
  And we do allow I mean, yeah, you're, you're the, you're the
• 1:43:30
  gaffer. So you can have you can have as
• 1:43:32
  many 1 brand as you like I. Don't think you're long enough
• 1:43:34
  for that. Look, you very kindly gave me
• 1:43:37
  about four hours warning for this.
• 1:43:38
  So I have had a wee thing I and I am going to choose three that
• 1:43:44
  have been stepping stones in my own personal exploration of
• 1:43:50
  whiskey, one of which is trying to remember we've got the right
• 1:43:56
  ones. Yes, one of which is is own
• 1:44:01
  brand on brand and the other two aren't, although there's
• 1:44:04
  connection. So the first one would be my
• 1:44:08
  first introduction to proper quality single malt Scottish
• 1:44:12
  whiskey. And I shared a flat here in
• 1:44:14
  Edinburgh University with one of my oldest friends, whose father
• 1:44:17
  back then owned a whiskey shop just outside Aviemore.
• 1:44:21
  It was a legendary whiskey shop, long since sold.
• 1:44:25
  But when we used to go up, if there was any snow on the hills,
• 1:44:29
  maybe go up for a day skiing when we're students, and we'd
• 1:44:31
  pop in to see Frank on the way down just for a restorative.
• 1:44:35
  And I remember the first time getting introduced to Flora and
• 1:44:38
  fauna, Mortlock and Liquid, side by side.
• 1:44:42
  And it was a defining moment because up until that point it
• 1:44:45
  had been whatever was on special in the local pub, which had been
• 1:44:48
  fine, but it was local pub was probably the wrong place, wrong
• 1:44:52
  DRAM. This was definitely the right
• 1:44:54
  place, right DRAM? So mort Lac 16 which no longer
• 1:44:57
  available as. Floor.
• 1:44:58
  That's been mentioned the floor of it once, I think.
• 1:45:01
  It's definitely been mentioned, but Linkwood 12 still very much
• 1:45:03
  floor and fauna still going strong.
• 1:45:05
  Cracking DRAM, Yeah. So that that would be certainly
• 1:45:09
  something that got me interested.
• 1:45:10
  And then it was only a couple of years from that stage when I
• 1:45:12
  then got the job at Remy and and really built from there.
• 1:45:16
  Second one, I don't know which order to put these in.
• 1:45:21
  Yeah, OK. Second one would be me getting a
• 1:45:27
  brain wave but on the back of a request to blend officially
• 1:45:31
  blend international whiskey for the first time.
• 1:45:34
  I may be wrong, but I've always felt that it was the first
• 1:45:37
  official Japanese Scotch. There's been plenty of
• 1:45:41
  unofficial stuff. This would have been 2015.
• 1:45:44
  But you've been nervous. 2015 two guys or three guys
• 1:45:48
  approached me in the office and said we want to commemorate the
• 1:45:51
  life of a Scotsman called Thomas Blake Glover.
• 1:45:55
  I'd never heard of him and along with most other Scots.
• 1:45:57
  He's the man who founded Mitsubishi and or I played a
• 1:46:00
  part in Mitsubishi and Kieran. Yeah, no, that's.
• 1:46:04
  Why? We've become the big part,
• 1:46:05
  right? He he he sold arms to the
• 1:46:07
  Satsuma Daimyo, who was the kind of local landlord and played a
• 1:46:11
  big part in the in the Satsuma Rebellion, which was a kind of
• 1:46:15
  failed. But crucially got them to be got
• 1:46:18
  them over for yeah, education in in the England for the first
• 1:46:21
  time. So it was the first, the
• 1:46:23
  current, as far as we know, of Japanese coming over to the West
• 1:46:26
  to learn Western. Yeah, but he, he was based in
• 1:46:29
  Nagasaki. I've been to Nagasaki and
• 1:46:31
  there's a whole kind of garden that's dedicated to him and his
• 1:46:33
  old house is still there and. So they, they basically, they
• 1:46:36
  told me this in the space of an afternoon.
• 1:46:37
  This is what he wants, what he did.
• 1:46:39
  Excuse me. Interesting.
• 1:46:41
  We want to, they said. We want you to make a blended
• 1:46:45
  Scotch whiskey and we'll take the funds from it to help fund
• 1:46:50
  rebuilding his house in in Fraserbrook or wherever.
• 1:46:53
  It is, yeah. He's from Fraserbrook, so I.
• 1:46:54
  Said, oh, this is great, it's really interesting.
• 1:46:56
  And there was a few things which I hadn't picked up on but
• 1:47:00
  subsequently made it even more important.
• 1:47:03
  One of which, well, sorry. I then came back to them the
• 1:47:07
  following day having had that brain wave, which was why are we
• 1:47:10
  doing a blend of Scotch? He was a blend of the two
• 1:47:12
  countries. Let's do that.
• 1:47:14
  They said, can we do that? I said, no idea, I'll go and
• 1:47:17
  talk to the SWA. And it took months.
• 1:47:20
  That's another story. But the other trigger for this,
• 1:47:23
  this combination was that where he did, where he started making
• 1:47:27
  a huge impact in Japan was post the signing of the Treaty of
• 1:47:33
  Amity and Commerce between the UK and Japan.
• 1:47:36
  So America were first, the UK was about fourth in line.
• 1:47:40
  But it just happened to be my great, great grandfather who was
• 1:47:47
  ambassador or something. I don't, I can't remember out
• 1:47:48
  there at the time had a faster ship than the French, so he got
• 1:47:53
  up there. Before the Yangtze.
• 1:47:55
  And signed the treaty second after America.
• 1:47:59
  So that was 18. Eighteen 58455 Yeah, 1850s I
• 1:48:05
  know. Yeah, 1850s.
• 1:48:06
  And that allowed Glover then to start trading West to east.
• 1:48:10
  So there was this amazing family connection, but I hadn't even
• 1:48:12
  thought about it at all. So we had the bare bones of the
• 1:48:15
  idea. I then went spent months with
• 1:48:18
  the SWA going through everything.
• 1:48:20
  What it boiled down to was you're only allowed to produce
• 1:48:24
  Scotch whiskey in Scotland and the word produce was key.
• 1:48:28
  So what is production? What does it entail?
• 1:48:30
  And it came pretty much to its flavour altering.
• 1:48:33
  So you can bottle in Scotland non Scotch whiskey, but you
• 1:48:36
  can't do anything else, you can't mature it, you can't blend
• 1:48:39
  it, etcetera. So we worked out a way of doing
• 1:48:41
  it great, and then I had to find some Japanese whiskey in bulk.
• 1:48:46
  Fortunately, I knew Ochiro reasonably well from Chichibu,
• 1:48:49
  who still had reasonable stocks of Hanyu from his grandfather or
• 1:48:54
  great uncle, I can't remember, who had had that distillery.
• 1:48:57
  Now Hanyu's gone on to be the most ridiculously expensive,
• 1:49:01
  unobtainable whiskey as as the castle got fewer and fewer.
• 1:49:04
  But he offered me two to choose one.
• 1:49:06
  They were both beautiful whiskeys.
• 1:49:08
  We bought one. We blended it with Longbourn and
• 1:49:12
  a few other things and it was the first Glover and out it.
• 1:49:15
  Went what was the product called?
• 1:49:16
  It was called the Glover, The Glover Glover, Yeah.
• 1:49:19
  So we're now on batch 10/11 I. Think so the Glover Batch 1.
• 1:49:24
  Yeah, this is batch 1 and it was in a fancy decanter.
• 1:49:26
  First time the Delphi's ever done that.
• 1:49:28
  It was over £1000 a bottle, bearing in mind it had a 23 year
• 1:49:32
  old handy. Handy.
• 1:49:33
  Yeah, Yeah. Wow, and it was delicious.
• 1:49:36
  And the family, the family in the family connection.
• 1:49:38
  Just fell as spurious connection and it also then allowed me to
• 1:49:42
  look at other fusion blending opportunities with India,
• 1:49:47
  Sweden, Australia. We've done, you know, those over
• 1:49:49
  the years. So that was a big step in my own
• 1:49:52
  personal kind of thing. And then the third one goes
• 1:49:55
  going back to the other side of the family, the ushers was the
• 1:50:00
  ability or the the the the chance to open a open a bottle
• 1:50:05
  of Usher's green stripe with modern day and American
• 1:50:10
  supporters. So our AD Venture club, the
• 1:50:12
  adventure Club, we meet once or twice a year, normally in Zoom
• 1:50:18
  and then in person, and that particular year a few years ago
• 1:50:20
  was in Behind the Pear Tree in Edinburgh.
• 1:50:24
  Yeah, which was recently owned by Angeles's house.
• 1:50:27
  So I had this extraordinary opportunity to open the bottle
• 1:50:31
  of green Stripe, which I'd got an auction Andrew Asher, albeit,
• 1:50:35
  you know, long after he was gone, but his brand and share it
• 1:50:40
  with my as an hour Adam Merkin Wow adventure Club.
• 1:50:45
  In his house. In his house.
• 1:50:46
  Wow, that's super and. It was bloody good whiskey as
• 1:50:49
  well, actually. Great, great watch 3 dramas.
• 1:50:52
  Yeah. Look, Alex, I have to say, you
• 1:50:54
  know, it's been, it's been a real pleasure getting you on the
• 1:50:56
  podcast. Adam Merkin for us.
• 1:50:58
  I mean, the fact that I wish I'd brought a trophy because,
• 1:51:04
  because last year we sat down to meet.
• 1:51:07
  Sorry. Well, year, year past December
• 1:51:10
  there we sat down and said what are our top drams of 2025?
• 1:51:13
  And for me, Arden, Mark and and Sherry, I said that, like I
• 1:51:16
  said, I wanted to fill a bathtub with it and wine it and drink it
• 1:51:20
  and bathing it. Bit of a Eureka whiskey for.
• 1:51:22
  You, it really was, it was, it was a crack and drop then this
• 1:51:25
  year or last year. Sorry, 2020, sorry, that was
• 1:51:28
  2024, I should say 2024-2025. We decided instead of going
• 1:51:32
  through our all of our drams that were our top ones, we put
• 1:51:35
  it out to the listeners and we got a lot of feedback coming in.
• 1:51:39
  People ranked in no order. Some people put them in order
• 1:51:42
  their top 10 drams of 2025. I don't know how to collate that
• 1:51:46
  kind of information to I chucked in and ChatGPT, but basically by
• 1:51:52
  basically came out with what were the top brands that people
• 1:51:56
  were drinking and are the market finished?
• 1:51:57
  Number one, it was #1 for the Whiskey Stories podcast.
• 1:52:00
  So two years in a row, effectively. 2024 Dana Merkin
• 1:52:05
  and Sherry for me 2025 Whiskey Stories podcast Drama of the
• 1:52:09
  Year I. Mean that's music music to our
• 1:52:13
  you know, generally we're not we're not we're not trying to
• 1:52:15
  rewrite anything. We're just whiskey lovers who've
• 1:52:18
  got behind the lucky enough to get behind the new distillery
• 1:52:22
  and do everything in ice. And if if other people have the
• 1:52:25
  same taste buds. It's fantastic and we're coming
• 1:52:28
  up to see you. Well, I was going to say, you
• 1:52:29
  haven't even been yet. Yeah, well we're going to make
• 1:52:31
  the pilgrimage aren't we lads? We're going to be heading up not
• 1:52:35
  too far away in fact. This episode will go out on the
• 1:52:39
  2nd of April. Yep.
• 1:52:42
  And and I. Can't be more excited?
• 1:52:45
  Actually I'm on the 3rd and the 4th here.
• 1:52:47
  And on the 3rd and 4th, we're ending up.
• 1:52:48
  So this episode, the the the vlog and our trip up, Cornell's
• 1:52:51
  looking after us. I think he's actually heading to
• 1:52:53
  New Zealand the next day. Or or, well, maybe not.
• 1:52:58
  Yeah, well, you never know. Yeah, but we're getting looked
• 1:53:00
  after up up in the distillery, so we're really looking forward
• 1:53:03
  to keep your eyes peeled for that.
• 1:53:04
  But Alex, thank you so much for coming on.
• 1:53:06
  Thank you for sharing your whiskey story as well.
• 1:53:07
  And thank you so much for sharing these fantastic drams
• 1:53:10
  with us as well. How How do people get to the
• 1:53:12
  distillery salary opened just now?
• 1:53:14
  Yeah, it is. Come Easter, it'll be open seven
• 1:53:18
  days a week, hopefully, certainly 6.
• 1:53:20
  We're aiming for seven this year.
• 1:53:22
  Usual kind of business hours. There is an in joke that an
• 1:53:27
  American distillery is 4 hours from anywhere in Scotland,
• 1:53:30
  including including an American, but it is worth every single
• 1:53:36
  mile of that trip. Angus is driving.
• 1:53:38
  That's for. Sure.
• 1:53:39
  Yeah, boy, thank you very much, Alex, for coming on.
• 1:53:41
  Thank you for everyone who's listening.
• 1:53:43
  Keep up to date with everything that's going on through the
• 1:53:44
  Facebook page. Give us five stars.
• 1:53:46
  Follow us on all the social media platforms.
• 1:53:48
  Check us out on YouTube, get on the newsletter as well.
• 1:53:50
  All the very best. Thank you very much, Alex.
• 1:53:51
  Sponge bar. Cheers.
• 1:53:52
  There we go. Well done.
• 1:53:55
  Nice one. Excellent.
• 1:54:00
  That's the closest I've ever come out pushing my pants.
• 1:54:03
  Sasha. See.
• 1:54:05
  See, I started me. I'm sorry, I should have gone on
• 1:54:10
  longer. No, no, you're all right.