Latest / Whisky Stories Podcast / Finn Thomson: 250 Years of Family Whisky History and the Art of Independent Bottling

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Finn Thomson: 250 Years of Family Whisky History and the Art of Independent Bottling · Whisky Stories Podcast

• 0:01
  Right. I guess you know what to do,
• 0:02
  right? Welcome to the Whiskey Stories
• 0:08
  podcast. If we look back at every single
• 0:10
  generation, my family being involved in whiskey one way or
• 0:13
  another, it goes all the way back to 1772.
• 0:16
  Well, I don't think there's any other family that can claim
• 0:19
  that. The fact that I think companies
• 0:22
  like Diageo actually supply little bottlers like me and many
• 0:25
  others, I think that's incredible.
• 0:27
  And a lot of people will will give the big boys a hard time.
• 0:31
  I think they're incredibly supportive.
• 0:33
  I could not be more excited. It's it's it'll probably be the
• 0:37
  best project I ever do. Welcome all the listings on this
• 0:40
  podcast, myself, Graham. We're back in the athletic arms,
• 0:42
  back in the diggers, back in the cellar, sandwich nicely
• 0:45
  underneath the gents toilets and the bar.
• 0:47
  How we do it? I guess.
• 0:48
  Oh, absolutely fantastic. It's it's been a while since
• 0:51
  we've done a recording. Yeah.
• 0:52
  Would you believe it? It's been a.
• 0:53
  Whole week, I know, actually, we've been seeing each other,
• 0:55
  yeah. I know usually go home and tuck
• 0:59
  yourself tuck and tuck each other into bed.
• 1:01
  Yeah, I don't know what you're tucking it when you go, it's
• 1:05
  like Chuck, how are you, pal? I'm all right.
• 1:07
  Well, I was all right. I'm good now.
• 1:09
  You're good. Yeah, you're good now.
• 1:10
  You know, like you've got a drab in front of you.
• 1:12
  Well, we've got, I, we've got, there's a lot of drams on the
• 1:15
  table. What have you got I guess?
• 1:16
  Just I, I well, to start, I've got it's a cabinheads,
• 1:19
  Cabinheads club, right? Pizza Dalmore, 12 year old.
• 1:24
  I'm sorry, I was 16. I think it was 12.
• 1:28
  Maybe it was 16. It's a Peter.
• 1:29
  Either way, it's. Pizza, and it's definitely
• 1:31
  Dalmore. It's definitely Dalmore.
• 1:32
  It's definitely beated. I can, I can tell it's beated
• 1:35
  brilliant. I'm relying on the assurance of
• 1:37
  garden heads that it's Dalmore brilliant.
• 1:38
  I have no reason to doubt them. No, they're the oldest
• 1:40
  independent bottler in Scotland, actually.
• 1:42
  Absolutely. There you go.
• 1:43
  Yeah, there you go. Charlie.
• 1:45
  How are you? What have you got?
• 1:47
  I'm good, I was going to get an iron 10 but then I spotted on
• 1:50
  the bar that was at £6 for a 25 year old Gervin like official
• 1:54
  bottling. So I've got that and I honestly,
• 1:58
  I remember enjoying it and I was like, it's probably not as good
• 2:01
  as I remember. It's decent, man.
• 2:03
  It's really good. 25 year old, is that 25?
• 2:05
  Yeah. 42%. Nice, nice.
• 2:07
  I've on the back of our episode with Andrew Lenny.
• 2:12
  Yes. And the chat about Fetter Cairn
• 2:15
  and the Fetter Cairn 18 that Ross was banging on about with,
• 2:19
  which is finished 100% in Scottish oak casks.
• 2:23
  I've gone for that and I'm not up until the podcast with with
• 2:29
  Andrew. We we, we told the story about
• 2:32
  us tucking into Fetter Cairn years ago.
• 2:35
  Boardroom. Yeah, but I haven't really had
• 2:37
  an awful lot of it. I want to like Fetter Cairn, so
• 2:40
  I've, I'm not tried enough to really say that I do or don't.
• 2:44
  But actually I've had a wee sip of this.
• 2:46
  It's great. But we've got loads of drums on
• 2:47
  the table because we have a well, an independent bottler
• 2:50
  here, Mr. Finn Thompson. Finn, how are you?
• 2:52
  I'm. Doing very well, yeah.
• 2:54
  Welcome. Surviving.
• 2:55
  Welcome back to the Whiskey Stories podcast.
• 2:58
  We were just talking there. We did an end and you were our
• 3:02
  second, second in the bottler spotlight, which was God, well
• 3:07
  over two years ago now. I think it was so great to have
• 3:10
  you back on the podcast search, but actually having a dedicated
• 3:13
  podcast for you. So it's good to have you.
• 3:15
  Good. Yeah, yeah, that first one was
• 3:16
  was a lot of fun. Your second second one wasn't.
• 3:20
  Second in the yeah. Half ago.
• 3:22
  More than that, I'd say. Yeah.
• 3:23
  At the Kilderken and we did it on a It was a kind of small
• 3:26
  group and we did it on a table and you'd brought all your
• 3:29
  paraphernalia. I did.
• 3:31
  There was and I was. There was Eagle decanters and
• 3:34
  yes. I was exclusively warned not to
• 3:36
  bring anything tonight. Just yeah.
• 3:38
  I mean you give you. A limited table space, you see
• 3:41
  the. Space that we've actually got
• 3:42
  available to have that. I mean, I don't know if I mean
• 3:45
  like we're going to dive into your family history, people who
• 3:48
  have listened or who are they maybe even on that indie ball or
• 3:50
  spotlight. It was good.
• 3:52
  We got we got a good sort of overview of who Finn Thompson is
• 3:57
  and what the background to your family is.
• 3:58
  But this is a sort of more dedicated deep dive into it
• 4:02
  because am I right in saying your family is probably one of
• 4:06
  the longest serving families in the whiskey industry?
• 4:12
  I would, I would argue so, yes, right.
• 4:15
  I I'm sure there's others that would claim otherwise, but.
• 4:17
  And Mark Thompson's your great granddaughter.
• 4:19
  That's right. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.
• 4:22
  It calls me son. Hi Martin, good to hear you.
• 4:24
  You see if you ever no but. I, I think, I think it depends
• 4:29
  how you want to define it because OK, you mentioned Kaden
• 4:32
  heads. Kaden has probably been oldest
• 4:34
  independent bottler. If we look back at every single
• 4:39
  generation, my family being involved in whiskey one way or
• 4:41
  another, it goes all the way back to 1772.
• 4:44
  I don't think there's any other family that can claim that.
• 4:48
  So, yeah. So I think that makes us the
• 4:52
  oldest whiskey family, but I'm sure other people debate that.
• 4:55
  Well, that's fine. But that, that, that family
• 4:57
  history ranges from illicit distilling.
• 5:00
  Yeah. All the way to where you are
• 5:02
  today with some crazy, crazy stories in between, from like
• 5:06
  your grandfather's days and things like that.
• 5:07
  So I mean, we don't how far back can you go where you can
• 5:12
  actually see where it started from and what else, how it all
• 5:14
  started? The first record we've got is
• 5:18
  from 1772, which is from James Thompson, who's my great, great,
• 5:25
  great, great, great, great granddad, who is named on a
• 5:30
  document which we found in the National Archives of Scotland.
• 5:33
  And there's a list of about 20 different farmers at the time
• 5:37
  all around the Grantley area next to Aberfeldy.
• 5:40
  And they were all on this list because they were caught with a
• 5:43
  pot stove on their land. Right, so that was the naughty
• 5:46
  list. The naughty list.
• 5:48
  But what that shows you is that this just in that area, there
• 5:51
  was 20 local farmers. Yeah, had a pot still.
• 5:55
  So that's what everybody was at it basic.
• 5:57
  Well, it's just like 1824 is like when it became legal.
• 6:01
  Yeah, exactly. So you go.
• 6:03
  Yeah, this is a good. Yeah, it's always extended.
• 6:06
  Yeah, Yeah. It's like. 50 years prior.
• 6:08
  Yeah, this is 50 years before and this is your first recorded.
• 6:11
  Family, this is, this is first, this is first recorded.
• 6:14
  So that, I mean, yeah, we put 1772 on the bottle, on the
• 6:17
  bottom of the bottle. It's probably been going on from
• 6:20
  before then as well. How many?
• 6:23
  You did say it. Father was probably doing the
• 6:24
  same thing. And this is it.
• 6:26
  That's. Right.
• 6:26
  Yeah, We also know that he was, he was probably in his 50s by by
• 6:30
  that point as well. Yeah.
• 6:31
  So good chance that. Well, there's been somebody.
• 6:33
  Didn't start doing it in 50s so. First time someone was fast
• 6:36
  enough to catch him, in fact. Exactly.
• 6:37
  Yeah, exactly. So that's why so so from there,
• 6:40
  right, you know, it's quite cool.
• 6:43
  You know that sort of who knows you're 4 times great grandson or
• 6:48
  daughter might be listening to whiskey stories podcast.
• 6:50
  They're going, actually, who knows?
• 6:53
  But the audio quality is terrible.
• 6:57
  So from there, then how, how there's a, is it just literally,
• 7:01
  because I'm, we've, we've had conversations with Stephen
• 7:06
  Rankin, yes, of Gordon Macphail's part of the, the
• 7:09
  Rankin family and the Arkhart's that have come, you know,
• 7:12
  through that, through that generation.
• 7:13
  We've had Google Gordon on the podcast as part of the Grant
• 7:18
  family from William Grant and Sons.
• 7:19
  And again, it's carried out. So has there been a continuous
• 7:23
  business line of whiskey like these companies like Gordon
• 7:26
  McPhail where generation, generation, generation like
• 7:29
  William Grant and Sons where each generation or has it just
• 7:31
  been spread out through different areas?
• 7:33
  It's, it's a, it's a little bit broken up, but I think in quite
• 7:37
  a, quite a cool way. So even if you go all the way
• 7:39
  back to to James Thompson, right, we know, we know for a
• 7:43
  fact that James Thompson got caught, right?
• 7:45
  And #1 he's on this list. The best bit of evidence we have
• 7:48
  about the family, family business going into 1800s is
• 7:53
  actually Alfred Barnard's whiskey distilleries in the
• 7:56
  United Kingdom. Nice book, right?
• 7:58
  And within that book, he visits Grantley Distillery, which is
• 8:03
  set up by I think, James Thompson's grandchildren.
• 8:09
  And in his in his entry into the book there, he basically writes
• 8:12
  about how the current proprietor is telling him the stories of
• 8:16
  his grandfather and how his grandfather got caught and
• 8:21
  essentially had to flee to America.
• 8:23
  And I think there's a quote in the book which is he managed the
• 8:27
  night. The night was dark.
• 8:29
  So he managed to escape, fled to America, spent 10 years there
• 8:34
  and then came back, repented of his crimes and became a
• 8:37
  respectable member of society. Wow.
• 8:41
  And got married and got married as well.
• 8:43
  So. So I always laugh thinking, do
• 8:46
  you know what, there's so many Scots back in that period who
• 8:49
  probably just were actually desperate to get out to that
• 8:52
  part of the world, were fleeing out to USA, Canada.
• 8:56
  Most of them would have stuck over there for whatever reason.
• 8:59
  James Thompson says to to come back.
• 9:01
  Whenever they got illicitly to still over in the.
• 9:04
  States you probably got caught there, you gotta come back.
• 9:08
  No, thank God. Otherwise we'd be doing a
• 9:10
  bourbon tasting. Well, that's fair.
• 9:11
  Yeah. So so it's all right.
• 9:13
  So, so, so that's that's scattered there.
• 9:17
  What about you? Like I want to interestingly
• 9:19
  jump off, jump a few generations ahead and go, did your dad work
• 9:23
  in whiskey? Yeah, I mean, dad's dad's an
• 9:26
  interesting one. Dad's the missing generation.
• 9:27
  So the, the, the most broken recent bit and probably the
• 9:31
  reason why essentially I'm having to restart a family
• 9:33
  brand, right, is my granddad sold the business natives,
• 9:37
  right? When my, my dad and his siblings
• 9:40
  would have been teenagers, give or take.
• 9:43
  So dad was always this kind of like misgeneration that should
• 9:46
  have gone into the family business, Peter Thompson's and
• 9:49
  instead had to pursue his own career and he became a lawyer.
• 9:55
  But essentially he's still been involved in some way or another
• 9:59
  because when my granddad sold the business, he kept hold of
• 10:02
  all the casks that should have gone into his Ben Eagles blend
• 10:05
  at a very young age. So Dad's almost had this role of
• 10:08
  kind of patiently waiting for the right moment, still looking
• 10:12
  after casks but not doing anything with them.
• 10:16
  So he's, he's probably the only one who's not had that very,
• 10:18
  very active role within the whiskey industry.
• 10:21
  That said, Finn Thompson Whiskey might be very arrogantly my name
• 10:25
  in the bottle, but Dad's been just as involved in it as I
• 10:29
  have. It was very, you know, the whole
• 10:30
  family. It was a family family business
• 10:31
  at the end of the day. And so, so, so that's your dad
• 10:34
  and we've heard about, you know, generations before sort of the
• 10:37
  illicit distilling and, and moving around and stuff like
• 10:40
  that. So you mentioned your
• 10:41
  grandfather then, because I suppose when you look through
• 10:43
  the generations, the big chunk of the actual industry work was
• 10:49
  your grant. Was that Peter Thompson?
• 10:50
  Your, I would, I would say the big I, the big chunk of it and
• 10:53
  the stuff that's most recorded and the stuff that the family's
• 10:55
  probably best known for is all that, all those bits in the 20th
• 10:58
  century, right? So in 1909 we know that Peter
• 11:02
  Thompson, who's my great, great granddad, breaks away from his
• 11:06
  two brothers who all three of them previously were running
• 11:11
  their dad's shop, Alexander Thompson.
• 11:14
  He was a grocer in Perth doing his own blending.
• 11:16
  And that's interesting because these grocers when you mentioned
• 11:19
  the Arcat family again took over a grocer in Elgin and these were
• 11:27
  all companies, these we grocers. Well, I say wheat.
• 11:32
  Grocers. But these grocers, Johnny Walker
• 11:34
  as. Well, Johnny Walker, come on.
• 11:35
  Towns of Scotland were bringing in all sorts of commodities from
• 11:38
  outside, tea, wine, etcetera, etcetera.
• 11:40
  But one of the things they were doing is they were blending
• 11:42
  their own whiskey on site and selling that it.
• 11:45
  Was funny, but. Then within the confines of
• 11:47
  Perth or Elgin. I was at a tasting a good few
• 11:51
  years ago and it was it was one of the ranking twins, Stuart.
• 12:00
  I don't know anyone's name it. Was it was terrible, but
• 12:04
  basically. Sorry, George, I can't.
• 12:05
  Help you. We were we were we were speaking
• 12:07
  about it and I we I asked the question and I'm saying, you
• 12:10
  know, whilst your family great, great grandfathers deciding to
• 12:15
  start selling single cast whiskey, Gordon Macphail is you
• 12:19
  know, they're they're laying down casks and they're selling
• 12:21
  CAS through grocers. I was like, did they ever think
• 12:23
  about blending? And he was like, well, you know
• 12:27
  what, There was a grocer in Kilmarnock that made the
• 12:29
  decision to start blending and we carried on with a single cash
• 12:33
  route. And he's like that grocer in
• 12:36
  Kilmarnock ended up becoming Johnny Walker.
• 12:38
  And you look at look at that. Now, let's be honest, I'm pretty
• 12:41
  sure no one's regretting the direction of travel that the
• 12:44
  Gordon Macphail family went in. But it's like what you're saying
• 12:46
  is it's like, you know, you were either a wine winter, yes, like
• 12:51
  garden heads, you know, wine and spirits merchant in the 1800s
• 12:55
  into the 1900s, or you were a grocer.
• 12:57
  And that was basically the main source of act.
• 13:00
  You know, how you got access to to whiskey really, Because back
• 13:04
  then what people forget. And it was like we had like
• 13:07
  mentioned Dougal on the podcast, Dougal Gordon, you know, people
• 13:10
  forget a single single malt whiskey.
• 13:13
  It's a relatively new. It's an 1860s, you know, and up
• 13:17
  until then distilleries were just spirit producing factories.
• 13:21
  Effectively, either they filled the casks for you or you brought
• 13:24
  your own casks in, got them filled and took them off site
• 13:26
  and or, or you took the spirit and went away off and it went
• 13:29
  and got blinded somewhere or either or it went to a grocers
• 13:32
  or it went into a warehouse and and that was it.
• 13:34
  So, so that's what your family, that was the groceries in Perth.
• 13:37
  They'd be groceries. I think the the most important
• 13:40
  thing to remember with is that they were for Meyer, they were
• 13:42
  primarily grocers first and foremost.
• 13:44
  The whiskey would have been a bit of a side element of it for
• 13:48
  for many, many deaths decades. And so we're really lucky that
• 13:52
  we've got we've got records. We've got the minutes of
• 13:54
  meetings from basically every single month going back to 19
• 13:59
  tens through to 1970s. And you look at the ones in from
• 14:04
  1910s to certainly like 1940s. And the minutes of meetings us
• 14:09
  as whiskey geeks would find actually incredibly dull because
• 14:13
  it's like water is this price today we can get access to this
• 14:17
  meat or great strawberry season. You know, it's all it's all
• 14:20
  these kind of things. And then there's kind of side
• 14:22
  notes is like, yeah. And whiskey's become a more
• 14:25
  available or we've managed to get this.
• 14:27
  So this you got to remember, they are, they are grocers first
• 14:30
  and foremost. Whiskey's on the.
• 14:32
  Footnote And whiskey, just over time becomes more important and
• 14:36
  more important. I suppose as well that period of
• 14:39
  time, I mean that that's spanning 2 world wars.
• 14:42
  Imagine some pretty interesting, you know, seeing like the
• 14:45
  rationing and stuff. Like that, the rationing is huge
• 14:48
  in it and my my favorite is probably one of my favorite 2
• 14:52
  pages actually in our whole family archives.
• 14:54
  Right. So Peter Thompson starts the
• 14:56
  business in in 19 O 9 breaks away from his brothers and he
• 15:00
  runs the business until 19 summer 1939 when he died.
• 15:04
  So it's a minutes meeting entry, which is basically saying Peter
• 15:09
  Thompson is dead very simple top his son David is no chair of
• 15:16
  these meetings. The next entry is David absent
• 15:21
  on military duties in France and then David.
• 15:25
  So David David ends up getting captured.
• 15:28
  So he was part of the 51st Highland Regiment, right, Which
• 15:31
  was the regiment that was basically left, left behind
• 15:34
  during Dunkirk. They were, they were left to,
• 15:37
  to, well, they were kind of cornered out.
• 15:39
  They were surrounded by the German army at Saint Valerie and
• 15:44
  there was an attempt to get get them back across to to England.
• 15:48
  That's how, essentially. Where my dad is right now, he's
• 15:50
  were his brothers and they went, they're going to visit some
• 15:53
  Valerie, OH. Really.
• 15:54
  Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, so that's so so he, he
• 15:57
  thankfully got captured, right? He wasn't with many who'd have
• 16:01
  been killed. They spent the war and spent the
• 16:03
  war in prison. For war camp, Wow.
• 16:06
  And the minutes and the they're just getting pretty sassy.
• 16:08
  He's like, really? He's really milking this.
• 16:10
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:12
  Yeah, yeah, looks gone off and this boy.
• 16:16
  Tammy Baller coming home. I know.
• 16:20
  I find, I find it fascinating. What I love about it as well is
• 16:22
  that that same entry where he goes missing as a prisoner of
• 16:26
  war, and it's a really cool part of, of British or European
• 16:31
  history, is that this, the company secretary who joins us
• 16:35
  as a junior clerk aged 14, Jean Cameron, she ends up becoming
• 16:40
  essentially managing director of the company a very young age.
• 16:44
  And I think that's it's pretty synonymous with the rest of
• 16:47
  British industry at that point in time.
• 16:49
  If you think that all these men are going off to fight in
• 16:52
  Germany, France, women were running all their businesses, I
• 16:56
  bet that's very, very similar across not just whiskey
• 17:00
  companies at a time, but all businesses, yeah.
• 17:03
  So it's all right. So all this this documentation,
• 17:06
  I want to go back a little bit and see see, when you talk about
• 17:09
  grocers and stuff like that, is that literally just selling
• 17:12
  groceries to consumers? Or was there sort of was there a
• 17:15
  start of, you know, like distribution into other?
• 17:21
  Like So what when were they selling their fruit to other
• 17:24
  vendors or anything like that? Or was it literally just people
• 17:28
  going into the shops and buying buying stuff from the grocery
• 17:30
  shop? I think it was a little bit more
• 17:32
  than just being a shop where people would go and buy things.
• 17:36
  We've got old advertisements, right?
• 17:39
  And a lot of it's advertising of recipes.
• 17:42
  It's like, you know, it's the Thompson family recipes of come
• 17:46
  in and buy your buy your ingredients.
• 17:48
  But this is the cookbook for for how you go home.
• 17:51
  So it's not necessarily, I don't think there's so much shipping,
• 17:54
  you know, tea and coffee and fruit and veg to to other
• 17:58
  grocers. They probably were with whiskey
• 18:02
  though. I think that was that was
• 18:03
  probably the anomaly of it selling other other bits of
• 18:06
  whiskey to other, other companies.
• 18:09
  Yeah, I'm not sure about. OK, Daily goods, it's just the
• 18:11
  actual because at some point or other the whiskey this like like
• 18:15
  you've said at some point or other, it's not about butter and
• 18:18
  ham and whatever you're getting available.
• 18:20
  Yeah, it's about whiskey. It's when did that really kick
• 18:23
  in there? I think that was already
• 18:25
  happening in 1890s, right? As in as in trading whiskey?
• 18:30
  Because again, we've got records of the family doing swaps of
• 18:33
  casks with Arthur Bell, with John Walker and basically
• 18:37
  trading, trading things with them back in the 1890s.
• 18:41
  And because this is the bet that fascinates me, I guess, right?
• 18:44
  Sure is. That is the fact that we've
• 18:45
  talked about Gordon Macphail, we've talked about Johnnie
• 18:48
  Walker and stuff like that. Now Johnny Walker a little bit
• 18:50
  different because it was a blender by Gordon Macphail
• 18:53
  single malt whiskey doesn't kick off till the till the 1960s, but
• 18:57
  we know that Gordon Macphail were buying casks and selling
• 19:00
  whiskey and we know that your family were buying casks and
• 19:03
  selling whiskey. Finn So what were people?
• 19:05
  Was it literally just you went out and you just said can I
• 19:07
  guess get a bottle of whiskey and you got whatever was the
• 19:10
  cask or? From my understanding, and
• 19:12
  please correct me if I'm wrong, but like effectively I think
• 19:17
  obviously I think we kind of forget obviously what a
• 19:19
  supermarket is in modern days. But the grocers would have been
• 19:23
  assuming like a big part of the local institutes would go, they
• 19:27
  would have the part and they would make the decisions one
• 19:30
  what was available cask wise or what they could trade with other
• 19:32
  people. They would blend and try to make
• 19:35
  a consistent product. So the bottle you went into your
• 19:38
  grocers to buy would in theory be the same thing as you bought
• 19:41
  last time, or if it did change you'd be able to tell.
• 19:44
  So it would be that. Would be the same with tea.
• 19:46
  Yeah, it would be the house blended effect, yeah.
• 19:49
  So it was still a blended product.
• 19:52
  You weren't just going cuz again.
• 19:54
  I think. G and M1 of the big.
• 19:57
  Things for their business initially was they were bottling
• 20:00
  for distilleries. So you, I think you kind of
• 20:04
  think of a distillery now as bottling plant.
• 20:06
  Warehouses were filling glass, but that's not the way it would
• 20:11
  have been. A lot of these people would have
• 20:12
  been farmers initially who had excess barley.
• 20:15
  Distilled that then we go well fuck well you know we've got to
• 20:20
  find cast for these and then they would have acquired stuff
• 20:22
  from what was available in the ports and if that was Sherry
• 20:25
  fantastic. If it was pickled fish casks,
• 20:28
  that also was a category of that, and then you've got to
• 20:31
  find someone to sell that to. If I.
• 20:33
  I yeah, I think you're right. I think these grocers played a
• 20:36
  really important role in in promoting and advertising
• 20:39
  whiskey as well, right? Yeah, Yeah.
• 20:41
  And so again, going back to family notes, we've got a letter
• 20:46
  in this in this book, which has all the the the trading of
• 20:49
  casks. There's also a letter in it
• 20:51
  which is to to basically from like to like a villain
• 20:57
  distillery, seeing to the distillery that Alexander
• 21:02
  Thompson's who had been at the time were going to promote
• 21:05
  Lagavulin to London-based accounts and they were taking an
• 21:09
  advertisement in a local London newspaper to go and promote
• 21:12
  Lagavulin almost as like a a registered vendor of Lagavulin.
• 21:16
  And when was this? Sorry this.
• 21:18
  Is this is 18 nineties so. That's so, that's so, yeah.
• 21:21
  So there's an element of, because this is what I want to
• 21:23
  know is that like Dougal Gordon said that in the 1960s, people
• 21:27
  went into bars, people went into pubs, and they ordered whiskey
• 21:31
  and they got whiskey, whatever the whiskey that was given.
• 21:34
  What happened was when people went in and said, no, no, I want
• 21:37
  a Glen FedEx up in that neck of the woods.
• 21:39
  People would go, well, you must work in you must work in whiskey
• 21:42
  then, because normally what happens is the punter just goes,
• 21:45
  can I have a whiskey? And I suppose what you're saying
• 21:47
  is like if these grocers through the 1800s, basically people just
• 21:51
  said, can I have a bottle of whiskey?
• 21:52
  The bottle of whiskey you got that groceries was like the
• 21:55
  house blend was that was where your was your grand great
• 21:59
  grandparents and all that. Were they blending or were they
• 22:01
  or was it literally single cast stuff that they were dressed?
• 22:04
  No. They'd been blending as well.
• 22:05
  I think they'd have been trying to create a semi semi consistent
• 22:09
  products right? I know and also you have to
• 22:12
  remember as well as whiskey at the term 1890s and turn the
• 22:15
  century. What was coming from the seller
• 22:18
  is probably, you know, the skill of distilling now is so much
• 22:23
  more advanced than it was 120 years ago.
• 22:26
  The product. Would have been rough.
• 22:28
  Would have been quite rough and the cast the wood was probably
• 22:32
  we didn't know. What Chuck was saying.
• 22:34
  Whatever you got your hands on. This is it.
• 22:35
  It was whatever you. And what you could pay.
• 22:37
  For we didn't know what we know about maturation now then.
• 22:40
  So there was an element of, well, there had to be a blend
• 22:43
  because there was rough stuff. It had to be smoothed out.
• 22:47
  So, so best example I've got of that is, is so also remember
• 22:52
  that Scotch whiskey and this, this is now early 1900s, right?
• 22:56
  Scotch whiskey is not actually considered the best type of
• 22:59
  whiskey. I think Irish whiskey the time
• 23:01
  is considered enough kind of a level above.
• 23:03
  It's trendier, it's cooler, a little bit tastes better.
• 23:08
  So when Peter Thompson starts his business in 19 O 9, we've
• 23:12
  got a recipe from 19 O 9 written down.
• 23:15
  We've got the original document of it, which is a recipe for
• 23:19
  Peter Thompson's Irish blend in Bond, right?
• 23:23
  So he was creating an Irish whiskey, which was entirely
• 23:28
  Scott. It was quote marks.
• 23:30
  Actually in quote marks on the actual document as well.
• 23:34
  So it was a Scotch whiskey, but he was trying to make it Irish.
• 23:38
  It was like a taste I like. So it was a taste I like, but
• 23:40
  you you never guess what was actually involved in it.
• 23:43
  So it's you know, it's it's not just whiskey.
• 23:46
  No. So he was getting and the recipe
• 23:48
  is five year old Cameron Bridge, right.
• 23:51
  And it's something like 5 Sherry hog sets of of of Cameron
• 23:55
  Bridge. But added to that, for each hogs
• 23:57
  head we add 1 gallon of vine de colour.
• 24:01
  Sorry, Vin, Declaw would have been kind of like a coloring
• 24:05
  coloring agent kind of sweetener for sharing.
• 24:08
  Caramel kind of okay. Oh wait, is this like the
• 24:11
  syrupy? Stuff.
• 24:11
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah.
• 24:14
  So it'd been that prune prune wine as well.
• 24:18
  Quarter gallon of prune wine, right?
• 24:20
  And a gallon of pineapple juice for each hog's head.
• 24:22
  This. Is a cocktail, so.
• 24:24
  It's a mod. Yeah, well.
• 24:26
  But this was adding the sweetness to the kind of SO.
• 24:29
  Yeah, you'll you know to. Get the Irish whiskey but this
• 24:32
  is random but. This I suppose we'd also you
• 24:35
  forget that like until like the 1920s were chewing whiskey for
• 24:40
  while it was 2 years initially wasn't thought of one of the
• 24:43
  biggest issues with Scottish whiskey back then why why Irish
• 24:47
  was considered so much better was that some of these people
• 24:49
  would just be running off the stoves leaving and would for a
• 24:52
  couple of weeks. And I think there's a Girvan
• 24:54
  advert from back of the day that seemed like made from this
• 24:59
  year's barley. Yeah.
• 25:00
  And the advert the advert came out in October.
• 25:03
  You know it's. Is that first?
• 25:06
  Oh, you reckon this first? So we've got some bottles on the
• 25:08
  table here. I was reaching for you, Glenn.
• 25:12
  Glenn there, but you have handed me.
• 25:14
  I want to. I want to crack this one open.
• 25:16
  Glenn Geary, this is actually a single new one for me.
• 25:19
  Yeah, because this is not yet bottle.
• 25:21
  Colour on that I may get some. I mean, the colour isn't.
• 25:24
  I see it's a bit. How much vindicolor you got it?
• 25:30
  So I mean as sorry, carry on. What is this very important
• 25:33
  here? It's a potential I've not
• 25:35
  decided on bottling this yet. Your your opinions will very
• 25:38
  much be considered when we come to choose.
• 25:40
  But this is a cast that's available ready for bottling.
• 25:43
  I think 2006 Shay Bot of Langeiri.
• 25:51
  But. Full maturation in Cherry.
• 25:53
  Bar full maturation tell you and how.
• 25:54
  Sorry, what was that? What did you say the year was on
• 25:56
  2? 1006 so it's going to be if we
• 25:58
  bottle it in June like I hope to, then it's going to be a 19
• 26:03
  year old. 19 Wow, fantastic. Thank you very much for that.
• 26:06
  Thank you. Well, I need your very valuable
• 26:09
  opinions whether it's good or not because I I've had a nose of
• 26:12
  it, I've not had a proper proper taste of it yet.
• 26:14
  So feel that you can. Qualified but you.
• 26:16
  Can tell me if you think it's not very good.
• 26:19
  Needs a bit of pineapple juice because.
• 26:22
  You see the influence of the fringe.
• 26:24
  Juice whiles whiles we're drinking this.
• 26:25
  I mean, that is the fascinating part of where because what we
• 26:28
  all see today and know today, the Scotch whiskey industry is
• 26:31
  the SWA rules and regulations, even to the point of, you know,
• 26:36
  a couple of weeks ago we saw I thought I'd been out for longer
• 26:40
  actually, but it was the Glenn Murray forbidden fruit came out,
• 26:44
  which months ago we had Sam Barber on talking about.
• 26:48
  And it's a nod back to when Glenn Murray use cider casks for
• 26:52
  a special release. Such thing got banned by the SWA
• 26:55
  because you can't use cider casks that they were the type of
• 26:58
  cider casts that they were using.
• 27:00
  So to look now when you, when you hear stories that you
• 27:04
  automatically always just assume forever since Scotch whiskey has
• 27:09
  been around three years in a day has been a rule, You know, the
• 27:14
  maturation process, what we've talked about is always been a
• 27:17
  thing. All this kind of stuff, even
• 27:19
  like sort of the age profile, you know, it didn't, it wasn't
• 27:21
  that long ago in relative terms where you look back and go.
• 27:25
  Actually a lot of places used to put cumulative age on a blend
• 27:29
  where they could actually say this is about 20 years old
• 27:33
  whiskey because it's got a 5 year old here, a four year old
• 27:36
  there and the rest is made-up through different whiskies.
• 27:39
  But actually, when you go back in time some a whiskey producer
• 27:43
  deciding to create a taste alike of there's this is what we think
• 27:48
  Irish whiskey tastes like. And it's got pineapple,
• 27:50
  pineapple juice, prune wine and then the the colour of it.
• 27:54
  Yeah. So you've got access to all
• 27:56
  that. And that was that what I've been
• 27:58
  going on right away to make whiskey palatable, I suppose.
• 28:01
  Scotch whiskey palatable. Totally.
• 28:02
  Yeah, Yeah. Well, that's interesting is that
• 28:04
  I think as well, what we've seen is we've seen the kind of flip
• 28:07
  side where you would never, you would never imagine nowadays a
• 28:11
  Scotch whiskey trying to become an Irish whiskey, You know,
• 28:14
  anyone, you know, you'd be mad. You'd be, you know, So in a
• 28:18
  sense, Scotch whiskey in itself has elevated itself from that
• 28:22
  superior product, you know, and that's to its credit as well.
• 28:27
  But yeah. Well, they talk about the fact
• 28:30
  that like the, the, the, the prohibition, there's, there's a,
• 28:33
  there's a, there's a train of thought through history and
• 28:35
  there might be historians who are listening to this, that old
• 28:38
  trope that you're rolling out because you know, isn't until
• 28:40
  you speak to people like Arthur Motley and things and.
• 28:44
  Sometimes the legends aren't always as true as.
• 28:46
  Yeah, Arthur might say, oh, we've heard that all the time,
• 28:49
  but that's actually not necessarily.
• 28:50
  There was the one he talked about with the What was the
• 28:52
  disease that hit all the vineyards?
• 28:53
  Oh, so this was back in the 1860s.
• 28:55
  So this was. The Arthur.
• 28:57
  Whatever. Something.
• 28:58
  Yeah, which which killed the. Yeah, that was.
• 29:02
  Why killed the vines in France which decimated the Brandy
• 29:05
  industry? When we had Arthur in the
• 29:06
  podcast, he actually countered that to say, actually, a lot of
• 29:09
  people credit the growth of Scotch whisky to that.
• 29:11
  But actually there was other things going on at the same at
• 29:14
  the same time. And the argument is one of the
• 29:16
  things that the train of thought is that, you know, the Irish
• 29:20
  church was basically saying it's not right to to get involved in
• 29:25
  illegal activities over in the states, whereas the Scots were
• 29:28
  like, well, bring it on and we'll try.
• 29:29
  And and almost that prohibition period was the turning point for
• 29:33
  Scotch overtaking the Irish whiskey where suddenly it was
• 29:37
  the thing to drink in America and you know, cut his heart.
• 29:40
  Prohibition was launched. Well, no, sorry, not cut
• 29:43
  yourself probation cut the Sark whiskey was actually launched
• 29:46
  just before prohibition and sold cases over to America.
• 29:51
  More cases in America during prohibition than they were
• 29:53
  selling. Well, that was that was that
• 29:54
  which elevated that brand. So suddenly you look at and go.
• 29:57
  I think a lot of it comes down to to that what some people
• 30:00
  consider to be a nasty word of branding itself and actually
• 30:04
  creating brands. And I think a lot of people are
• 30:06
  quite anti brand in the world of whiskey.
• 30:09
  And you can argue actually independent bottlers are prime
• 30:12
  example of that. We're actually, you're often not
• 30:14
  buying a brand, you're buying single cask additions from
• 30:18
  multiple different distilleries, all under 11 roof.
• 30:21
  But indie bottlers in their own rights are brands, of course.
• 30:25
  But I think the success of Scotch whiskey comes from some
• 30:28
  really, really strong brands that were created in that time.
• 30:31
  And that leaves us on quite nicely because your own family
• 30:34
  had a particular brand as well. So when, when did that come
• 30:37
  about? Because obviously we talked
• 30:38
  about the grocer and the House Blend, but obviously a brand did
• 30:42
  emerge at some point and I'd be interested to know how that came
• 30:45
  about. Yeah, so, so the family whiskey
• 30:48
  up until early 1920s was Peter Thompson's.
• 30:52
  Peter Thompson's whiskey, right as as arrogantly as myself, he
• 30:55
  put his own name on a ball. The the story goes, is that
• 31:02
  Peter, who's still run the business at that point in time,
• 31:05
  based in Perth, hears about this brand new, very fancy hotel
• 31:11
  opening up down the road just 15 miles South.
• 31:16
  And he catches on to this idea and he and he decides that in
• 31:20
  Scotland every single Glenn should have a Ben.
• 31:24
  OK. Yeah, right.
• 31:27
  So before this new hotel opens, he decides to launch Ben Eagles
• 31:32
  Whiskey. What's the hotel it's?
• 31:37
  Not very famous, so yeah. And so he launches Ben Eagles
• 31:41
  Whiskey essentially the year before the Glen Eagles Hotel
• 31:44
  opens, which we think is 191924. Ben Eagles we think was was
• 31:48
  launched in 1922 potentially. We've got pictures of Peter
• 31:54
  Thompson standing in front of that famous, you know, front
• 31:57
  door of Ben Eagles at we believe is is some kind of Ben Eagles
• 32:01
  kind of launch party or I don't know, some kind of event so.
• 32:06
  When he launched Ben Eagles at Glen Eagles.
• 32:07
  I think he did well. I know I tried.
• 32:12
  I tried telling Glen Eagles this when I was trying to do we deal
• 32:15
  with them. They were having none of it,
• 32:16
  really. We've got ways in with the Glen
• 32:19
  Eagles. Nice.
• 32:19
  So if anyone at Glen Eagles is listening or the Glen Eagles
• 32:22
  townhouses listing, yeah, then shoot us up because that.
• 32:26
  So it's funny you hear about stories going through history
• 32:31
  and opportunity, Knox. There's basically a lot of
• 32:35
  people, look, I always argue this case like a lot of people
• 32:38
  say, oh, you know, go back 20-30, fifty years ago,
• 32:42
  opportunity was there where there wasn't opportunity, You
• 32:44
  know, how easy was it? It's all relative, I suppose.
• 32:47
  You know, your grandfather, he's overheard or he's heard about
• 32:51
  this, this, this hotel that's going to be opening down the
• 32:54
  road. So he's quickly thought, well,
• 32:55
  I'll get, I'll get a brand out that sort of matches up with
• 32:58
  that. And that's great.
• 32:59
  That's opportunity in Oxygen. It's taken advantage.
• 33:01
  But what your grandfather or great grandfather didn't have
• 33:03
  was social media was didn't have the ability to be able to pick
• 33:06
  up a mobile phone and do a video or start putting videos and
• 33:09
  posts out on social media, which gets people's attention as well,
• 33:12
  all that kind of stuff. But you know, it is, it is great
• 33:15
  when you hear these little stories where somebody just you,
• 33:19
  you've made a decision just to launch a whiskey brand and say,
• 33:23
  well, we've got a hotel down the road called Glen Eagles.
• 33:25
  So we'll create a brand in the local area called Bare Eagles.
• 33:27
  And it feels like a match made empty.
• 33:29
  And was there was there any ever any collaboration between the
• 33:32
  two? I, I don't know, I've got this
• 33:35
  image. I've got this picture of him
• 33:37
  standing in his suit in front of the in front of the hotel, which
• 33:42
  is what I think some kind of whiskey event.
• 33:45
  But there's no, there's no evidence of a supply agreement
• 33:48
  or anything. There might be.
• 33:49
  I'd love to, I'd love to shouldn't say that there was,
• 33:52
  but no, sadly no concrete evidence.
• 33:55
  So. When?
• 33:56
  When was this then? So when was Ben Eagles
• 33:58
  officially launched? We think 1922.
• 34:00
  So 1922 and it lasted until. Well, OK, so so my granddad
• 34:06
  sells the the business in the mid 1980s Ben Eagles does
• 34:11
  continue on for a little bit longer than that.
• 34:14
  I think it was White Mackay that ended up taking on ownership of
• 34:18
  it because I remember speaking to Richard Patterson, he was
• 34:21
  like, I remember those those damn ceramic eagle bottles.
• 34:25
  They were a nightmare to try and do anything with.
• 34:30
  So it continued on for a while and then and then essentially
• 34:32
  fizzles out. Probably early early 90s.
• 34:34
  So, so, so you go back then, right?
• 34:36
  So this, this brand that's lasted for so long.
• 34:40
  Now you mentioned the ceramic decanters.
• 34:42
  We've, we've talked about them, we've had them on the podcast,
• 34:45
  on the, on the last tasting that you were at, but was that the
• 34:47
  only way you could buy a bottle of Eagles or was it actually,
• 34:51
  were they just special? They were special, special
• 34:54
  editions I think launched in some of them in the 1950s, but
• 34:58
  primarily in the in the 60s and 70s when my granddad ends up
• 35:03
  getting involved and one of the reasons why they started
• 35:08
  launching the larger bottles of the ceramics.
• 35:12
  So probably the best known 1 is probably that golden eagle
• 35:16
  decanter right where the head of the eagle comes off seriously
• 35:19
  and you core the net which is super.
• 35:20
  Cool that swing top top as well. So you pop, all right, you just
• 35:26
  take the head off. It's it's flimsy as hell.
• 35:29
  And I've broken so many of them trying to do tasting events with
• 35:31
  them or I passed them around during a tasting event.
• 35:34
  I was doing one in, in a whiskey bar in, in Barcelona called La
• 35:38
  Whiskeria. And I passed around and warned
• 35:40
  them in advance. I'm like, guys, please be really
• 35:43
  careful with this. This is this is, you know, one
• 35:45
  of my last bottles of this, the head falls off and obviously I
• 35:49
  don't speak Spanish and most of the people probably didn't speak
• 35:52
  English, so they didn't listen to a word I was saying.
• 35:54
  So but they're passing the ball around and some guy just tips
• 35:56
  obviously down heads falls and smashes on the floor.
• 35:59
  So really happens more more often than I'd like.
• 36:04
  But 1950s and 1960s seems like it was like a really big time
• 36:07
  for experimentational big stuff with.
• 36:09
  Big time. Well, the the the.
• 36:11
  Swing top like technology which seemed ingenious at the time and
• 36:16
  you like the dimple bottlings they did, they had these swing
• 36:20
  tops. Oh well, they like this sort of
• 36:22
  pop off type cork things that stay on like like.
• 36:24
  It was like almost like spring operated the lake.
• 36:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone was like, this is the
• 36:28
  future. And then then it.
• 36:30
  Turned out that it was not keeping oxygen out so like.
• 36:33
  Oh, really? Yeah, a lot of them like
• 36:35
  oxidized really, really bad though.
• 36:36
  So can you still can you still buy bottle?
• 36:39
  Could you find bottles of bent Eagles and still try it to drink
• 36:42
  it Like every now and then I try and self exclude myself from the
• 36:47
  auction sites. But you know, when you do go on
• 36:50
  these auction sites, the first thing I do is I go filter, I go
• 36:53
  price looter, looter high instead of starting at the
• 36:57
  20,000 LB bottles in McAllen. But when you when you go down
• 37:01
  the way you know, you look at you find, I mean, the other day
• 37:04
  they are Johnny Walker read 1970s Bells 12 super deluxe
• 37:09
  1970s. I've we've talked about bottles
• 37:12
  of bow and things and I will somebody be able to come across
• 37:15
  a bottle of Ben Eagles. How accessible was Ben Eagles
• 37:18
  back then? So.
• 37:20
  It's quite easy to get the the ceramic empty bottles right.
• 37:24
  And there's a lot of them that pop up on, on whatever you see
• 37:28
  them on Etsy, you see them on on all sorts of different auction
• 37:31
  sites. Again, a full 1's really, really
• 37:33
  tough. Well, I filled it the cat, but
• 37:36
  what about a full Just a bottle of Bendigo's gold dust.
• 37:39
  Really cannot find them anywhere.
• 37:41
  Right, because I suppose if you were want, you would want to
• 37:43
  buy, you would want to Hoover up as much.
• 37:44
  First bidder. There was also a tight.
• 37:46
  I'll always be bidding against if one pops up but.
• 37:50
  Actually, if someone wants to really wind me up, just keep on
• 37:53
  bidding because I'll probably bid.
• 37:54
  You somewhere, but I mean, you're really relying on back of
• 37:57
  the elderly relative sideboard for that because I mean if well,
• 38:00
  it was whiskey that was probably bought and drunk and that's just
• 38:03
  it. Exactly, it is a drinking
• 38:06
  whiskey, but I'm almost quite surprised that it's not more
• 38:09
  prominent than these kind of auctions.
• 38:11
  It's because it was a. It was a pop.
• 38:13
  So my whelse pops up so. Exactly.
• 38:15
  And and I mean, there's a there's a book, the Schweppes,
• 38:19
  Schweppes going to whiskey. I don't know if you read that
• 38:21
  brilliant book and there's a a chapter on Peter Thompson's in
• 38:25
  it and it mentions Ben Eagles as being at the time, I think the I
• 38:29
  think it says the 10th best selling whiskey in in Scotland,
• 38:33
  in the UK. Wow.
• 38:33
  Yeah. So it's clearly a popular
• 38:36
  whiskey brand, whether that was a ceramics or just a normal
• 38:38
  bottle, I'm entirely sure. But really, really hard to get
• 38:42
  hold of those normal glass standard tall round Ben Eagles
• 38:45
  balls. You've passed one around.
• 38:47
  I've been at a couple of your tastings.
• 38:48
  You do pass because you like. One of the things is if you, and
• 38:51
  I'm being serious, I'm not plugging you for the sake of
• 38:53
  plugging, but genuinely because you did it for us as well.
• 38:57
  The tastings that you put on aren't there.
• 39:00
  Are there are visual concepts as well as a whiskey concept
• 39:03
  because you bring all this stuff with you, like Angus has already
• 39:07
  mentioned. Well, the most fantastic thing
• 39:08
  that you brought, we were tasting you did in Scots and
• 39:11
  Balmoral. This barrel I don't think is big
• 39:14
  enough. The chess set, well, that's
• 39:15
  which is which is just incredible.
• 39:17
  So I think it was done for an airline, wasn't it?
• 39:19
  And it was a chess piece. So every time you you, you flew
• 39:22
  with that airline, you got given one of these chess pieces and it
• 39:26
  was Scotland again. Scotland on one side, inland on
• 39:29
  the other. So it was like Mary Queen of
• 39:31
  Scots and Henry the Eighth and all that sort of stuff and just
• 39:35
  terrific. Kev.
• 39:36
  Kev Butler. And they were set, yeah.
• 39:38
  And they they were. Meant to pick up from him.
• 39:40
  Of course, each each each chess piece is is a.
• 39:44
  Had whiskey. Had.
• 39:45
  Whiskey inside, Yeah. Not the ponds, the pond.
• 39:47
  Not the pond. Brilliant.
• 39:49
  Yeah, yeah. Right.
• 39:49
  So because like there's loads of stuff you bring, you bring old
• 39:55
  samples of what pricing lists that they've also got an
• 40:00
  original Alfred Barnard book which you've which you've
• 40:02
  brought. Even little ceramic hip flash as
• 40:05
  well with kind of trout on it and they were lovely.
• 40:08
  I mean, it just goes to show you like what the marketing world
• 40:12
  was like for back then. You know, was it was it just a
• 40:17
  case of these ceramic eagle decanters were on supermarket
• 40:21
  shelves? Were they more specialist?
• 40:23
  Was it a case of you go to the supermarket, you can buy a
• 40:25
  standard bottle, you're tall round Ben Eagles with just a
• 40:28
  standard label, a screw top versus where were you picking up
• 40:31
  the the eagle decanter versus where were you picking up the
• 40:35
  the tall rounds? Probably, probably not
• 40:38
  supermarkets. I mean, supermarkets as we know
• 40:41
  them still wouldn't have really existed back then.
• 40:43
  Of course, what I do know is that Peter Thompson's as a
• 40:48
  business, we're very focused on the entree as in supplying bars
• 40:53
  and and pubs, restaurants, hotels all around the country.
• 40:56
  That was always the predominant part of the business because the
• 41:00
  business, while being a whiskey blender, was still predominantly
• 41:03
  that of being a wholesaler. And that's why we've got these
• 41:05
  old price lists, which are not just been eagles on them, but
• 41:09
  actually wines from all across Europe.
• 41:12
  But also, you know, there's Tunisian wine on it.
• 41:14
  There's there's you could Slavian wine, there's all sorts
• 41:17
  of different spirit types. So the predominant business was
• 41:20
  being a wholesaler, supplying pops, hotels, restaurants and
• 41:25
  probably other shops as well. And was that, was Ben Eagles the
• 41:29
  only Scotch whiskey brand you're talking about wine, but was
• 41:34
  there, was there other, did they work with other distilleries?
• 41:36
  Did they work with other brands and things like that as well?
• 41:38
  Well. Ben Eagles.
• 41:39
  Ben Eagles was one of one of a couple proprietary brands.
• 41:42
  So the other one or the big one would have been Old Perth, which
• 41:45
  obviously a lot of risky people know.
• 41:47
  So Perth was created by the family, we think probably 1950s.
• 41:52
  So you guys started Old Perth? Yeah, right.
• 41:55
  OK, because we've had to. We did well, we did the taste
• 41:57
  with Tam Kuffler a few yeah, a few weeks or a few months ago
• 42:01
  now. A couple months ago back, yeah.
• 42:03
  So we had old Perth on there and.
• 42:05
  It's brilliant, Yeah. I think, I think it's one of the
• 42:06
  best value for money trams out there.
• 42:08
  I think it's it's absolute quality.
• 42:10
  Yeah, it is. Yeah.
• 42:11
  And you could easily sit there and go.
• 42:12
  It's never been the same since our family let it go.
• 42:15
  But but it just goes to show like I think this is the thing
• 42:18
  about whiskey and custodianship and stuff like that as well is
• 42:21
  that, you know, there are brands that have moved around and.
• 42:25
  Look, there are absolutely. How many distillery own?
• 42:27
  How many distilleries are still owned by the original people in
• 42:30
  Scotland? You'll probably look at Glenn
• 42:31
  Fartless and Glenfiddich Balvin. You know William Grant.
• 42:34
  And that's it. You can be, you know, all you
• 42:35
  need to do is go on the Wikipedia page of any long
• 42:39
  established distillery and it'll be.
• 42:40
  It was owned by so and so. It was sold by so and so.
• 42:42
  So and so bought it. It was then sold by this
• 42:44
  company, that company, that company and it's usually 5 or 6
• 42:47
  different sales and from the last 100 and. 50 and you're
• 42:50
  looking at standing on the shoulders of giants and stuff
• 42:52
  like that. If you, if you're a, if you're a
• 42:54
  company that buys another brand, another whiskey distiller and
• 42:59
  whatever, you've got to look at and go, well, use the Morrison
• 43:02
  family for an example, as Morrison's, the Morrison's
• 43:04
  bought, well, the Borrison's own Bulmore and then was it sold it
• 43:08
  to Santori Santori. So again, you know, Santori
• 43:13
  Santori have to stick to the principles of what Bulmore is to
• 43:16
  make Bulmore what it is. All right, OK, maybe they can
• 43:19
  add new things to grow that brand and push it into a bigger
• 43:23
  global market. Maybe that's what they've done.
• 43:25
  But at the same time, maybe, and who knows, someone might be
• 43:29
  buying, someone might buy more of Santori in a few years time
• 43:33
  and they have to carry that legacy on.
• 43:35
  So there is always this element of the distilleries and the
• 43:38
  brands as such will always stay there.
• 43:39
  But there's a responsibility of the person who owns that brand
• 43:42
  to carry on the legacy of and basically become a custodian of
• 43:45
  that whiskey. Brand yeah, the only to story I
• 43:48
  would really think of that we didn't kind of follow that route
• 43:52
  would maybe be Ben Romac like mothballed in 88 in the 1883 and
• 43:57
  when it reopened, I think they went for a completely different
• 44:00
  style. Yeah, I did reopen near 30 years
• 44:04
  after it started. But you mean you're retaining,
• 44:08
  you're retaining a name and a brand.
• 44:09
  And for for the even the idea of having something from the 1950s
• 44:14
  it disappearing and resurging the brand is the brand is still
• 44:18
  so prevalent today. Yeah.
• 44:20
  And like old Perth is an attractive, like an attractive
• 44:23
  purchase because of the name in a big part of it as well.
• 44:27
  As well. The thing you can do right going
• 44:31
  down a rabbit hole you. Look at the Point talk about the
• 44:34
  Glen. Gear Wow, let's come back.
• 44:36
  I'll make a very quick something like Glen Alec as well, which
• 44:39
  didn't have a brand really. I mean it was a brand that did
• 44:42
  exist. Everyone knew very good point,
• 44:44
  but bought by Billy Walker and he just turned it completely
• 44:48
  into, you know, his own image, right and and completely changed
• 44:52
  the process completely changed out.
• 44:53
  But but again, that was taken over distiller.
• 44:56
  It didn't really have a brand creating.
• 44:59
  Something. Yeah.
• 44:59
  But the next person who takes on the next person who fills, well,
• 45:02
  he's the next person that fills Billy Walker.
• 45:03
  Like you even look. At it you can you can.
• 45:05
  You can make or break brands I suppose.
• 45:07
  Like Ian McLeod, distillers are a good example with Rosebank and
• 45:09
  Tam do. Yeah, in the sense that you
• 45:12
  know, they. Want to pay homage to the
• 45:14
  history of it and they want to do that, yeah.
• 45:17
  Rosebank, Rosebank, you know, cloud distillers have carried on
• 45:20
  the same, they've carried on the same cask, the same wood
• 45:24
  management program that Tam do had when it was owned by
• 45:27
  Highland Distillers, which was Edgington, which, you know, so
• 45:31
  basically Tam Du has the same wood management program as
• 45:34
  McAllen because it used to have the same wood management.
• 45:37
  It would have been very easy for Ian MacLeod distillers to come
• 45:39
  in and go how much for a cask of whiskey?
• 45:43
  How much for a cask of Sherry seasoned wood coming over?
• 45:46
  No, no, we can go to another place and get it for cheaper
• 45:48
  from there. And that would have then tainted
• 45:51
  the, the, the product that would have tainted the name and Tam
• 45:54
  Du, but they carried that on. Same with Rosebank Distillery.
• 45:57
  They've made a commitment to saying spirit style has to be
• 46:00
  exactly the same the way that we do it and not by saying hang on
• 46:03
  a minute. You speak to them and you hear
• 46:05
  them saying at Rosebank and say if we were to make this
• 46:07
  distillery from scratch, it would make absolutely no sense
• 46:10
  to have three cells set up the way that we've had them set up.
• 46:13
  But that is our commitment to having the to try and create
• 46:16
  that because we're we're not, we're taking on Rosebank as a
• 46:19
  brand and we have to try and recreate what it was back then.
• 46:23
  Just like when when the Morrison family took on the old Perth,
• 46:26
  they would have looked at it and gone well.
• 46:27
  What about James Edie? They they have their blend
• 46:30
  whiskey from the 1920s. I forget they is it blend X or X
• 46:35
  blend? Yeah, I think so.
• 46:37
  Don't. Know an awful lot about this.
• 46:38
  So you're on your own here? Trump would.
• 46:40
  Have been from the 1920s when they kind of like discontinued
• 46:43
  it and then they tried, they brought it back.
• 46:46
  And I think they have gone to example bottles and they have.
• 46:49
  But most of the distilleries that would have been made of and
• 46:53
  no longer existing. So it's a modern incarnation of
• 46:57
  the past and more toward guided towards a pilot that they think
• 47:00
  would make sense in the modern. And I think I do think
• 47:04
  consortium of spirit, which is essentially kind of what you're
• 47:08
  by the sense of what your dad has done.
• 47:09
  He's been a custodian to casks that your family's owned for a
• 47:12
  very long period of time. But you are now guiding that to
• 47:16
  a market that you think it would work for a pallet.
• 47:17
  Yeah. And I think that's.
• 47:18
  What a custodian does effectively, it's interesting
• 47:20
  because just doing the same thing over again.
• 47:22
  The cast that your grandfather laid down were never intended to
• 47:25
  be bottled a single cast. They were to be blended.
• 47:29
  Yeah. So actually, what you've done is
• 47:31
  taken. I mean, this is different.
• 47:34
  We're talking about brands, but you've taken something and gone,
• 47:36
  you know what? We're actually going to do
• 47:38
  something completely different than intentional ever was for
• 47:40
  these. Guys, well, that's always the
• 47:41
  danger of being a custodian is once you're you're carrying the
• 47:45
  you're carrying the torch. So like, go back to your
• 47:47
  episode, go back to your your point, Chuck, you know, yeah,
• 47:51
  James Edie is trying to do something to carry on a process.
• 47:55
  But at the same time, there has to be a logic where they go,
• 47:57
  well, look, we can't do what we, we can't do what they were doing
• 48:01
  in the 1920s because it's just not feasible.
• 48:03
  But we still have to carry the brand to try and do what we're
• 48:07
  doing. But we have to do it in a new
• 48:09
  way. But at the same time, that's it.
• 48:11
  When you're a, when you, when you're a custodian or something,
• 48:14
  it falls on your shoulders if you mess it up.
• 48:16
  Yeah, yeah. You know.
• 48:18
  Well, this is it. If you want to do something
• 48:19
  radical, you better get it right, because otherwise.
• 48:22
  And that, yeah, go I. Really like the Glenn.
• 48:24
  Gear, right? Go back to the Glenn gear.
• 48:25
  Let's talk about the Glenn Gearies.
• 48:27
  In this case, it seems great. First time.
• 48:29
  First time I've probably tried it.
• 48:31
  Yeah, my quick, quick top line opinion having not.
• 48:37
  Tried so much. So a little it's 55.76 according
• 48:42
  to this feels quite punchy. Yeah, but not in a not in a
• 48:46
  negative way. I don't think it's a lot of
• 48:48
  share influence. I mean, if people, if people
• 48:50
  like a proper Sherry bomb whiskey, you're not going to be
• 48:53
  disappointed. That is, but it is terrific.
• 48:55
  I really like I put a bit of water in it and I I.
• 48:58
  Was yeah, but what made a big difference?
• 49:00
  This is good in the sense of getting, I mean, we're going
• 49:03
  backwards and forwards here, but this is we are long because
• 49:05
  we've had a few drama, but but this is good because it gets an
• 49:08
  insight into the process here. Finn because, Right.
• 49:11
  So starting point. Yeah, please.
• 49:14
  That going Kinch is a cracker, by the way.
• 49:15
  Yeah, it's terrific. Iron brew in the nose.
• 49:19
  Together. So when you're.
• 49:21
  Yeah. You're wanker tasting.
• 49:22
  There you go. But the process that we're
• 49:24
  talking here, they're going, we're fast forwarding a lot, but
• 49:26
  we'll jump back the process for you, right?
• 49:30
  You've got a sample here. So you've picked this sample
• 49:32
  which is very, very, very nice. You've then got you've got to
• 49:35
  work out, is this good enough to go in a bottle, first of all,
• 49:39
  yeah. When do you start thinking about
• 49:40
  the price point or something like this?
• 49:45
  Often before, probably a lot of the time before I'm even looking
• 49:49
  at let's say it's purchasing A cask, right?
• 49:53
  I'm not. I'm not going to.
• 49:55
  I'm probably not going to bother requesting A brokers or whoever
• 50:00
  sends me a sample if I know the price just isn't going to work.
• 50:03
  So is this one of your casters? It's a castle you have.
• 50:05
  Access to this is one I've got access to.
• 50:08
  I know the price works. It's on hold for me.
• 50:14
  If I want it, I can purchase it and I can have it bottled by
• 50:17
  June. Because this is a fascinating
• 50:18
  insight into the world of independent Ballers.
• 50:21
  Quick question then. I'm not going to hold you to
• 50:23
  pounds, pennies and shillings, but roughly speaking for a 19
• 50:26
  year old Glen Geary single cast because Scott Sherry about
• 50:29
  55.76% roughly. Where does that set in the
• 50:34
  market right now on the price scale?
• 50:35
  What will people roughly be looking?
• 50:37
  At for us it will be certainly over hundreds, but I would hope
• 50:42
  under 150. Right.
• 50:43
  OK, Yeah, because and you know that because that's another
• 50:46
  interesting where the industry is right now.
• 50:49
  We've spoken to a lot of people within the industry about how
• 50:53
  times are tough and it's seen that knock on effect.
• 50:55
  We've had people say, listen, everything's OK.
• 50:58
  You know, we've had people say, well, we've heard people talking
• 51:02
  about somebody said fish where the fish where the fishes are.
• 51:07
  Yeah. And then they asked her, well,
• 51:08
  where are the fishes like, well, that's a good question.
• 51:10
  Yeah. We've had other people say,
• 51:12
  well, look, if you have a good market then you should be fine
• 51:16
  because if you just go into that good market, that's OK.
• 51:20
  So you're we've heard people saying that it's never been as
• 51:23
  good as that it has been for getting access to cash and
• 51:26
  whiskey. Right now, it's a buyer's
• 51:27
  market. I would agree with that.
• 51:29
  Yeah, right. So in terms of you, when you're
• 51:32
  looking at putting whiskey out there, are you saying you've got
• 51:36
  to keep your prices at a very good competitive?
• 51:37
  I mean, you would always keep them at a competitive level, but
• 51:40
  are you saying you have to really be quite potful now on
• 51:43
  with the pricing of your whiskey?
• 51:44
  I think, I think what I've learned, so we've we launched
• 51:47
  the brand back in 2022, right? Yeah.
• 51:50
  I think we've always been probably one of the slightly
• 51:53
  more expensive independent offers that probably comes down
• 51:55
  an element to the to the packaging that's involved in it.
• 52:00
  But it's not held us back in any way.
• 52:04
  I think as long as your quality is goods, I think as long as
• 52:07
  your your presentation, not just off the bottle but off the story
• 52:11
  of the brand is good and the way in which you sell your whiskey
• 52:13
  and get your story across the people, I think you can you can
• 52:17
  justify your risk of being a certain price point.
• 52:19
  You're right. It is 100% more competitive now
• 52:23
  because you do get some independent bottlers who have
• 52:26
  dramatically dropped their pricing in the last couple of
• 52:29
  years. There's some that are, I don't
• 52:31
  understand how they get whiskey out the prices they do.
• 52:36
  So you've got to to bear that in mind.
• 52:37
  Now, some markets care about certain things more than others.
• 52:42
  German, Northern European markets tend to be very, very
• 52:44
  price focused about, you know, it's established whiskey
• 52:49
  drinkers who really know what independent bottlings are.
• 52:52
  And they're probably not so driven by brand and story, but
• 52:55
  they're driven by what's in the bottle, what's the price of it.
• 52:59
  OK. There's other markets we look at
• 53:00
  and the the fine single cask independent bottling WW more
• 53:07
  interesting, it might be nearer to them.
• 53:09
  There might be something that's a bit unusual for the market.
• 53:12
  And in those markets they want this kind of offering to be a
• 53:17
  premium offering because maybe if they're an importer of this
• 53:20
  type of product, they're competing against another
• 53:23
  importer who is an importer of your standard brands.
• 53:26
  They think well, we need to compete against them.
• 53:29
  So how we want to have a premium offering, we don't want to just
• 53:31
  try and match them on price and have a different offering.
• 53:34
  It's okay. How do we How do we really show
• 53:38
  that something is worth that extra?
• 53:39
  Little bit of money, rather battle of margins is a battle of
• 53:42
  quality product. I would say so.
• 53:44
  Well, we're such small quantities that we don't do a
• 53:47
  lot of bottlings at all. And so it is genuinely quality
• 53:52
  over quantity. That's the story.
• 53:55
  I just maybe because you were talking about the ceramic, but I
• 53:57
  just like know it's the quirks. The stopper let's talk about the
• 54:01
  bottle right because I want to carry on this train trade of
• 54:04
  thought here right so because this is where the debate really
• 54:08
  comes down to is whiskey is we've we've spoken about this
• 54:12
  before whiskey is a craft OK, but obviously.
• 54:16
  Also, Ross is going to be so jealous of this playing kitchen.
• 54:19
  Oh, good. We like it.
• 54:20
  It's an absolute banger. Yeah.
• 54:21
  Yeah. But WW is a craft right now.
• 54:24
  You've got somebody like powerhouses like Diageo and
• 54:26
  Perno that that that craft is more of a sort of manual.
• 54:30
  When does it range from being crafted, manufacturer and stuff
• 54:33
  like that. I would still argue that, you
• 54:36
  know, we had Emma Walker on that.
• 54:37
  What were Emma Walker on the podcast and she talked about the
• 54:40
  fact that Diageo, we'll still look at a distillery not based
• 54:46
  on size and output, but also on quality of liquid and what they
• 54:49
  can provide and flavour profile. That's one thing, but at the
• 54:52
  same time, when you are producing en masse, it feels
• 54:55
  less of craft. So when you go further down the
• 54:57
  chain, you've got your big distilleries, you've got your
• 55:00
  smaller distilleries, you've got your independent distilleries,
• 55:02
  you've got new distilleries, then you go into the independent
• 55:04
  bottler margin. And that's when it really does
• 55:07
  start to feel like craft. But at the same time, you have
• 55:11
  to think about marketing. You have to think about what
• 55:14
  your brand feels like. You have to think about how and
• 55:16
  when you deal with a craft product marketing can some
• 55:19
  things feel like a dirty word, like you've already mentioned
• 55:22
  that branding and stuff like that.
• 55:23
  You've got, you've got to wear 2 hats.
• 55:25
  You've got to wear the hat of the guy that goes, I'm going to
• 55:28
  put the best possible liquid flavor first, flavor first all
• 55:31
  the time. Put good, good whiskey into
• 55:33
  glass. But you've also got to then
• 55:35
  create an experience or somebody.
• 55:36
  And when you look at the bottle that you talked about, Chuck's
• 55:39
  mentioned ceramic stoppers, I mean, how many sides has your
• 55:44
  bottle got now? Well.
• 55:45
  Nine sides. Yeah, we've not got, we've not
• 55:47
  got a baby fin. Yeah.
• 55:48
  On the way, No. I was going to say Finn.
• 55:50
  Poor baby. Finn, if he ever gets involved
• 55:51
  in the company, has got an expensive rebrand on his job.
• 55:54
  Wow. Yeah, he's got to find the 10th
• 55:55
  side for this. Oh, isn't.
• 55:56
  It it'll be a lot easier though, because at the moment it's not
• 55:59
  not an equal sized. Oh yes, it'll.
• 56:03
  Be like 1010 easier. 10s easier. So actually you need to say I.
• 56:08
  Get a move. On if there's if there's one guy
• 56:10
  who can talk to us about putting labels on bottles and how much
• 56:14
  of a nightmare it is. Chuck.
• 56:15
  Chuck's a man, no? These are these are tricky.
• 56:20
  One, I like that the bossing helps with the lower label.
• 56:22
  Which, yeah. That's a bit of a guide to where
• 56:25
  to. Put the label right know for a
• 56:27
  fact that like trying to get a jig for this is an absolute
• 56:30
  nightmare and neck tabs and could I already see that's you
• 56:33
  know that's not straight man Yeah, it's done that.
• 56:36
  But it's kind of crafted. Though, well, so so fine, you've
• 56:39
  made it. You've.
• 56:39
  Made it. I do have to say like, I'm not,
• 56:43
  I'm not been. I've drank quite a few Finn
• 56:45
  Thompson the last year. But I'm really surprised to you
• 56:48
  say that it started back up in 2022 and it might be because of
• 56:52
  the bottle. This feels like something I
• 56:54
  would have seen for the last 20 years.
• 56:56
  Yeah, I really, really established on the.
• 56:57
  Market it's a premium looking bottle and.
• 57:00
  Actually a bottle we mentioned there was, there was, there was
• 57:04
  a question on a previous podcast, somebody asked what
• 57:08
  bottle would you use to fight off a bear?
• 57:11
  And this is one of the and this was definitely mentioned in the
• 57:14
  conversation because of, I mean, that's a thick we with a thick
• 57:18
  stop that could do some damage. But but Finn, you've made a
• 57:20
  conscious, you've made a conscious decision.
• 57:22
  Now when it comes this is a bit that people don't understand
• 57:25
  when depending dollars is the other costs, right.
• 57:28
  I've I've been guilty of it myself.
• 57:30
  You speak to somebody maybe has a bit of access to something and
• 57:34
  they'll go, oh, you can get a cask of this for this price and
• 57:38
  you almost go take my money, right.
• 57:41
  I'm looking at I'm trying to sell my car and go, what was it?
• 57:45
  It was Gregor Hannah, who famously told us in the podcast
• 57:48
  to get him to get himself going for Lady of the glad he sold his
• 57:51
  car. That's right by his first cask.
• 57:53
  And I must admit, when you especially nowadays when you see
• 57:57
  some of the whiskey that's being on offer, you like to yourself
• 57:59
  tell you what, we could we could get the bus for six months.
• 58:04
  But there's the element of buying the cast, the first step.
• 58:07
  Yeah, suddenly picking a bottle, yeah.
• 58:10
  And that's, this is when your marketing head has to come on
• 58:13
  because, and there's nothing wrong with it because there's
• 58:15
  plenty of people that go down just the tall round route.
• 58:18
  But at the same time, you this is this this bottle that you've
• 58:21
  picked here, this will be, this was a, is it a bespoke bottle
• 58:24
  bottle so that that adds cost on to everything.
• 58:28
  Yeah, right. Then a ceramic stopper instead
• 58:29
  of just going with a standard cork with or a screw top.
• 58:32
  Even that adds cost every single bit of.
• 58:35
  You've got 4 labels. Well, that's what I mean, every
• 58:38
  bit. Plus the damn tubes.
• 58:39
  As well everything of every bit of paper that you see on on a
• 58:43
  bottle. The more I look at that bottle,
• 58:44
  the more stress I get. Yeah, exactly.
• 58:46
  But this is, but This is why what you're saying is it's a
• 58:49
  thick glass as well. So there's a premium feel around
• 58:52
  it. So this is an, this is a
• 58:53
  conscious decision that you've made to go right.
• 58:57
  It's we're going down that route.
• 58:59
  And when you speak about importers and what people are
• 59:01
  looking for. So this is where the balance
• 59:03
  really comes in is bouncing quality of liquid that matches
• 59:07
  up with the quality of experience that the drinkers
• 59:09
  getting from start to finish. Yeah.
• 59:11
  I think it probably comes down to two reasons why we've gone
• 59:16
  down this route. One is more in the commercial
• 59:19
  side because I think there is business sense in doing it.
• 59:21
  But I think the, the primary reason why we've spent a lot of
• 59:26
  time and a lot of effort and, and probably spent a little bit
• 59:29
  extra money on doing it is this is a family, a family project.
• 59:33
  I've got 8 generations before me who've all been involved in the
• 59:37
  whiskey industry, who've all done, you know, incredible
• 59:40
  things. And I'm the one who's taken it
• 59:42
  on my shoulders to go and restart it all.
• 59:45
  And if I'd done a shitty job of it, I'd have felt like I've, you
• 59:49
  know, I've let the whole family down to some extent, right?
• 59:53
  I don't press. So no press.
• 59:55
  You know this, this is not, it's not purely just a business
• 59:59
  decision. There's an element of creating
• 1:00:01
  something that the family can be proud of, bringing a bottle that
• 1:00:04
  is genuinely good looking. It's a bottle that I like.
• 1:00:08
  It's something that if we, if we start looking at the commercial
• 1:00:11
  angle of it, my criticism, if you like, of, of independent
• 1:00:17
  bottling has been in the past that it's not something that is
• 1:00:21
  appealing to the non whiskey drinker a lot.
• 1:00:24
  I think, I think there's some amazing labels and, and more
• 1:00:27
  recently there's been a lot more cooler stuff that's happened and
• 1:00:30
  well, it's different angles how it can go down.
• 1:00:32
  Yeah. I mean, I would say there's
• 1:00:33
  probably a temptation from some. And again, this isn't a
• 1:00:36
  criticism, but there's probably a temptation from some
• 1:00:39
  independent bottlers to go down the kind of quirky route when it
• 1:00:41
  comes to bottles, when it comes to labels, that side of thing.
• 1:00:45
  Well, as a, as a consumer, I would have been drawn more to
• 1:00:48
  like, like, and this is, again, I'll be honest with you, and we
• 1:00:53
  always approach this Angus, we never forget our roots of this.
• 1:00:56
  We're 2 1/2 years ago before we started this podcast, we were
• 1:00:59
  the very generic whiskey consumer that didn't know an
• 1:01:02
  awful lot. I mean, I didn't know about
• 1:01:04
  independent bottlers, but I remember seeing a cartoon label
• 1:01:08
  would have put me off a whiskey bottle because I would have
• 1:01:11
  gone. What are they doing?
• 1:01:12
  This is whiskey. It shouldn't be a cartoon
• 1:01:14
  bottle. It should be serious.
• 1:01:16
  And this is where. What I would say as well as if
• 1:01:18
  it was particularly where, you know, like you said, there's
• 1:01:20
  plenty of brands that do it. So we're not singling anybody
• 1:01:22
  out. But a cartoon label, for
• 1:01:24
  example, you could have that not actually realize the brand.
• 1:01:29
  You know, if you just pick that in a bar, I'll have one of those
• 1:01:32
  not actually realize the brand it's for.
• 1:01:34
  And then if you saw one of the other whiskeys, you wouldn't
• 1:01:37
  actually know it was the same brand as the brand you'd.
• 1:01:38
  Yeah, there's a bit of school, yeah.
• 1:01:40
  So there is, there is like there always is a benefit to having
• 1:01:45
  that kind of. You need the consistent
• 1:01:48
  breathing grounding points of where you can establish.
• 1:01:50
  Well, I mean, the Thompson Brothers are the example I'll
• 1:01:52
  use and I'll be honest with you, like 2 1/2 years ago, three
• 1:01:56
  years ago, the Thompson brothers labeling would have put me right
• 1:01:59
  off their product, sure, because I would have gone, what are
• 1:02:02
  these guys doing? But then, ironically, the change
• 1:02:06
  was the Tesco Highland. The blend.
• 1:02:09
  The blend, yeah, the the branding of that put me onto
• 1:02:13
  them because I but my mind had. Because you like Tesco value
• 1:02:16
  stuff. From that, but it was just what
• 1:02:18
  my mind had been opened a little bit more to whiskey.
• 1:02:20
  So suddenly seeing that and going, that's funny, who are
• 1:02:23
  they? What are they doing?
• 1:02:24
  And then you realize that, by the way, these guys aren't
• 1:02:27
  gimmicks. Like they're not putting out
• 1:02:28
  gimmicky whiskey. They're putting out very, very
• 1:02:30
  good whiskey. But they're going down a
• 1:02:32
  completely different route. But there'll be other people
• 1:02:34
  that go. They are.
• 1:02:35
  Doing kind of some trolley things in between.
• 1:02:37
  Us they are but I but I but what they're but it comes down to the
• 1:02:41
  but we know Chuck from being up there.
• 1:02:42
  The trust factor is the most important thing and it doesn't
• 1:02:45
  matter whether they, I mean, bottom line is the Thompson
• 1:02:48
  brothers have proved the point that they could put a black
• 1:02:50
  bottle with a white question mark on it and they can sell.
• 1:02:54
  People are buying, people are buying their whiskey without
• 1:02:56
  even knowing why is because they trust them so much.
• 1:02:58
  So there's that element of trust.
• 1:02:59
  But what I would say is that there still is a market of
• 1:03:02
  people that want to see and having what you could class as a
• 1:03:06
  bottle that definitely stands out on the shelf will go.
• 1:03:09
  I see that that's a Finn Thompson bottle.
• 1:03:11
  I trust that I know what they've got in there.
• 1:03:13
  But also actually I'm not actually scared to pay a little
• 1:03:15
  bit more money because of. The actually, I wouldn't say
• 1:03:18
  Graham it's so. I mean, it is much what you
• 1:03:20
  would see on the thing, but we know a lot of whiskey has bought
• 1:03:23
  as a gift. If you're buying a Finn Thompson
• 1:03:27
  bottle, I think the bottle itself does a lot of the
• 1:03:31
  talking. Yeah.
• 1:03:32
  So whereas I think, for example, an independent bottler that has
• 1:03:36
  a cartoon label, you might buy that for someone.
• 1:03:39
  You might have to say, by the way, this is actually really,
• 1:03:42
  really good whiskey. I'm giving you just try it and
• 1:03:46
  you'll see. Whereas if you give a gift in a
• 1:03:49
  bottle like this, so you almost it's like right, well, let's I
• 1:03:53
  know as a. Previous well, that's a lot of
• 1:03:55
  it. A lot of it's.
• 1:03:56
  Come down from from probably my experience of working with
• 1:03:58
  retailers, right, because I always maintain the retailers
• 1:04:01
  are the ones that really understand consumer habits
• 1:04:03
  better than than anyone. I'm not really selling that many
• 1:04:06
  bottles direct to consumer. I work with as many retailers as
• 1:04:10
  possible who are essentially my brand ambassadors and had done
• 1:04:14
  in all my kind of previous jobs as well.
• 1:04:16
  So in creating this, it was drawing upon the, the, the
• 1:04:20
  thoughts of previous retailers I've worked with right to, to,
• 1:04:24
  to get their input on, you know, what do people actually want?
• 1:04:27
  And every, every retailer is different by the way, they've
• 1:04:30
  all have different opinions. You know, one of our, one of our
• 1:04:33
  great customers is the whiskey trail on the Royal Mail, right?
• 1:04:37
  Yep, which is, you know, a tourist hotspot.
• 1:04:40
  You you guys won't go in there to to go buy your.
• 1:04:43
  Nestle the counter. Nestle the Cantor, right?
• 1:04:46
  But we. We sell a hell of a lot with,
• 1:04:50
  well, the, well, the green Welley up at the Green Welley up
• 1:04:53
  in Windrum. We were yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:54
  They're 50 year old Inver Gordon up there.
• 1:04:56
  We saw it. We saw in the weight of the
• 1:04:58
  toilets. Yeah.
• 1:04:59
  Other exclusive bottling as well.
• 1:05:01
  A. Green massive exclusive bottling
• 1:05:02
  for them. But then sorry.
• 1:05:04
  So you know, I, I even remember asking them about I'm having
• 1:05:08
  this dilemma at the moment about tubes or no tubes.
• 1:05:11
  Yeah, yeah. And I remember asking the the
• 1:05:13
  guy that runs the shop and, and, and he basically said, don't you
• 1:05:16
  dare get rid of those tubes because every single person
• 1:05:20
  who's buying a bottle here is buying your bottles because they
• 1:05:22
  look amazing. They're gifts for people back in
• 1:05:25
  America or experienced, and we want.
• 1:05:28
  The Tube isn't that and I have to admit I've been to a few
• 1:05:32
  places, a few distilleries or a few shops, probably bored
• 1:05:35
  distilleries, one or two where they've given it's an optional,
• 1:05:39
  the Tube is optional. I've always gone for the Tube
• 1:05:41
  because, you know, like, why not love, you know?
• 1:05:46
  Well, well, I don't know why I can't.
• 1:05:48
  Explain it. That's it.
• 1:05:51
  But you pay, do you get you pay extra for it?
• 1:05:52
  No, no, right. So.
• 1:05:54
  He sometimes said Or do you want Yeah, tube.
• 1:05:56
  I think at least your. Bells can be long, you know.
• 1:05:58
  At least twice there's been an optional tube and I've gone,
• 1:06:01
  yeah, no, I'll take the tube because I'll be a tube not to,
• 1:06:03
  because it'd be a tube not to. But if you're keeping it at home
• 1:06:06
  and you might not open that bottle.
• 1:06:08
  For a wee while, but it's good to, it's good to just have it.
• 1:06:11
  We're about to move into so this Quinn can't you that you're
• 1:06:14
  trying right? Yes, Yeah, probably the first
• 1:06:16
  one we've done without a tube as a as a concrete.
• 1:06:18
  Yeah, right, truck. What were you going to say
• 1:06:20
  there? Sorry.
• 1:06:22
  We have been talking about the glass for a really long time.
• 1:06:25
  Actually, it's really hard actually.
• 1:06:26
  One thing, and then I'm not gonna mention glass anymore.
• 1:06:31
  This is the kind of bottle that I would get as a gift.
• 1:06:35
  Absolutely. See through the whiskey really
• 1:06:37
  quick because it's everything we've had so far.
• 1:06:39
  Tastes great. And then that would then become
• 1:06:41
  an Infinity bottle in my house. Yeah, like that.
• 1:06:43
  Like, yeah, there's no way I'm throwing that bottle.
• 1:06:46
  Away. Well, remember when we had when
• 1:06:47
  we talked about the Hirak well. The Hirak is the one the Hirak.
• 1:06:52
  But we said, I said the congratulations on creating like
• 1:06:55
  light stacks. The Hirak is the one bottle that
• 1:07:00
  I've bought and I've not chucked the bottle and I've stuck a
• 1:07:02
  candle in it Yeah and I can't do that with every whiskey bottle
• 1:07:05
  but here actually one where you've gone OK, we'll.
• 1:07:07
  Stick a candle. What I'll say is so somewhere
• 1:07:10
  Finn, I've been at a few tastings.
• 1:07:12
  You've hosted one for us in the bottle spotlight now Was it the
• 1:07:15
  Glasgow? Was it a Glasgow 5 year old?
• 1:07:17
  I Glasgow 5 year old. Yeah, really, really, really
• 1:07:18
  nice whiskey. Now the interesting thing here,
• 1:07:20
  right, How much pressure I You're the only person I've ever
• 1:07:24
  been on a tasting with. I've ever had a tasting where
• 1:07:27
  you stuck 250 year old whiskies on the line up right now that is
• 1:07:32
  mental. That was very special.
• 1:07:34
  That is a mental but but one of the first drams that we, I think
• 1:07:38
  it was the first. Drama that would have been the
• 1:07:39
  Inver Gordon yeah, was a. 50 year old Inver Gordon and the
• 1:07:42
  last drama that we had was a 50 year old Glenn Levitt, right?
• 1:07:48
  So how does this work for you as an independent bottler?
• 1:07:51
  Where? And I'll be honest, right?
• 1:07:53
  I'll be honest, if I see a Finn Thompson whiskey bottle, I
• 1:07:57
  accept this. I expect now to see a hefty age
• 1:08:00
  on it. Right, because I associate Finn
• 1:08:04
  Thompson. We've had the 33 year old Tam,
• 1:08:06
  the villain from that's. Just because you're a spoiled.
• 1:08:09
  Boss no, no, it's not that I'm spoiled.
• 1:08:11
  It's just it's but how difficult is it as an independent bottler
• 1:08:15
  where on one end of the spec. Now we've spoken to so when we
• 1:08:17
  had Andrew Lenny on the podcast from White Mackay, we've had
• 1:08:21
  when we spoke to Tim Walker, Sure.
• 1:08:23
  You know, head of luxury for on trade in Scotland is how
• 1:08:27
  difficult is it where you've got like Tim Walker as an example,
• 1:08:31
  you've got Glenn Fedec 12 that sits on the supermarket shelf,
• 1:08:35
  right? And then at the other end of the
• 1:08:37
  spectrum, you've got like the Chateau, the grand Chateau 31
• 1:08:42
  empty bottle. We finished it on the pod by the
• 1:08:43
  way, but that's thousands of pounds worth of whiskey, right?
• 1:08:48
  So when you have on one end of the spectrum a drum that every
• 1:08:52
  single person can pick up in the supermarket, how do you then
• 1:08:55
  convince people that it's luxury?
• 1:08:56
  So how do you go? How can you have, and I think
• 1:08:58
  it's great that you can, but how can you put a 5 year old whiskey
• 1:09:03
  in here and sell it to people at the same time as put a 50 year
• 1:09:07
  old whiskey in there and sell it to people?
• 1:09:08
  And do you find that difficult where you've always got to look
• 1:09:11
  at, OK, that's a 12 year old Glenn Kinchy and by the way, an
• 1:09:15
  amazing 12 year old Glenn Kinchy.
• 1:09:17
  But when I see that in a thin question, no, I'm sorry, I just
• 1:09:22
  see that in a bottle and I expect to see that as a 22 year
• 1:09:24
  old Glenn Kinchy. Do you know what I mean?
• 1:09:26
  Yeah, I think you'd be surprised by what people buy more often
• 1:09:32
  than us. We are younger expressions sell
• 1:09:34
  out far quicker than our other expressions, without a doubt.
• 1:09:38
  Because ultimately, you know, not everyone can afford the 50
• 1:09:43
  old Glenn Liver or even A50 old Inver Gordon, right?
• 1:09:45
  They're expensive whiskies. I think, I think that the brand
• 1:09:48
  is to some extent built from the base level up.
• 1:09:52
  It was probably my expectation the other way coming into
• 1:09:56
  launching the brand where we certainly thought you use these
• 1:09:59
  high, higher end whiskeys as the Halo effect and then you know,
• 1:10:04
  people end up buying the younger ones.
• 1:10:05
  I actually think it's worked the other way around.
• 1:10:07
  We've had loads of people who've tried a Finn Thompson whiskey
• 1:10:09
  for the first time being the Glasgow 5 year old.
• 1:10:12
  And then it's almost just a, a natural progression up the way
• 1:10:16
  where where you want to try that next one.
• 1:10:18
  You think, Oh well, he's got a N British 34 year old.
• 1:10:21
  So I've never spent £120 in a bottle of whiskey before, but
• 1:10:25
  I'm going to try it because I enjoyed the five year old.
• 1:10:27
  So I actually think it's worked the other way around.
• 1:10:29
  And the bottle. The bottle works across both
• 1:10:34
  both kind of brackets. It does.
• 1:10:36
  Can I ask? Can I ask with the liquid inside
• 1:10:37
  of these bottles like this just haven't we've been having the
• 1:10:42
  stosia. Is this like whiskey that you've
• 1:10:44
  then finished yourself? That's.
• 1:10:46
  Finished by me, yeah. Yeah, because that's class.
• 1:10:48
  That's super tasty. It's quite like it's 12 years
• 1:10:52
  old, but we'd almost say that's quite delicate for a stosia as
• 1:10:54
  well. Like the beat doesn't seem to
• 1:10:55
  be. No, it's.
• 1:10:56
  Very. It's very, very, very reduced,
• 1:10:59
  yeah. And with the, I mean, with the
• 1:11:01
  Glenn Kinch we had totally get what you mean by Iron Brew.
• 1:11:05
  It's like Iron Brew, Tang Fastix, that kind of vibe.
• 1:11:07
  Yeah, and that's I mean there was soon as I casted that you.
• 1:11:11
  Just just refill hog I'm not done anything yeah that's just
• 1:11:14
  bottling as a refill thinking that's a really good really good
• 1:11:17
  example of what Glenn Kinshi at cast strength with a decent
• 1:11:22
  amount of task influence but not not overwhelming.
• 1:11:24
  That's not that's not hiding the spirit character of it at all.
• 1:11:27
  And I. Guess that's also one of the
• 1:11:29
  benefits of being a independent bottler is you know that Glenn
• 1:11:35
  Kinshi don't release many. You know the now got the name.
• 1:11:40
  Well, this is a they've gotten a core.
• 1:11:42
  Release the first one I've seen yeah, and they've.
• 1:11:43
  Got a core release and it's either 40 or 43%.
• 1:11:45
  So you're not getting a lot of no, but you own Brandon.
• 1:11:48
  No, Glencoe Single doesn't let you do that.
• 1:11:50
  That's what I mean. That's what I mean, or whatever.
• 1:11:52
  Just by being just by being a 12 year old single cast cast
• 1:11:58
  strength refill hogs head Glenn Kinchy, you're creating
• 1:12:01
  something unique. That's not always the case, but
• 1:12:04
  something would have been having obviously lots of single cast
• 1:12:06
  Yeah, distillery. It's been heavens.
• 1:12:08
  So you've finished the sorry. How have you finished that?
• 1:12:10
  So this been finished, there's a little bit more detail to it
• 1:12:13
  actually. So this has been finished in a
• 1:12:18
  refill all the Rosso cast because the all the Rosso cast
• 1:12:21
  beforehand had been used for finishing.
• 1:12:24
  AI think it was our 18 year old Khalilah that we did.
• 1:12:28
  Right. Oh, right, OK, cool.
• 1:12:29
  So that's double so. Just just down the road from.
• 1:12:32
  That and, and it will, it will be on the yeah, it will be on
• 1:12:35
  the label, yeah, the tube label of it.
• 1:12:37
  But essentially, yeah, that's a little bit of extra detail to
• 1:12:40
  that. Cast.
• 1:12:41
  It's even more surprising that the P is yeah.
• 1:12:43
  Even more. Election, it's chilled out.
• 1:12:45
  It's it's got that nice like sticky BBQ kind.
• 1:12:47
  Of really. Yeah, definitely.
• 1:12:49
  We'll. Just smoke sausage and.
• 1:12:50
  Have you had a quick sell like whiskey then because you're
• 1:12:52
  wrenching, some whiskey sell faster than others.
• 1:12:54
  Have you had one that's really just gone like hot?
• 1:12:56
  Quickest selling, Quickest selling one we ever did was the
• 1:13:01
  Hearts. The Hearts balling.
• 1:13:03
  The heart of Midlothian. Collaboration Bridge North
• 1:13:07
  Bridge 25th anniversary of Hearts When the Scottish Cup
• 1:13:10
  against Rangers in 1998 did a collaboration with the club
• 1:13:13
  where we were able to use the Hearts Hearts badge and sold out
• 1:13:18
  on their website within 24 hours.
• 1:13:19
  Well, they're a great way. They're a great way of getting
• 1:13:21
  like, you know, independent bottlers getting into markets
• 1:13:24
  where people can then suddenly go, I like that bottle.
• 1:13:28
  How many people actually drank that will open up whiskey and
• 1:13:31
  drank it versus how many people will have that sitting on the
• 1:13:33
  shelf, which is nice to have that bottle, but also equally
• 1:13:36
  how many people will then go, I've seen that.
• 1:13:38
  I'll try it. You know, if Kev's got a shit, a
• 1:13:40
  bit of a shelf for you guys. What I want to also go back then
• 1:13:43
  ask is well, going back to the family history.
• 1:13:46
  Sure. And you know how many of the
• 1:13:49
  casks that you've bottled that you are bottling?
• 1:13:52
  Yeah, are coming from casks that have been family owned, that
• 1:13:55
  your dad's been looking after going well, just wait till my
• 1:13:58
  young Finn turns my age till I can pass them over to him versus
• 1:14:03
  how many you're actually going. Because this like you should go
• 1:14:05
  back to this Glengarie. This is something that you
• 1:14:06
  haven't purchased correct yet, but you're waiting for it to
• 1:14:09
  work. So you've got these options, but
• 1:14:12
  you also, I mean how many whiskey casts you have
• 1:14:14
  available? To you, the vast majority of
• 1:14:16
  what we bought have been casts that I've gone out and sourced
• 1:14:18
  myself, right? And it's topped up by the odd
• 1:14:21
  occasional release of old family stock and that's primarily stock
• 1:14:26
  that was laid down in and 80s essentially, we've probably only
• 1:14:32
  done 10 of them. Right.
• 1:14:34
  Really. Yeah.
• 1:14:35
  And that includes things like the Glenn Livett 50 year old.
• 1:14:39
  We did a very small batch release of the Macallan 1985
• 1:14:44
  things like longworm. He's on 2 casks of the long
• 1:14:46
  Mourn Longhorn was a very a large part of the Ben Eagles
• 1:14:49
  blend. So we've got quite a good stock.
• 1:14:51
  We had a. Tam, Neville and 33 year old as
• 1:14:53
  well. Tam Neville in 33 Duffton 34 was
• 1:14:56
  brilliant. Tried a long one as well.
• 1:14:58
  We've tried a long. And quite a lot of the North
• 1:15:00
  British is the old N British is that have done that was because
• 1:15:03
  N British was the main grain in Ben Eagles.
• 1:15:05
  As well, what was the kind of what's the age kind of stuff for
• 1:15:08
  the long one? 33 and 34, then we've done 33
• 1:15:12
  and 30. 4 But, but has, you know, we mentioned these casts
• 1:15:14
  that you, your family held and obviously that's must have been
• 1:15:18
  beneficial in getting access to other casks in your you know
• 1:15:23
  that I take it there's been some cast trading going on?
• 1:15:25
  Yeah, that's a good point there. There's an access.
• 1:15:28
  There's been a. Little bit of it.
• 1:15:29
  We've done some swaps with people where it's maybe 1 old
• 1:15:32
  thing for multiple younger things.
• 1:15:35
  Yeah, obviously we've we've sold the odd cask here and there that
• 1:15:39
  I don't think is necessarily right for bottling.
• 1:15:41
  Doesn't mean there's a bad whiskey.
• 1:15:42
  It might just be something that someone else wants for a
• 1:15:44
  different purpose. Sure.
• 1:15:47
  So yeah, listen, we've been, I'm incredibly lucky that I've been
• 1:15:50
  able to to lean on using some of those old cast, whether it's for
• 1:15:54
  raising a little bit of money for starting the brand as we did
• 1:15:58
  or just from having amazing whiskey to go and bottle from
• 1:16:02
  the off. And is your grandfather still
• 1:16:03
  around today? Is he still around?
• 1:16:04
  Still around, good live and kicking?
• 1:16:07
  And do you have, do you lean on them or do you try and go your
• 1:16:12
  own way? No, I don't know.
• 1:16:17
  Listen, I've kept them informed of everything that we've done
• 1:16:19
  along the way. But he's very much stepped away
• 1:16:22
  from the whiskey industry. And I think to some extent, I
• 1:16:26
  don't want to speak for him in his behalf, but I think he
• 1:16:30
  probably left the whiskey industry with a bit of a sour
• 1:16:33
  taste in this movie to some extent because you know, selling
• 1:16:36
  business in the 80s, I don't think that was a decision that
• 1:16:38
  was ultimately wanted at the time.
• 1:16:41
  Hold the reasons for it. But ultimately that period of
• 1:16:44
  time not so strong for Scotch whiskey.
• 1:16:47
  He might have felt hand forced to some extent.
• 1:16:49
  And I think that he's probably distanced himself from the risk
• 1:16:52
  industry to a degree because of that and gone on to do various
• 1:16:57
  other things with with his life. But you know, I've kept him up
• 1:17:01
  to date with everything that we've been doing.
• 1:17:03
  I love picking his brain for for stories and you know, he, he
• 1:17:08
  tells the stories much better than I do.
• 1:17:10
  But you know, he's, he's got his own, his own.
• 1:17:11
  What's he coming on the podcast? Wow.
• 1:17:14
  Does he enjoy a drum? Does he?
• 1:17:15
  Does he like anything? Yeah, I have.
• 1:17:18
  Has he given? Has he given you any positive
• 1:17:20
  feedback? On yeah, yeah, I, I, I dropped
• 1:17:23
  him in a bottle for, for Christmas, which he finished
• 1:17:27
  within a couple of days, I'm pretty sure.
• 1:17:30
  He's bursting the whiskey industry, the man but.
• 1:17:32
  Yeah, no, he, he, he loved it actually, because he's in a care
• 1:17:35
  home now and I and I went in just before Christmas and I saw
• 1:17:40
  he was drinking a bottle of, I can't remember what it was.
• 1:17:42
  It wasn't very good. And I was like, I gotta make
• 1:17:44
  sure you gotta have something good to actually drink.
• 1:17:47
  We just bottled a really nice one for him, actually.
• 1:17:51
  So we bottled a liquid with a Jamaican rum castle, right?
• 1:17:57
  The reason why that's a very personal 1 and I like doing this
• 1:18:00
  with as many bottlings as possible.
• 1:18:02
  For me, you know, a single cast whiskey, you're choosing
• 1:18:05
  individual cast. They've all got stories and we
• 1:18:06
  try and attach the stories to the cast as much as possible.
• 1:18:10
  The reason I was so desperate to work with Jamaican rum is
• 1:18:13
  because my grandmother is Jamaican.
• 1:18:14
  Oh, really? Yeah, really, No one believes me
• 1:18:17
  when I say that. Yeah.
• 1:18:18
  Grandmother born and born in Kingston and lived there until
• 1:18:23
  she was 18, went to school there, got a scholarship to go
• 1:18:26
  to Saint Andrews University. Wow.
• 1:18:28
  And she met my granddad there. So we've got this amazing like
• 1:18:33
  Jamaican heritage, which I'm very, very proud of.
• 1:18:38
  And unfortunately she died a few years ago.
• 1:18:41
  I'd always wanted, I'd always wanted to do something for her
• 1:18:43
  as well because so often when I'm telling you stories, it's
• 1:18:46
  all about the men in the family. Granddad did this, great
• 1:18:49
  Granddad did this, you know, is quite repetitive.
• 1:18:52
  So I thought, you know what, it'd be nice to do something for
• 1:18:54
  her as well. So we thought, let's make sure
• 1:18:57
  we do a Jamaican rum task finish.
• 1:18:59
  Did that with a liquid, worked out really, really nicely.
• 1:19:02
  Gave him a bottle of that for Christmas.
• 1:19:03
  Lovely, superb. That's great.
• 1:19:05
  You know what that's I mean, first of all, never knew the
• 1:19:08
  Jamaican element of your family, absolutely fantastic.
• 1:19:11
  But but again and for your grandfather still being alive
• 1:19:14
  and to be able to enjoy that. But the other question is then
• 1:19:18
  what about, you know, sage old advice, family advice?
• 1:19:22
  Is there a sort of things that use that principles that you can
• 1:19:26
  stick to that have been passed through the generations that you
• 1:19:28
  can go that still still act today in the whiskey industry or
• 1:19:32
  for for you guys? Main thing he always said was
• 1:19:36
  whiskey helps whiskey. That was his, that was his kind
• 1:19:38
  of ethos of it. And you know, and I think that's
• 1:19:41
  the same with everyone in the industry, right?
• 1:19:43
  To some extent. He he was very much all about
• 1:19:46
  his relationships within the whisk industry, having
• 1:19:50
  friendships as much as business partners.
• 1:19:52
  I think that stems back for, you know.
• 1:19:55
  Hundreds of years, and is that something you find to be true as
• 1:19:57
  well? 100%, I am blown away by how
• 1:20:01
  good the whisk industry is actually looking after each
• 1:20:03
  other. The fact that big companies like
• 1:20:06
  Diageo actually supply little bottlers like me and many
• 1:20:10
  others, I think that's incredible.
• 1:20:12
  And a lot of people will give the big boys a hard time.
• 1:20:15
  I think they're incredibly supportive.
• 1:20:18
  You know, I've had meetings with, you know, bulk whiskey
• 1:20:20
  suppliers who I think, why on earth.
• 1:20:22
  Would you sell? This is that.
• 1:20:24
  This is people that don't need to sell one or two cars to.
• 1:20:27
  Don't need to sell it. They've gone and told me.
• 1:20:30
  It's like, listen, Finn, like #1 you're not our competition.
• 1:20:35
  It's hard for it. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:37
  But, but #2 we want whiskey to do well.
• 1:20:41
  And if we sell whiskey to an independent bottle like you,
• 1:20:44
  ultimately you're actually going around, you're travelling in
• 1:20:47
  different countries, you're hosting whiskey tastings, you're
• 1:20:49
  introducing to people, people to whiskey.
• 1:20:51
  And yeah, they might buy a bottle of Finn Thompson whiskey
• 1:20:53
  first. But if we're Diazio, then
• 1:20:56
  they're going to find they're going to buy a Diazio bottle at
• 1:20:58
  some point. So we want, we want whiskey to
• 1:21:01
  do well. That helps us as a business.
• 1:21:02
  It's all about growing the category.
• 1:21:04
  It's been the biggest I opener for me.
• 1:21:06
  What you've just said from doing this podcast about how much how
• 1:21:10
  supportive whiskey is of everybody and it's things like
• 1:21:13
  simple things like when we talked about the Scotch whiskey
• 1:21:16
  experience sweet and you go, well, you guys must have been
• 1:21:20
  absolutely brick in it when the big bad Diageo came in and said
• 1:21:24
  we're going to open a Johnny Walker experience.
• 1:21:25
  Like no, far from it. That's actually perfect because
• 1:21:28
  guess what? There'll be a percentage of
• 1:21:30
  people that go to the Johnny Walker experience to go.
• 1:21:33
  We need more. We're in Edinburgh And then
• 1:21:35
  they'll find sweet. Or and they also say and also
• 1:21:37
  Diageo are part owners. Exactly that is not.
• 1:21:40
  Only that, but Sway as well. I mean the other great story
• 1:21:43
  about Sway and. Scotch whiskey experience.
• 1:21:45
  And industry fastest, I remember asking on the pod, I think I'm
• 1:21:49
  pretty sure I asked the question, you know, what about
• 1:21:51
  new distilleries? And it's like, no, they come on
• 1:21:52
  board, they come and join, they get their share of Swede, they
• 1:21:56
  get they get into that position and.
• 1:22:00
  Well, and as a category, whiskey is so big that there, there is a
• 1:22:02
  space for everybody. And that's what we see.
• 1:22:04
  Like you've got, you've got over 130, you've got over 130
• 1:22:08
  distilleries in Scotland, single malt distilleries in Scotland.
• 1:22:11
  You've got between 8:00 and 10:00 single malt distilleries.
• 1:22:14
  Yeah. And then you, you say single
• 1:22:16
  green, Sorry. And then you look at all the
• 1:22:17
  blenders you look at. And then how many independent
• 1:22:19
  bowlers are there throughout the world.
• 1:22:21
  We were at, we were at in the, in the, in the spirits festival.
• 1:22:25
  Not that long, I guess. And you were there fine and you
• 1:22:28
  saw just how many and it was all collaborative.
• 1:22:30
  There was nobody that was sitting there going, oh, I'm not
• 1:22:32
  speaking to them, I'm not talking.
• 1:22:33
  I mean, really, there's obviously this.
• 1:22:35
  Is what we have to remember is whether it's a Finn Thompson
• 1:22:37
  bottle or a Johnnie Walker Red or a Shiva's Regal bottle or
• 1:22:42
  whatever, they all have Scotch whisky on the And that's the one
• 1:22:46
  thing everything has in common and that's the one thing it's
• 1:22:48
  the industry first isn't. It but how many of them have
• 1:22:51
  Tartan Army on the bottle? Because there's a couple of
• 1:22:57
  drums here and I'm looking to get tucked in there because no,
• 1:23:01
  tell me I've got, I've got in my hands here.
• 1:23:04
  Your sample bottles of it. Wow.
• 1:23:07
  Oh, so we're not open the actual bottles here to open them,
• 1:23:10
  right? I have, I have.
• 1:23:12
  I have two bottles in front of me.
• 1:23:13
  Number one, I have a 28 year old Glen Geary.
• 1:23:17
  Yeah. Official whiskey by Finn
• 1:23:21
  Thompson and it's got Tartan Army on it. 19982026 in my hand
• 1:23:25
  of a 1998 lowland single grain bourbon barrel in my hands.
• 1:23:34
  Tartan Army. Scottish Tartan Army Correct?
• 1:23:36
  What's happening this year? Why have you decided to bottle
• 1:23:38
  Stone Army Whiskey? So do you know what it's it's
• 1:23:41
  it's going to be my favorite project ever because the I mean,
• 1:23:46
  I probably spend my life talking about two things.
• 1:23:49
  Number one is, is whiskey, obviously, but number 2 is
• 1:23:53
  football. I'm, I'm absolutely football
• 1:23:55
  daft and this, I can't quite believe I've been lucky enough
• 1:24:01
  to, to do this particular project.
• 1:24:05
  We are going to be the official Tartan Army whiskey for the
• 1:24:08
  World Cup. Wow.
• 1:24:09
  Right, so. That that comment, if I'm not
• 1:24:11
  talking about whiskey, I'm talking about football,
• 1:24:13
  resonates with two of the three of us.
• 1:24:16
  Well, that's how it's podcasts. It's exactly had a podcast.
• 1:24:19
  We aren't talking about people, we're talking about whiskey.
• 1:24:21
  So great. Graham and I are big football
• 1:24:22
  fans. Yeah, we've mentioned it once or
• 1:24:24
  twice. We won't mention it too.
• 1:24:25
  More, too much more. Chuck, Chuck.
• 1:24:28
  Chuck is 0 interest. Have you watched the game
• 1:24:29
  before? Yeah.
• 1:24:31
  But I've been ahead. But what we have to remember
• 1:24:33
  here, guys, first of all is there's, we have a global
• 1:24:36
  audience. Yeah.
• 1:24:37
  So there'll be people and they're all going Tartan Army.
• 1:24:41
  Is that a branch of the is, you know, what is the Tartan Army?
• 1:24:44
  Tartan Army is what the what the Scottish football fans are.
• 1:24:48
  It's if yeah, it's the Scottish supporters of the national team.
• 1:24:51
  Yeah, the National Football team, the supporters group,
• 1:24:55
  which is 10s of thousands of members, 40,000 members,
• 1:24:59
  something like that. It's the Tartan Army.
• 1:25:00
  Because what we don't want to happen here is our American
• 1:25:03
  listeners to start panicking. The Tartan Army are going to
• 1:25:07
  invade America. We are.
• 1:25:08
  Well, they are. Yeah, but we are going to be.
• 1:25:10
  But there'll be no military going on.
• 1:25:13
  Oh no. But like Angus, we united, so
• 1:25:15
  it's only the one time a submarine was chartered.
• 1:25:19
  You know, one of the things Angus, when we when we started
• 1:25:23
  the podcast, yes, an ambition of ours was to see if whiskey could
• 1:25:28
  take us to Germany for. For the EUR, for the EUR and
• 1:25:31
  guess what it did, they were there, we were in Cologne.
• 1:25:34
  Special spirit. Yeah, Peter Klass, we did a
• 1:25:37
  podcast. A podcast episode podcast.
• 1:25:39
  Episode there, it was an absolute riot.
• 1:25:40
  It was great and it was great. We had a fantastic time over in
• 1:25:44
  Germany as well. When was this?
• 1:25:46
  This was in 24/20/24. So we start very.
• 1:25:49
  Early on in the pub. Yeah, I mean, do you know
• 1:25:53
  something? Do you know, do you know the
• 1:25:54
  episode number 1 was meant was published.
• 1:25:57
  Episode number 1 was published when I had a stinking hangover
• 1:26:01
  on a Thursday morning at 8:00 in the morning while Scotland were
• 1:26:05
  over in Georgia officially qualifying for the Euro 2024.
• 1:26:09
  We recorded. We recorded 5 episodes.
• 1:26:13
  Yes, right. We recorded the 1st 5 episodes
• 1:26:15
  without putting them out because here's an interesting start on
• 1:26:18
  podcasts and the majority of podcasts never make it past
• 1:26:22
  episode 8. Oh wow.
• 1:26:23
  Before the for the failure point.
• 1:26:25
  So this is episode like 127. So we we're there.
• 1:26:30
  So what I did was we made the decision that we would record
• 1:26:33
  the 1st 5 episodes, prerecord the first five episodes, which
• 1:26:36
  would give us 5 weeks to get 3 episodes in to hit the 8 number.
• 1:26:40
  And we managed to do it, hence reason we're still here.
• 1:26:43
  But basically that that the date that I picked in the diary to
• 1:26:46
  release the first Whiskey Stories episode, I was, I'll
• 1:26:50
  never forget it. We were.
• 1:26:51
  I was sitting outside on our rooftop bar area at 8:00 in the
• 1:26:56
  morning, having just had my breakfast at a hotel in Georgia.
• 1:27:00
  Got on a just just qualified, Just qualified with A11 draw.
• 1:27:04
  Well, we'd already qualified, but we drew with the Georgians.
• 1:27:07
  11 more than Shanklin. Scored a late goal to make it
• 1:27:09
  11. Apologies for anyone that's not
• 1:27:11
  a football fan here, but we qualify.
• 1:27:13
  Suffering threats. But basically, but so we, and
• 1:27:16
  one of the things that we used to joke about was we said, you
• 1:27:18
  know, what if this podcast is nothing but get us to the work,
• 1:27:21
  to the EUR, it's done so and you know, on the back of that and
• 1:27:24
  here's a really, really good, really tenuous connection.
• 1:27:29
  Well, we ought to talk about that in a second.
• 1:27:31
  Angus and I on our trip, we bought a litre of Glen Goine and
• 1:27:37
  it was an air to Germany. Yeah, to Germany.
• 1:27:38
  We bought a litre of Glen Goine. Later of Glen Goine 10 year old
• 1:27:41
  travel exclusive. Travel exclusive and it had a
• 1:27:43
  bit of American Okan. I took a photo of it on the
• 1:27:46
  train between Munich and. Nuremberg, Nuremberg and hello.
• 1:27:51
  Took a picture of it and I got a message from a guy called Jake
• 1:27:53
  ad Cook that way. Hi guys.
• 1:27:55
  Just to let you know, I listen to your podcast.
• 1:27:57
  I just want to say I worked for Ian McLeod distillers.
• 1:28:00
  I'm an assistant blender. Let me know what you think about
• 1:28:02
  that because I had a big part in blending that right.
• 1:28:05
  We've got China Jake. Not how long later Jake Ad Cook
• 1:28:08
  turned up in the bottler spotlight that we did with Finn
• 1:28:12
  Thompson, which is our second ever, and I believe you and
• 1:28:14
  Jacob sparked up a nice relationship.
• 1:28:17
  He he he very kindly sorted me out with some of my favorite
• 1:28:21
  casks we've ever been. There you go.
• 1:28:23
  So there's a real tenuous link between between us, but like,
• 1:28:26
  anyway, back to your whiskey. You are the official bottler of
• 1:28:29
  the whiskey for the Tartan Army. That's the.
• 1:28:31
  Big thing. Tartan Army.
• 1:28:33
  It's it's amazing. Yeah, I've been waiting.
• 1:28:36
  My my first football memory is Scotland V Brazil in 1998.
• 1:28:41
  And I remember as a kid, very vaguely excited being six years
• 1:28:43
  old. But it is that first time I
• 1:28:45
  remember clocking football as a thing.
• 1:28:47
  And I remember the team walking out.
• 1:28:50
  I'm sure John Collins gives a wee wink as the cameras going
• 1:28:54
  past and then obviously scores the penalty.
• 1:28:57
  And it all ends in heartbreak, right?
• 1:28:59
  With Tom Boyd's own goal, right. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:29:02
  So, you know, ever since then I've, I've been desperate to see
• 1:29:07
  Scotland obviously at major terms, which we've been lucky
• 1:29:10
  enough to see see more recently, but in a World Cup it's just.
• 1:29:13
  It's a different level. Well. 1988 was the last time we
• 1:29:16
  were there, that moment. Exactly was.
• 1:29:17
  That the French World Cup. That was in France, yeah.
• 1:29:19
  And that game was the opening game of the World Cup, which,
• 1:29:22
  you know, at the time the, the TV audience for that.
• 1:29:25
  Yeah. There's some great stories the
• 1:29:27
  the story of the Scotland teams standing there in the in the
• 1:29:30
  lineup and they're looking beside them and they've got
• 1:29:32
  these Brazilian lads. And there's like Valdo Ronaldo,
• 1:29:36
  the original Ronaldo, Tafarel, some of the names in that
• 1:29:39
  Brazilian team. And everyone's kind of the
• 1:29:41
  Scotland boys are really trying to puff their chest.
• 1:29:43
  They're about to walk out to the opening game of the World Cup
• 1:29:47
  finals. There was over a billion global
• 1:29:50
  audience watching that game. And suddenly just as the boys
• 1:29:54
  were walking out and the Brazilians were a holding hand,
• 1:29:56
  you watched about. Those are holding hands,
• 1:29:57
  everyone said someone who is it? They said they smell amazing.
• 1:30:02
  But all the Scotland boys are standing there and they're
• 1:30:04
  looking and every single Scotland player said seeing them
• 1:30:07
  up close, they just looked about a foot taller, a foot wider.
• 1:30:11
  These were Brazilian, the top players and everyone's going
• 1:30:13
  bloody hell, here we are about to walk out World Cup and then
• 1:30:17
  suddenly out of nowhere a wee voice pops up.
• 1:30:19
  They're shooting themselves lads and it was Craig Brown Scotland.
• 1:30:24
  I'm just trying to get that last little bit energy in them and
• 1:30:27
  you know what, like you said, John Collins scored the penalty
• 1:30:31
  and suddenly it's looking all great.
• 1:30:32
  And then Tom Boyd in that World Cup as it was the Scottish way
• 1:30:36
  of doing things. But glorious failure, glorious
• 1:30:38
  failure. But here we are back at the
• 1:30:40
  world stage again. And so to be a part of that, oh,
• 1:30:43
  absolutely fantastic. I could not be more excited.
• 1:30:47
  It's it's it'll probably be the best project I ever do.
• 1:30:52
  We've done three different whiskeys for it. 12 year old Tam
• 1:30:56
  the villain had had forecast together, reduced down.
• 1:31:01
  Make it a nice kind of easy accessible one.
• 1:31:02
  And then two single cask editions, which are the ones
• 1:31:05
  that I've got on the table. Yeah.
• 1:31:06
  Let's try which ones. I think you've got to go in with
• 1:31:09
  this one first, because we're talking about that Brazil game,
• 1:31:12
  right? Yeah.
• 1:31:13
  I could not believe my luck when I managed to source a cask that
• 1:31:20
  was distilled on the very day that Scotland played Brazil in
• 1:31:23
  198. Really.
• 1:31:24
  That's incredible because I you know, like we said, we mentioned
• 1:31:27
  this game. Everyone in the room apart from
• 1:31:30
  you, Chuck probably remembers watching that game.
• 1:31:31
  I remember exactly where I was watching that game.
• 1:31:34
  You can remember that day. It's amazing the thing that
• 1:31:37
  well, I, I, I was in Haddington. So it's amazing.
• 1:31:39
  I think that 30 miles down the road that was that that liquid
• 1:31:43
  we're about to try was being had been freshly.
• 1:31:45
  Off the Yeah, a guy very aggressively listening to the
• 1:31:48
  radio was making this. Yeah, well, that's exactly some
• 1:31:54
  bird bugger. Yeah, some bird bugger was.
• 1:31:56
  It's a guy like you Chuck, with 0 interest in football.
• 1:31:58
  I didn't mind I. I no, but I think, I think a
• 1:32:01
  moment like that, I think generally there's moments in
• 1:32:03
  history where there are, there's things like, for example, Andy
• 1:32:06
  Murray winning Wimbledon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:08
  Where it didn't matter whether you're a tennis fan or not.
• 1:32:10
  Yeah, I remember that, that Sunday afternoon, glorious
• 1:32:13
  sunshine, yeah. You could have walked through
• 1:32:15
  any town in Scotland and the place was dead because everybody
• 1:32:19
  was around the television watching Andy Murray and I
• 1:32:21
  think, bearing in mind Angus, what age would we have been back
• 1:32:24
  then? 1998.
• 1:32:25
  So we would have been I. Was I was I was 8, you'd have
• 1:32:27
  been 9. At 8-9 years old, basically, I
• 1:32:30
  don't know what the rest of the world is like at that.
• 1:32:32
  I can remember watching the game.
• 1:32:35
  But I tell you what, though, I can imagine that Scotland the.
• 1:32:38
  Guy definitely clocked in that day.
• 1:32:40
  Right Scotland opening the World Cup.
• 1:32:42
  Scotland opening the World Cup finals in the game against
• 1:32:44
  Brazil, I reckon every single St. in Scotland was dead because
• 1:32:47
  everyone is watching that game. So to find a cask.
• 1:32:51
  Yeah, it's, it's incredible. Obviously this.
• 1:32:54
  Was presumably distilled in the morning as well.
• 1:32:56
  You know well, okay. Technically right if, if if
• 1:33:00
  you're going by a YS is it's probably filled that day, right?
• 1:33:04
  So it's it's filled date more than anything else.
• 1:33:08
  But you know, difference. Come on.
• 1:33:09
  But. How good is that's a cracker?
• 1:33:11
  How good it's not just the luck of the.
• 1:33:14
  Drug and this. Was incidentally what Brazil
• 1:33:17
  game but I remember the. ABV on this is quite a high the.
• 1:33:21
  It's really. Really drinkable, that strength.
• 1:33:24
  Yes, I'm trying. To how much?
• 1:33:26
  How much I bought like this? Will this set you back so?
• 1:33:28
  This is going to be 150. 100 and how many bottles have we got?
• 1:33:31
  200. And 200.
• 1:33:33
  And 2020 odds, yeah. So another big part of it.
• 1:33:35
  So I'm a great believer, I think.
• 1:33:38
  I think the Tartan Army, and for listeners that don't really
• 1:33:41
  understand what the Tartan Army is all about, and my mum
• 1:33:46
  probably falls into this category where she just assumes
• 1:33:48
  that all football fans are the same, right?
• 1:33:50
  Absolutely not. But the Tartan Army, I genuinely
• 1:33:53
  think have a reputation beyond football as being doing good,
• 1:33:57
  genuinely good, good football fans and good, good visitors to
• 1:34:01
  different countries. They do various charitable
• 1:34:04
  things. They represent the country well.
• 1:34:06
  They represent the spore well. It's not like you're, you know,
• 1:34:10
  chair throwing dogs down other parts of fields.
• 1:34:14
  I think there's a great thing in that because I mean, we've been
• 1:34:17
  part of Scotland trips away and there is that reputation that
• 1:34:21
  the Tartan Army has and no one, no one is a better advocate for
• 1:34:24
  the Tartan Army and the Tartan Army themselves.
• 1:34:26
  And I mean that for a point of if anybody does maybe step over
• 1:34:29
  the line a wee bit, it's very quickly snuffed out because it's
• 1:34:32
  our reputation and the Tartan Army themselves collectively
• 1:34:36
  really want to. Police it well and.
• 1:34:38
  Police it well themselves, but also that reputation, it's so
• 1:34:41
  ingrained. We're in there there is that
• 1:34:45
  right? Well, we're going to be a wee
• 1:34:46
  bit. Different.
• 1:34:47
  They get ingrained. It's got really good mouth
• 1:34:49
  texture. Yeah, yeah, I'm so sick.
• 1:34:51
  What do you think of the Scotland?
• 1:34:52
  Are you just sticking to them? But I mean, am I right in saying
• 1:34:56
  in 1998 in the World Cup, Scotland actually won an award?
• 1:34:58
  Because it was the first year, yeah, that FIFA did the the fan
• 1:35:01
  award, fan award. And it was absolutely the
• 1:35:03
  Scotland fans. They bring the colour, they
• 1:35:05
  bring the. I mean, look, the song that
• 1:35:07
  Scotland's saying no Scotland, no party.
• 1:35:09
  And they're genuinely lays this element of.
• 1:35:11
  The we saw the coverage the Tartan Army got in Germany as
• 1:35:14
  well. I mean, German fans support in
• 1:35:16
  Scotland, et cetera, et cetera, saying no, come back next year
• 1:35:19
  and all this sort of thing. It's just.
• 1:35:22
  So the reason I mentioned it is that whole ethos of giving back,
• 1:35:26
  right? And large part of what we're
• 1:35:28
  doing, so we've partnered up with the Tartan Army Children's
• 1:35:31
  Charity as well. Yeah, we're donating money from
• 1:35:33
  every single bottle towards the Tarn Army Children's Charity.
• 1:35:36
  It's a charity that's aimed at getting kids to their first
• 1:35:38
  football matches in grassroots football.
• 1:35:40
  So I think I think that was always a really important part
• 1:35:43
  of it because there is a part of me that thinks the Tarn Army
• 1:35:46
  shouldn't be commercialized as a business opportunity either.
• 1:35:50
  So, you know, it's about giving a little bit back, but I want
• 1:35:54
  this to be a whiskey that people, you know, have in the
• 1:35:57
  cabinet thinking if we go and actually qualify from the group
• 1:36:01
  stage or win a game or score a goal.
• 1:36:03
  We'll get to the next World Cup and.
• 1:36:05
  Yeah, I'll tell you what, whenever you know, if they do,
• 1:36:08
  if it does sit on the shelf until we qualify for another
• 1:36:11
  World Cup, whenever they open it, they're in for a treat.
• 1:36:13
  Oh, that's this is. The thing with this is this is.
• 1:36:15
  Really good. Whiskey I've I've been part of
• 1:36:17
  these bottlings before with, with where you do special
• 1:36:20
  edition bottlings. Yeah, particularly a football
• 1:36:22
  club. And there's a danger to that.
• 1:36:23
  When you do these small releases, special edition, that
• 1:36:26
  you go, how many of these bottles are actually ever going
• 1:36:30
  to get opened? But at the same time, you have
• 1:36:32
  to assume that every single bottle is going to get open.
• 1:36:34
  Because let me tell you, if you spend 150, what, how much did
• 1:36:38
  you say this is good? This is costing 1. 150 retail.
• 1:36:40
  Right. Spend 300, buy 2 bottles, buy
• 1:36:42
  one drink, one to keep. Because let me tell you that if
• 1:36:45
  you're one person, if you're a person for keeping whiskey to
• 1:36:47
  sit on the shelf until a special occasion, you're going to be
• 1:36:50
  missing out. Because that's an absolute
• 1:36:52
  cracking DRAM. I would say.
• 1:36:55
  You know, a whiskey story that we've talked about on the
• 1:36:58
  podcast before was actually we flew out to Kazakhstan for the
• 1:37:02
  yeah, ironically, 2019, Scotland's worst ever,
• 1:37:06
  Scotland's worst ever result. It was a real low point, ended
• 1:37:09
  up in the sacking of Alex McLeish.
• 1:37:12
  Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, anyway.
• 1:37:14
  Well, it LED very much towards. That but my point being is.
• 1:37:17
  I was in Kazakhstan in 2019 as. Well, well, we were in Astana,
• 1:37:20
  which then actually that whole trip was wild.
• 1:37:21
  Wasn't that Marty? Astana bumping into U2 when I
• 1:37:24
  really thought that drip off. I can tell you it would have
• 1:37:27
  been really weird because I was out there for curling.
• 1:37:30
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. My sister was in the Unifascitad
• 1:37:32
  games in Ahmate. Well, we were.
• 1:37:34
  We were in Astana and we flew Air Astana from London to
• 1:37:37
  Kazakhstan. I'm not a fly.
• 1:37:39
  A good flyer and whilst my brother and Angus were serving
• 1:37:42
  to sleep, I polished off the best part of a bottle of bells.
• 1:37:46
  I Remember Remember not sleeping I I can't sleep in a plane and I
• 1:37:51
  remember we were actually only about 6 rows in.
• 1:37:53
  Full bottle bells in your belly. It wasn't a full ball, I would
• 1:37:56
  say that. But basically what happens, I
• 1:37:57
  remember being we were about fourth or fifth rollback on the
• 1:38:00
  flight. Bear in mind the flight's now
• 1:38:01
  full of Tartan Army foot soldiers, as we would call them,
• 1:38:05
  guys in kilts with Glenn Garys on all sound asleep on this
• 1:38:09
  overnight flight from London to Kazakhstan.
• 1:38:11
  And I remember that the the the steward desk on the trolley came
• 1:38:16
  and I said there you've only whiskey.
• 1:38:17
  And she said I've got, I've got bells.
• 1:38:19
  I went, I'll do, I said can I have, can I have a bells please?
• 1:38:22
  And I was expecting a miniature to come.
• 1:38:24
  And she just produced a 70 CL bottle and she hand poured a
• 1:38:28
  very healthy measure and I went, that bottle's not making all the
• 1:38:32
  way in the back of the plate. Thankfully she came back and I
• 1:38:35
  was like, you want any more bells?
• 1:38:36
  She went, yeah, I said can I have another one?
• 1:38:38
  She did that. And over the course of the
• 1:38:40
  evening flight, whilst my brother and oldest pal sit
• 1:38:43
  sounds fast asleep. I wasn't actually sleeping.
• 1:38:46
  I downloaded Goodfellas and your brother was mocking me for
• 1:38:49
  watching a film on my phone. But I mean, I did.
• 1:38:53
  Yeah, I did. But then when we got there, the
• 1:38:55
  only whiskey available in Kazakhstan was Valentine's.
• 1:38:57
  Yes. And we were drinking rounds and
• 1:38:59
  rounds of, I think, a lot. Not a bad bling.
• 1:39:01
  It's not a bad bling at all. And it was a round of lager
• 1:39:05
  around the local lag or whatever it was.
• 1:39:08
  Valentine's 12, Valentine and a Jager bomb was setting us back.
• 1:39:14
  Something like 2 lbs two pounds, 2 LB Brilliant.
• 1:39:17
  Fantastic, right? That's the first bottling that
• 1:39:20
  you've done, because you've done eventually three.
• 1:39:21
  You've brought 2 in tonight. What's the second bottling?
• 1:39:23
  The second one, technically this is not a 28 year old whiskey.
• 1:39:27
  The the there's not the North British.
• 1:39:30
  It is a N British. I put lowland.
• 1:39:34
  You don't want British on an army bottling.
• 1:39:36
  It is from North British distillery.
• 1:39:37
  I know best to avoid that whole dialect.
• 1:39:38
  I think you're. Absolutely.
• 1:39:40
  And the listeners, this is North.
• 1:39:41
  British, which I think is my favorite green distillery anyway
• 1:39:44
  because it was distilled on in June on that day that Scotland
• 1:39:49
  played Brazil. It's not going to be 28 because
• 1:39:52
  we've got a bottle ahead of the world course.
• 1:39:54
  So we do have a 28 year old whiskey which is already bottled
• 1:39:58
  as well and it is single so. 2nd Glengaria of the evening. 2nd
• 1:40:03
  Glengaria turning into one of my favorite distilleries.
• 1:40:07
  We've bottled probably more Glengaria than than almost any
• 1:40:11
  other distillery because I just keep on finding really good
• 1:40:14
  reasons to do them. I would say this is phenomenal.
• 1:40:19
  The natural cast strength of 42.1%, so it's come there, but
• 1:40:24
  really, really nicely only producing something like 134
• 1:40:29
  bottles out the cask as well. So one of these ones where I
• 1:40:33
  wish I had more what? Cast Has it been in?
• 1:40:35
  Has it been? 134, yeah.
• 1:40:37
  What cast has it been in? Is the same box.
• 1:40:38
  Just barbin, Barbin barrel. Just a Barber barrel.
• 1:40:41
  And what's this retail in it this?
• 1:40:43
  Is gonna be about 270. 5 This is a special.
• 1:40:45
  Draft, which by the way, yeah, and the. 20 year old single mop.
• 1:40:49
  28 year. Old, yeah, 28, that's what I'm
• 1:40:51
  saying. 28 year old single malt. 275.
• 1:40:53
  And 275 and only 134 bottles. The official Tartan Army bought
• 1:40:58
  line. Now we'll talk about gifting
• 1:41:00
  whiskey. If you've got somebody who's a
• 1:41:02
  big football fan, yeah, that's a good deal for you to get
• 1:41:05
  somebody. A better gift?
• 1:41:06
  But equally, you know, as a special, as a special drama to
• 1:41:10
  treat yourself to. And again, this is the problem.
• 1:41:12
  You're going to need to buy 2 bottles if you're one of these
• 1:41:14
  people that likes to keep the whiskey on the shelf.
• 1:41:16
  And I've always get drank because I'm almost sure, based
• 1:41:20
  on the whiskeys that we've had this evening, what Finn's
• 1:41:23
  putting in the bottles isn't going.
• 1:41:24
  To be I think this is I think this is really tasty.
• 1:41:26
  It takes a lot of the boxes for me of a of a just amazing.
• 1:41:30
  Well, you know well developed 28 year old whiskey low strength.
• 1:41:36
  It drinks like juice in my opinion.
• 1:41:37
  Oh. God, that's dangerous.
• 1:41:39
  I. Yeah, that's that's.
• 1:41:41
  It's got that that old whiskey funk to it as well.
• 1:41:44
  It's got a little bit of, I don't know, just just.
• 1:41:47
  You know what that would taste real.
• 1:41:48
  Do you know what that would taste really, really nice?
• 1:41:51
  When a sun lounger in Miami just before the.
• 1:41:54
  Graham. Well, Scotland, they're going
• 1:41:55
  into a game against Brazil, already qualified for the next
• 1:41:58
  in the World Cup finals. Well, yeah, yeah, confident
• 1:42:03
  talk. I mean, I was talking about that
• 1:42:05
  Brazil game, but I actually remember the Morocco game far
• 1:42:07
  more clearly because I remember being quite excited about that
• 1:42:10
  Morocco game. Tropical fruits and tropical
• 1:42:14
  Very tropical. Loads of tropical fruit.
• 1:42:16
  Ended in a three nil defeat and my dad said, well you better get
• 1:42:18
  used to this. I guess that's how he that's how
• 1:42:21
  he comforted his upset son. There's there'll be members of
• 1:42:25
  the Tartan out, there'll be members of the Tartan Army,
• 1:42:28
  there'll be guys listening to his podcast.
• 1:42:30
  Scotland Fans. People be going over to America
• 1:42:33
  for the World Cup. You're going over as well, fine,
• 1:42:36
  aren't you? I'm going over and I'm now
• 1:42:39
  getting to the expensive part of my trip, so I'm going to be
• 1:42:40
  working over there, right? I mean, this projects actually
• 1:42:44
  opened up a lot of doors. It's allowed me to get a US
• 1:42:47
  importer. It's allowed me to get a
• 1:42:49
  Canadian importer. Wow.
• 1:42:51
  I'm linking in with the Haven, which is a Scottish bar in
• 1:42:55
  Boston. You've asked me to come and do a
• 1:42:57
  whiskey tasting in between the two games there.
• 1:42:59
  I've got other bars who who want to stop this as their malt of
• 1:43:03
  the month for for all the World Cup.
• 1:43:05
  I'm I'm hopefully doing a tasting event in our whisking
• 1:43:08
  cigar like lounge in Miami. So it's, yeah, it's, it's been a
• 1:43:13
  really good way of expensing my. Whole trip, you know, we, we, we
• 1:43:18
  thought, I mean, you mention it like we've got Scott Miller.
• 1:43:21
  We can't talk about America without talk about our US and
• 1:43:26
  master out there, Scott Moore always born his own trumpet.
• 1:43:29
  But but we've also got the guys at Tampa Bay Whiskey Club.
• 1:43:33
  We've got Howard Sachs over there, Scotch drinkers only.
• 1:43:38
  And there's a there's a load of people out there.
• 1:43:41
  And what you've got to remember is that Yes, Scotland will be
• 1:43:43
  playing two games in Boston and one game in Miami.
• 1:43:46
  When you look at the. I mean, maybe more games.
• 1:43:48
  Of course, maybe more games, but when you look at how many Scots
• 1:43:51
  are over in the, in the whole of the States, there'll be, I'm
• 1:43:54
  pretty sure there will be pilgrimages going on from every
• 1:43:58
  corner of US of people who the, the people who are Scottish that
• 1:44:03
  are living over there right now and the people that go, my
• 1:44:06
  great, great, great grandfather was a scat.
• 1:44:08
  He was, he was a McAllen. And he's, you know, they'll be
• 1:44:11
  heading over Scotland will be an adopted nation of the, of the
• 1:44:16
  World Cup for sure over in America and Canada, particularly
• 1:44:20
  with the, with the emigration sort of things over there.
• 1:44:22
  So for people, even if they can't make it to Boston to be
• 1:44:25
  around other Scots, if they can't make it to Miami to be
• 1:44:29
  around other Scots, they'll see it on the television that we're
• 1:44:31
  keeping up to date. But at the same time, there will
• 1:44:33
  be an opportunity for them to actually get hold of some of
• 1:44:36
  these bottles are special. Yeah, as well, we've got our
• 1:44:38
  whiskey, brilliant whiskey importer for a called Whiskey
• 1:44:41
  Lab, actually a guy who I met at the Independent Spirits
• 1:44:44
  Festival. We was there and, and came over
• 1:44:47
  the stand, tried to hold the whiskey and seemed to really
• 1:44:49
  like them, which was which was great.
• 1:44:51
  And then we've been chatting since and, and using this as a
• 1:44:54
  bit of a project to, to launch the whole brand out there.
• 1:44:56
  But he's he's bringing over bottles so Americans will be
• 1:44:59
  able to buy not just tart on my whiskey, but also Thompson
• 1:45:03
  whiskey in general as well. Well, great.
• 1:45:06
  Thank you very much for coming along.
• 1:45:07
  It's been absolutely fantastic to hear your stories.
• 1:45:10
  It's it's great to get to hear and taste whiskey that you're
• 1:45:15
  doing. Brilliant.
• 1:45:16
  I hope if you enjoyed this, let us know.
• 1:45:18
  How can people keep in touch with Finn Thompson?
• 1:45:20
  What's going on? Finn Thompson Whiskey on
• 1:45:23
  Instagram and I think that's. And if people are over in the
• 1:45:28
  States, how can people find out what's going on?
• 1:45:31
  You've got a great website. Great website.
• 1:45:32
  Go on the website, actually say and.
• 1:45:34
  You sell you sell whiskey on your website as well.
• 1:45:36
  Sign up for the newsletter and you do get first news about
• 1:45:39
  releases like these. You might get we discount code
• 1:45:42
  now and then, but yeah, launching out in America.
• 1:45:46
  So if if the Americans are out there, definitely try and pick
• 1:45:49
  up a bottle would be the first one to get one out there.
• 1:45:52
  And other than that, yeah, keep an eye on when.
• 1:45:53
  Kinchy comes to America like do yourself a favour.
• 1:45:56
  Yeah, yeah. Look, thank you very much for
• 1:45:58
  bringing your drums. Thanks for hearing your story.
• 1:46:00
  It's been great. Finn Thompson, all the very
• 1:46:01
  best. Thank you very much for
• 1:46:02
  listening to Slangema. Cheers.