Latest / Whisky Stories Podcast / A Taste of Malt - Atom Whisky Brand Ambassador Boutique-y Dave

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A Taste of Malt - Atom Whisky Brand Ambassador Boutique-y Dave · Whisky Stories Podcast

• 0:03
  Everyone's sounding good, everyone looking.
• 0:05
  Everything OK there? Do I have to hold it right up?
• 0:08
  Hold it where you want it, you'll adjust.
• 0:09
  It just I'll be able to adjust. I can see it.
• 0:11
  And if you hear how you're getting on with that, turn all
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  them down. Which ones are great?
• 0:16
  I'll ask. You sorry multi colour don't
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  that. Yeah, it keeps us going great
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  for the ADA people. Are always in, people are
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  always. That's quite a good production,
• 0:23
  but. For for something that sounds
• 0:24
  like we make it up as we're going along, we actually do
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  rotate, but. We've got sound effects as well.
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  We do, but I don't wanna press edit them.
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  Alright, He's actually unpressed edit.
• 0:33
  Everyone's just been speaking in a robotic voice.
• 0:36
  I mean, I've got this the next six hours Googling.
• 0:40
  How do you remove robotic voice from podcast?
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  For 90 minutes, two or three, we could just quickly see what we
• 0:45
  filmed the So when I was filming, we were doing it with
• 0:48
  Jake Adkook. The camera kept going off and I
• 0:51
  swapped the camera about and I hit something on the settings.
• 0:53
  So I was loading all the clips in.
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  The last hour was filmed in slow motion but with no sound.
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  So what I'd have to do. So what I'll do is I'll the
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  sound comes from here. So I take the camera, put the SD
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  card in here, upload the footage and then I take the audio.
• 1:12
  I guess we'll do a clap in a minute, which everyone must
• 1:14
  wonder why an earth design used to do the clap, but it helps me
• 1:16
  see the spike so I can pair up the thing.
• 1:19
  We used to do it as well. Yeah, try doing that when it's
• 1:21
  in slow motion and. We still.
• 1:25
  Admire it's it's mute it. So I've got an hour and it was a
• 1:29
  it was a disaster. We'll hopefully have the sound
• 1:31
  through the camera. That's funny.
• 1:34
  That was. We had we had a podcast on
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  there. We recorded a podcast and we
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  didn't save it and we lost. We've done, we've had the last
• 1:45
  episodes. Right.
• 1:46
  Anyway, Angus, we've had a DRAM. Everyone ready to rock His
• 1:49
  Royal? Shame we didn't.
• 1:50
  Ready to go? You've got three stories.
• 1:53
  What DRAM? What 3 drams he's got that he's
• 1:54
  got his home. I always say that wrong.
• 1:56
  Why do I always say that? What 3 drams, right?
• 1:58
  It's only been here. Everyone, we are celebrating it,
• 2:01
  right? Everyone ready to rock'n'roll?
• 2:02
  Yep, right. When you are Angus, you know
• 2:04
  what to do. Clap us in.
• 2:08
  Welcome to the Whiskey Stories podcast.
• 2:11
  Everyone was so passionate about what they were doing.
• 2:14
  Even if their distillery wasn't a brand yet they made the best
• 2:19
  whiskey. They were passionate about what
• 2:21
  they were doing. And you see the passion from the
• 2:24
  brand ambassadors, you see the passion from the the big fans or
• 2:28
  the geeks, the bloggers. And you see the passion from the
• 2:30
  people who are Mike and the whiskey, from coopering to to
• 2:35
  blending. There's a passion about it.
• 2:37
  I want it to be the best. Welcome along to Whiskey Stories
• 2:39
  podcast for myself, Craig. We are back in the comfort of
• 2:42
  our own home, the athletic arms in the big room as well.
• 2:45
  It's nice and spacious tonight, guys.
• 2:46
  How we were getting on. Ross, you all right?
• 2:48
  Magic. Glad to be back.
• 2:49
  Glad to be back in my spiritual home.
• 2:51
  I've got 2 drams in front of me that I've never had before.
• 2:54
  Brilliant. And also a brand new bottle that
• 2:56
  I get to take home. Exactly what we'll talk about
• 2:58
  that. Angus, how are you?
• 2:59
  I'm. Delighted.
• 2:59
  I'm just happy. Have a bit more space than last
• 3:02
  week around the sun I was about. Charles, Chuck Girl.
• 3:05
  Last week and it was it was a bit of a squeeze, but.
• 3:07
  I haven't laughed so much. I mean it was it was a Chuck
• 3:10
  Kerr episode. If anyone is listening to this,
• 3:12
  it hasn't listened to the Chuck Kerr episode.
• 3:14
  Get listened to it. The feedback's been really,
• 3:16
  really funny from ex guests and people around the industry said
• 3:21
  they've never learned so much about farming.
• 3:22
  Yeah. Exactly.
• 3:25
  There we go, I. Got called out for one point
• 3:27
  saying and thanks for holding on or something like that.
• 3:30
  In fact, we're getting back to the whiskey.
• 3:32
  It was really good and we're all getting back on for a second
• 3:35
  episode. Absolutely.
• 3:36
  But I mean, I have to say, guys, I was getting there was a a
• 3:40
  little frog in my throat on Friday night as we're recording
• 3:43
  this, it's the 23rd of October. There was a frog in my throat on
• 3:46
  Friday night. When I realized that is a year
• 3:49
  ago on Friday night, the three of us turned up here, walked in,
• 3:53
  everybody looked at us, looked at me with all these bags I'm
• 3:56
  carrying, spoke to the people behind the boxes.
• 3:59
  We're here quietly. We're here recording the
• 4:02
  podcast. Didn't want to be like we're the
• 4:04
  podcasters. We sat in that tiny little
• 4:06
  dugout room and chatted for an hour, an hour and a half maybe,
• 4:10
  between ourselves. Between ourselves.
• 4:12
  Yeah. And that was it.
• 4:13
  That was episode #1 we didn't release it until the 16th of
• 4:16
  November, but a year. We're over a year.
• 4:20
  I should have brought a cake, if I remember.
• 4:24
  Yeah. No, no, it's tremendous to me.
• 4:27
  It's been great. And, you know, we've we've I
• 4:29
  think we've personal pride as well.
• 4:31
  We've not missed a week of, you know, podcast.
• 4:34
  And so every every Thursday, there's something you know for
• 4:37
  the dear listeners. Absolutely.
• 4:38
  Well, this is this is episode 50, which is, which is great,
• 4:42
  you know, really, really exciting to be doing that
• 4:44
  episode 50 and thank you to everybody who's listened. 8
• 4:47
  downloads is what we got for our first ever episode 8 downloads
• 4:52
  and we're now pushing 10,000. That's amazing.
• 4:55
  Alright, So I mean, we've had some wild times and hopefully
• 4:58
  more wild things. My mum, my dad, me.
• 5:00
  I was good. Shout out Dear Daddy, Bob, Bob,
• 5:04
  Bob Bob, Bobby Barr. Good, but I mean.
• 5:07
  Still still waiting on the 1st confirmed listener.
• 5:09
  Antarctica. Yeah, we're working on it.
• 5:11
  One continent. We've got everything, yeah.
• 5:13
  But we don't. We don't have a cake, but we do
• 5:14
  have a guest who's brought whisky, but he's gumble laden
• 5:17
  with whiskey. We've got boutique Dave, Dave
• 5:20
  Burlington, who is the whiskey ambassador for Adam Brands.
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  Dave, welcome along. How are you?
• 5:25
  Thank you very much for having me.
• 5:26
  I'm pretty good. I've had a wonderful day and a
• 5:28
  wonderful evening, a wonderful trip up.
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  It's been a just a fabulous week, actually, to be honest.
• 5:32
  Yeah. You've had quite a week because
• 5:34
  I mean, first of all, I have to say before, before we get
• 5:36
  started, a big thank you to our new booking agent, Dom from
• 5:41
  from, from Diggers, who is the whiskey guru at Diggers.
• 5:44
  We still need to get Dom on the podcast actually, but you are
• 5:48
  here thanks to Dom booking you in actually.
• 5:51
  That's that's the reason he yeah, he said you might be
• 5:54
  interested in getting them on the podcast.
• 5:56
  His his Graham's number and get in touch.
• 5:59
  So we did, and squeeze me in just at the last minute.
• 6:01
  Well, talk us through because we were talking before we started
• 6:04
  recording the week that you've had so far, We're only at
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  Wednesday, right? So, so obviously not just the
• 6:10
  day you've had today, but the full week from starting from
• 6:13
  before you left to head up here. Right, OK, well Monday evening I
• 6:17
  was hosting a Darkness tasting, which is another brand of
• 6:20
  whiskeys from Atom Group, the Darkness brand, which is
• 6:24
  intentionally sherried finished whiskeys and we had 7 whiskeys
• 6:27
  in this little pub, their annual whiskey night.
• 6:31
  It went down really well and that was all the way down in
• 6:33
  Horsham near Gatwick Airport. I needed to be on the 920 train
• 6:39
  out of Horsham. I looked at my watch at 9:00 and
• 6:42
  we still had three whiskeys together.
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  I've missed the 9:00 and maybe we go for the 10:00 train.
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  We missed the 10:00 train and then there was a couple of
• 6:51
  cancelled trains. Fortunately my, my buddy said,
• 6:56
  well, I'm, I'm, I'm driving down here anyway, so I'm going to
• 7:00
  drive you home. So he drove me 90 minutes from
• 7:03
  Gatwick Airport all the way up to Bedford and then had to drive
• 7:06
  himself back home. So I got home at midnight, just
• 7:08
  after midnight. If I'd taken the last train out
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  of Horsham, I would have got home at 2:00 in the morning,
• 7:14
  2:30 in the. Morning big show to that guy for
• 7:16
  driving you. CC.
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  Charlie. He didn't touch.
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  A thing He was under 0% all night.
• 7:27
  And then you're back at it. We're only thinking about 2 1/2
• 7:29
  hours. I mean, I'm just kidding.
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  Well, drink responsibly. And if you're going to drink and
• 7:33
  drive, drink and drive responsibly.
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  Just don't do it. Please.
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  And then in the end the next morning up early on a train
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  standing on a platform at 9:00 in the morning to get up to
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  Edinburgh. And I was in here last night and
• 7:45
  we did the boutique whiskey core tasting.
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  So that's five drams. Our our new core range of
• 7:49
  whiskeys were that one aisle and one space.
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  I had one peated highland ranging from 8 to 18 there.
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  Then we got a blended grain and A and a silly Canadian corn
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  whiskey, which is delicious at the end.
• 8:02
  And we did that this morning, early start into our warehouse
• 8:08
  bottling facility, blending facility over Portobello.
• 8:13
  So we got a warehouse there. When I first started in with
• 8:16
  Master of Malt boutique whiskey, Atom Brands, we didn't have our
• 8:20
  own bottling plant. We used another independent
• 8:22
  bottler to independently bottle our bottles.
• 8:25
  But we have we've, we've grown massively what the first
• 8:29
  bottling plant that we had over there, we only had licence to
• 8:31
  bottle. Now we can actually keep casks
• 8:35
  there. And so we will have a lot of
• 8:36
  casks that we were just sampling this morning.
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  Just checking out a number of it's.
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  Tough for you? Space ice.
• 8:42
  Highlights. Yes, there are probably.
• 8:45
  Yeah, there was a Tober Moi there.
• 8:47
  That's probably the best Tober Moi I've ever tasted.
• 8:50
  It was absolutely magic. Chris Weir what 3 drams?
• 8:55
  Tobermori was one of his what? 3 drams?
• 8:58
  Yes, sorry. I've got a bad habit now of any
• 9:00
  time somebody mentions a distillery or a DRAM, my brain
• 9:03
  goes straight to has that been a Walk 3 drama and then I could go
• 9:06
  back to it's a better recall than me.
• 9:08
  So yeah, so that was. So yeah, we did that until
• 9:13
  midday and then I jumped on a bus and came into town and did a
• 9:16
  stuff train. Yeah.
• 9:20
  And was. At the same, the same. 5
• 9:22
  whiskeys, yeah, yeah, I wasn't carrying them around with me as
• 9:25
  well. We just arranged to.
• 9:27
  Get bars and restaurants from within Edinburgh then.
• 9:29
  That's exciting, I. Know you're.
• 9:30
  Just gonna stop and now I'm here.
• 9:32
  And then you're off someplace else, are you?
• 9:34
  Yeah, I've got to run. As soon as we drop this, I've
• 9:37
  got to run to. We've got a big get together
• 9:39
  with all the team, most of the team that come out to play from
• 9:43
  from the warehouse coming because we don't see them.
• 9:45
  I only see them on little screens normally.
• 9:47
  Yeah, wow. Right.
• 9:48
  So and then when you're back down, are you here for a while
• 9:51
  or are you? Well, I'm travelling back down
• 9:53
  Saturday morning. So have you got any of the
• 9:55
  other? Are you getting a day off or are
• 9:56
  you just constantly out of the back?
• 9:58
  We've got yeah, we, we're what we've got tomorrow I've got
• 10:02
  another, another trade tasting stuff to stuff training trade
• 10:06
  tasting tomorrow afternoon. And on Friday, we've got a big
• 10:11
  tasting over in the black bull in over in cold E colder.
• 10:18
  Is it now? Yeah, no, E colder at the back
• 10:21
  of the East. Colder.
• 10:21
  That's well known, yeah. There you go.
• 10:23
  If you're there next day, you can.
• 10:25
  I think we're gonna try and. What week?
• 10:28
  We're gonna try and sneak into Rosebank as well on Friday
• 10:31
  sometime during the day. Literally sneaking.
• 10:35
  We've got it. We've got an invite because.
• 10:37
  I was about to tell you when there's a hole in the fence, I.
• 10:41
  My daughter and I tried to climb in quite a few years ago when we
• 10:44
  did the full whiskey festival, but I'm too old to get over the
• 10:47
  blown fence so we just took some pictures through the gates.
• 10:50
  Yeah. Well, a big shout out to Vicky,
• 10:52
  Vicky Elliott, who is, well, she's, she was working at the
• 10:56
  Rose Rose back, but I think she's now sort of moving further
• 10:59
  into the Ian MacLeod distiller sort of head office now.
• 11:02
  I think that's an end in there. So, yeah, big shout out to Vicky
• 11:05
  if you're listening. Yeah.
• 11:07
  So, right. First of all, for people
• 11:09
  listening, you've mentioned Atom brands, we've talked about it,
• 11:12
  Master of Malt, all these kind of things.
• 11:14
  Explain to us who are Atom brands and what do they do?
• 11:17
  OK, well Atom Group is the parent company and it owns
• 11:21
  Master of Malt, which is the online retail store.
• 11:24
  The the the the drinks warehouse, mostly whiskey.
• 11:28
  Master of Malt is the online retail.
• 11:32
  Atom stands for A Taste of Malt. There you go.
• 11:38
  There we go, a taste of malt. And the Atom Group owns also
• 11:43
  Atom Brands, which has all of the whiskey brands, the gin
• 11:48
  brands, so Bathtub gin, for example, Rambouli and the spiced
• 11:51
  rum. The whiskey brands like the
• 11:54
  boutique drinks company with boutique whiskey, rum, gin.
• 11:58
  And we've bought some brandies, the worm tub whiskeys that we've
• 12:02
  got coming out, the Darkness whiskeys, boutique whiskey sort
• 12:05
  of came 1st 2012, Darkness came in 2014, Intensely Sherid
• 12:11
  whiskeys, very, very small batches and and then a number of
• 12:14
  other brands sit alongside there.
• 12:16
  And then there's the distribution Maverick drinks,
• 12:20
  which do represent some third party brands that are coming in.
• 12:24
  So we look after KIRO over here, the the Finish Rye, the boys do
• 12:29
  I I might talk about that now as well because I'm a big fan of
• 12:32
  rye whiskey. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:34
  Brilliant. Well, I'm, I'm glad tonight
• 12:35
  because actually I'm just thinking there, you're talking
• 12:37
  about master and Malt there. Tonight is the night that I
• 12:39
  actually get a dividend from Master and Malt in the sense I
• 12:43
  get something back because I spent an absolute fortune with
• 12:46
  you guys doing COVID have. You got Master of Malt prime.
• 12:51
  No, I don't actually. I've kind of had to.
• 12:53
  I think I've banned myself. So I sent him an e-mail.
• 12:56
  I said don't ever accept any more of order from me.
• 13:00
  I just became, you know, people listen, it's a well trodden
• 13:03
  path. You know, in the whiskey in the
• 13:05
  Whiskey Stories podcast, people during lockdown, so many people
• 13:09
  got involved in Whiskey Kev from Diggers.
• 13:13
  What was it? It was been having been having
• 13:16
  which one was that key? Remember.
• 13:18
  It. Was a French wine one, was it
• 13:20
  not? Strange maybe a pitted French
• 13:22
  wine been having maybe one of the mines and it was the case he
• 13:24
  was testing if he still had his palette every week by trying
• 13:27
  that DRAM. I think master or malt I I
• 13:29
  always thought Mastermat to say I use all the time when I'm
• 13:33
  buying whiskey. What I thought was particularly
• 13:35
  impressive was you could buy sample size 3 CLS and nobody
• 13:40
  else ever done this to the ability and to the quality.
• 13:43
  I've I've bought the bourbon packs.
• 13:45
  I've done all sorts of master remote for research purposes and
• 13:49
  HMRC. Well, it's been really
• 13:53
  interesting because you can go OK, after treating yourself to a
• 13:58
  couple £100 bottle, you know, buy a sample, buy a three CL.
• 14:02
  It's a great service. And I think a lot of people done
• 14:05
  that with their online tastes. And Charles Kerr certainly said
• 14:07
  he's done it. He was ended up with olive oil
• 14:09
  business. But for David, he's doing online
• 14:19
  Zoom tastings and he's so nervous about sending whiskey in
• 14:21
  the post, right. He's convinced the the woman
• 14:24
  work in the post office. He started an olive oil business
• 14:27
  and he'd be, he was so paranoid. He'd be researching different
• 14:30
  kinds of presses and such for olive oil in case she asked him
• 14:34
  any. How's the business going?
• 14:35
  It must be going well. We all, we all use olive oil.
• 14:39
  But I mean, it was take, add cook another one.
• 14:43
  There's so many people that and, and for our, our sort of thing,
• 14:47
  I guess was we, we kind of both got, we're always close pals,
• 14:53
  oldest pals and stuff like that. But it was like we both kind of
• 14:56
  found whiskey at the same time. Kind of about the same time,
• 14:59
  you're right. And for me, it was more, it
• 15:01
  wasn't during the kind of the kind of deep lockdown, it was
• 15:04
  more the emergent out of lockdown where you were able to
• 15:07
  kind of, you know, go on holiday, but only in yeah, with
• 15:11
  the UK. And I ended up right, let's go
• 15:13
  to ILA. And it was like, right that that
• 15:15
  was really for me. Well, I mean, I spent.
• 15:18
  One of the big moments. I spent absolute fortune.
• 15:20
  I'd be researching it and then I see somebody talking it and I
• 15:22
  like the idea of at that point, I mean, even I look, I've still
• 15:26
  got some of the bottles in the house and I look at them and I
• 15:29
  think they're not, you know, well, look at the whiskey that
• 15:33
  we've been able to try and the people that we've spoken to.
• 15:35
  This just shows you, I think it was Mark Thompson who said on
• 15:38
  the podcast, Like when you think you know everything about
• 15:41
  whiskey, you're knackered. Yeah, because you don't.
• 15:43
  You don't know. How how many people?
• 15:46
  I think you said like 95% or 99% of people that walk into a
• 15:49
  whiskey bar don't actually know that much about whiskey.
• 15:52
  So when you're in like you doing a training session with staff
• 15:55
  behind the bar, giving them that extra bit of knowledge suddenly
• 15:58
  just means that they're in that better position so they can
• 16:01
  actually help that person. Well, I hope so, yeah.
• 16:03
  I mean, I try and share as much I I'm, I'm just a whiskey geek.
• 16:06
  I'm the geek, period. Everything I've done in my, my
• 16:10
  past career, I, I just throw myself into it full on.
• 16:13
  And yeah, whiskey. I I discovered whiskey and I
• 16:18
  thought, well, I start writing about it and I I started a
• 16:21
  little blog. Well, yeah, talk.
• 16:23
  So sorry. Let's talk about your journey
• 16:24
  into whiskey then. So this was you as a geek.
• 16:27
  You just. You were.
• 16:28
  I, I, yeah, I was AI was a rugby coach, rugby referee.
• 16:32
  My knees were shot and I, I couldn't go to the rugby
• 16:34
  anymore. And my sales manager, I mean, I,
• 16:37
  I drank rum just to fall over really.
• 16:43
  But my, my background is boat building, yacht building, marine
• 16:47
  industry. But the marine industry crashed
• 16:50
  in 2008 and I had to go back into heavy engineering and my
• 16:54
  sales manager introduced me to whiskey.
• 16:58
  And there there's 1W, which is I just just, I changed my life
• 17:02
  completely and I needed to go and buy a bottle of whiskey.
• 17:05
  And I went out and bought a bottle of whiskey.
• 17:07
  And then I bought another four. And then I started writing about
• 17:10
  them at Christmas. And then over the period of the
• 17:12
  next year, I said to myself, as a New Year's resolution, I'm
• 17:16
  going to buy one new bottle of whiskey every month.
• 17:18
  I'm going to write about it. And that's what I did.
• 17:20
  By the end of that year, I bought, I think about 20
• 17:23
  something bottles. So I'd overdone.
• 17:25
  Overdone. It.
• 17:27
  Just 20 months and a year. I'd gone metric and I was, I
• 17:33
  was, yeah, my brother said, you should turn this into, I was
• 17:36
  just writing on Facebook for family and friends.
• 17:38
  And he said, you turn that into a blog.
• 17:40
  How do we do that? And so we create this little
• 17:42
  whiskey discovery blog. And then I wanted to go to a
• 17:46
  whiskey show and I called my eldest daughter up and we went
• 17:49
  to a whiskey show. And this is just the life we
• 17:52
  want to go to this whiskey shows.
• 17:55
  And so we did a few more and Cat started writing on the blog and
• 17:59
  it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.
• 18:02
  And then I thought, I want to work at these whiskey shows.
• 18:05
  So I basically called a brand up that I'd met at the first one
• 18:08
  and said, do you need a hand? And because I'd worked overseas
• 18:11
  and he was coming in from overseas, it was an American
• 18:13
  company, it was Balcony's. And I called Chip Tate up
• 18:16
  basically and said, do you need a hand?
• 18:17
  Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?
• 18:19
  Because I looked after visiting firemen when I was working in
• 18:22
  the Far East. No, you don't need to do that.
• 18:24
  But we'll have you on board. We know what you're doing.
• 18:26
  Yeah. So I worked a couple of whiskey
• 18:28
  shows with him. We start the whiskey club.
• 18:32
  We started doing our own tastings that I'd buy the
• 18:35
  whiskeys, put them together, and then we're going to tell
• 18:37
  stories, sell tickets in a in a local pub.
• 18:40
  And it just exploded from there, really.
• 18:43
  So you almost became three years, your geekiness, a brand
• 18:46
  ambassador before you were an employed brand ambassador
• 18:49
  because you were. You were an ambassador for
• 18:51
  whiskey. Yes, whereas we were, because we
• 18:54
  went to just about every whiskey show we could as a father and
• 18:56
  daughter team, most people knew who we were.
• 18:59
  Then we turned up at everything we were invited to and we we
• 19:04
  were trusted to look after the stand.
• 19:05
  You know, if someone wanted it, could you get a coffee for us?
• 19:07
  You ever getting them a coffee or could you just look after the
• 19:10
  stand day? I've got to go and do a master
• 19:11
  class. And they knew that we just
• 19:13
  wouldn't go, you know, they knew that we'd be sensible.
• 19:16
  We'd tell a story because that's what we we we were geeks.
• 19:20
  Do you, do you? Do you have a favorite whiskey
• 19:22
  show? I the the I I do have AII think
• 19:28
  whiskey like Paris is just fantastic, but for for fun.
• 19:32
  Glasgow Whiskey Festival. Oh, right.
• 19:34
  OK. Yeah, there's run run by Glasgow
• 19:36
  Whiskey Club. That's just brilliant.
• 19:39
  It's at Hampden Park last year, wasn't it?
• 19:41
  I think that was at Hampden Park.
• 19:42
  It's been there for a number of years.
• 19:44
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, brilliant.
• 19:46
  Well, I mean, you mentioned your daughter there.
• 19:48
  So I've just, I've just had a baby girl myself and you're sort
• 19:53
  of looking into the, you're trying to look into the future
• 19:56
  and you're going, was it going to be horses?
• 19:58
  I'm going to have to buy it. Is she going to be a gymnast?
• 20:00
  She's going to be a ballerina. Is she going to like football?
• 20:04
  But aye, whiskey, brilliant. So you and your daughter, what a
• 20:07
  thing to be able to bond with your daughter and also be part
• 20:11
  of that, you know, journey as well together.
• 20:13
  Yeah, it well, she's, yeah, she's my eldest daughter by, you
• 20:17
  know, 10 years between the youngest and, and the middle
• 20:20
  one. And yes, yes, she's yeah, which
• 20:23
  is a mate. I mean, all the, the kids are
• 20:25
  all mates now. They're all grown up and they're
• 20:26
  good mates and I love, I love going out with them.
• 20:28
  And yes, she got into, she wanted to come to the whiskey
• 20:31
  club and she fell into it as well and she enjoyed doing the
• 20:34
  whiskey taste. And she's a social butterfly as
• 20:37
  well. Likes people, loves people,
• 20:40
  never stops talking. And yeah, she was really good at
• 20:44
  organising tasty, She's got great palette and she would do
• 20:47
  sort of food pairings with the chef in the hotel or the bar
• 20:50
  that we were working. We would do little whiskey and
• 20:52
  food pairings just to make it a little bit more special and
• 20:55
  trying to get a wider demographic in basically than
• 20:59
  white bearded men. Yeah, if you're if you're
• 21:04
  watching this, you're looking. At four of them.
• 21:12
  Up and running, I'll be there. You're.
• 21:13
  Shaving your Hamish but. Wait till eight in November.
• 21:18
  He's on he's on the cast rest of get a bit of hair on his chin.
• 21:20
  But but so right. So you started doing this
• 21:24
  yourself, What stage then did it get to when Atom came in and or
• 21:29
  did you? Were you still working with
• 21:30
  anybody else before Atom or did it?
• 21:33
  I did 2W22 years with not full part time with with Balacones to
• 21:40
  doing the whiskey shows in the UK with Chip Tate.
• 21:42
  This is in the old days of Balcones with.
• 21:44
  Chip Tate People don't know Balcones as as a Texan single
• 21:48
  malt. It's a Texan distillery that
• 21:50
  wanted to make single malt, but they started off with blue corn,
• 21:55
  native corn to Americas, rather than the yellow dent corn.
• 21:59
  But they did make a single malt. Yes, in new oak.
• 22:01
  And they built the distillery themselves, Chip, and built the
• 22:06
  stills themselves. Wow.
• 22:08
  Yeah. He, he, he, him and Jared Belt
• 22:11
  belted the copper and built their own stills the first time.
• 22:14
  Chip Tate. Chip Tate.
• 22:16
  One here, man. Hey, chip take.
• 22:18
  Chip take. And I worked worked with him for
• 22:21
  I learnt so much from him in those first couple of years.
• 22:24
  And then we did some work for, I was a honorary brand ambassador
• 22:29
  for Douglas Lang. Well, yeah.
• 22:31
  And we did some Weems tastings as well on the South London and
• 22:36
  South, basically doing Weems. Tasting Weems before Kings Barns
• 22:40
  had. This yeah, before Kings Barns
• 22:41
  started making whiskey. It's just a independent bottler
• 22:44
  with their three, sort of their their spice, the hiking, Yeah,
• 22:48
  the high and. Family like Fife family Fife
• 22:50
  based family there so. The royalty, The Fife, were they
• 22:53
  not? Yeah.
• 22:53
  So go with the with the daughters, actually.
• 22:56
  So what happened in 2016? I think it was 2015, sixteen.
• 23:00
  I wanted to go to the whiskey show in London, the the Whiskey
• 23:04
  Life show. I didn't want to, I could get a
• 23:07
  press ticket for the Friday night or the Friday afternoon
• 23:10
  Friday, but I just wanted to go the whole weekend.
• 23:11
  I wanted to work it. So I called Balconies up and
• 23:13
  said, do you need a hand? No, no, we're we're we're full.
• 23:15
  We we've got everyone. Sorry about that, but I know
• 23:17
  Maverick drinks need a hand give give Maverick a call.
• 23:21
  So I knew Michael at Maverick, Michael Vashon and called him up
• 23:24
  and said, yeah, yeah, come along.
• 23:25
  You can look after Boutique and and Kat too.
• 23:29
  So we helped them run the stand for Boutique at Whiskey Live and
• 23:35
  then they called me up and said we've got a whiskey show in
• 23:38
  Bristol. Can you get to Bristol next
• 23:39
  weekend? I said, yeah, I can do that.
• 23:41
  Well, we'll pay you. We'll cover your expenses and
• 23:44
  everything. Oh, lovely.
• 23:45
  What do you want me to do then? Just turn up.
• 23:47
  We'll turn up with the whiskey. I did a really good whiskey show
• 23:51
  in Bristol. Apparently they'd sold more
• 23:53
  boutique that weekend than they ever sold at a whiskey show
• 23:55
  before. We won stand of the day.
• 23:57
  We didn't win Whiskey of the day, but there was, it was easy
• 24:01
  because there was far too many whiskeys.
• 24:03
  Actually, we had some really beautiful whiskeys and they,
• 24:06
  they send another long list to me.
• 24:08
  They said, right, these are all the shows that we've committed
• 24:10
  to these this year. Which ones can't you do?
• 24:14
  And I thought, well I can do them all you've given me, I'll
• 24:16
  just take the time off and and do it because I was working full
• 24:19
  time as an engineer then. And then they said, well we want
• 24:23
  your daughter to go with you and look after American craft
• 24:27
  spirits. So I was looking after boutique
• 24:30
  for the year, doing shows up and down the country up to Falkirk.
• 24:34
  I think Falkirk was my first ever Scottish whiskey festival.
• 24:37
  There's still being a hobby, but at this point as well.
• 24:41
  And Cat looked after Balcony's few spirits and smooth Ambler
• 24:45
  and we as a father and daughter team, we travelled the country
• 24:48
  every weekend away and. Cat now works in whiskey,
• 24:51
  doesn't she? Yeah, she ended up, she started
• 24:54
  working with Gordon McPhail up until she was furloughed and
• 24:59
  then laid off. So she was UK Sales London and
• 25:03
  South Sales for Gordon McPhail and she's been working for
• 25:07
  Nickname as Sales, UK Sales for the last four years.
• 25:12
  I mean, that's, I mean, it's a fantastic story.
• 25:14
  I mean, it's and also what's really interesting, I've picked
• 25:17
  up on another engineer on the podcast who's given up on
• 25:23
  engineering and joined whiskey there.
• 25:25
  There has to be, we've, we've sort of looked at it from so
• 25:28
  many different angles here. There has to be a a a, a pathway
• 25:33
  where you see people in engineering that like whiskey
• 25:36
  but seem to just get an attraction to it.
• 25:39
  Tell me it might help. We've had different people.
• 25:42
  Jake Adkook was one of them, actually.
• 25:44
  Who again was it engineering? He'd.
• 25:46
  Done it. You've had Jodie Buchan, you've
• 25:47
  got Cam you and you've got phasers.
• 25:49
  Soon as there must be a chemical reaction in your brain to
• 25:52
  applying to do engineering at university and drinking whiskey.
• 25:56
  To you as engineer, engineer, engineer Napier right here.
• 25:59
  Really. Yeah, there are.
• 26:00
  So there's a lot like, no, this is it's a bit mad, but what is
• 26:05
  it to whiskey? Because Jake ad Cook said.
• 26:07
  Don't care about the history, don't care about, you know, like
• 26:12
  the romantic romance side of it. He was.
• 26:14
  He's a blender. He cares about the the quality
• 26:16
  of the liquid. Very sensitive.
• 26:17
  And is everything what it's all? About what is it about whiskey?
• 26:21
  I tell you what. What's about whiskey?
• 26:22
  I mean, I used to run out a gear plant, a plant that made when I
• 26:26
  fell in love with ski, I wasn't boat building anymore.
• 26:29
  I loved boat building. Boat building was fun round the
• 26:32
  world, yachtsmen and mental. Anyone who sails around the
• 26:35
  world alone is has definitely got a screw loose.
• 26:41
  But working back in in heavy engineering, there was always
• 26:45
  this saying that when people when showing people around and
• 26:47
  well, how many people have you got here working for you here,
• 26:49
  Dave? And I'd say probably about half
• 26:51
  of them, but you don't see that in whiskey when you go to.
• 26:58
  I mean, I was fortunate that I was going.
• 27:00
  I got invited to lots of little press trips as a whiskey Blogger
• 27:03
  back in the day. And everyone was so passionate
• 27:08
  about what they were doing. Even if their distillery wasn't
• 27:11
  a brand yet, they made the best whiskey.
• 27:14
  They were passionate about what they were doing.
• 27:16
  And you see the passion from the brand ambassadors, you see the
• 27:20
  passion from the the big fans or the geeks, the bloggers.
• 27:24
  And you see the passion from the people who are making the
• 27:27
  whiskey from, you know, coopering to to blending.
• 27:30
  There's a passion about it. They want it to be the best.
• 27:33
  So. So when did being a part time
• 27:36
  brand ambassador turn into being a full time brand ambassador?
• 27:39
  Well, halfway through that year that I was looking after
• 27:42
  boutique whiskey, they called me up and said how would you like
• 27:45
  to do this full time? I said, are you serious?
• 27:48
  I called my daughter up and she said you've handed your notice
• 27:51
  in Dad, haven't you? Well, no, not yet.
• 27:54
  Do it. You don't need, you don't need
• 27:56
  this stress of of what you were doing at the time.
• 27:59
  So. Yeah.
• 28:00
  What I. Mean and then when?
• 28:03
  So how long have you then been full time as a brand ambassador?
• 28:07
  Well, a full time employee, I did one year as a contractor and
• 28:11
  then a full time 7 years. I think I just got my seven-year
• 28:15
  card, so one year before that. No, I pinch myself every
• 28:18
  morning. Seriously, I pinch myself every
• 28:20
  morning that I'm allowed to do what I do.
• 28:22
  And there's an interesting thing about brand ambassadors, and
• 28:24
  we've touched that a wee bit before of other ones,
• 28:27
  particularly I've come to mind, like Jodie Buck and a Monkey
• 28:29
  Shoulder, where you become associated with the brand.
• 28:33
  Because, you know, when we were talking before the podcast and
• 28:35
  we were talking about, oh, how do you want us to refer to, you
• 28:38
  said, oh, well, I'm known as Boutique Dave.
• 28:40
  Yeah. So you are fairly tied to the
• 28:43
  brand. Very, very much tied to the
• 28:45
  brand. Well, that's a whiskey geek is
• 28:46
  perfect. Yeah, you know, in an odd sort
• 28:49
  of way, you know, you, the brand sort of found you rather than
• 28:54
  you finding the brand. You know, you, you phoned us,
• 28:57
  you know, this show up, you want to attend the show, you phoned
• 29:00
  the brand up, the brand said come and help.
• 29:01
  And eventually, you know, you ended up being the brand
• 29:04
  ambassador. But what, what is it about the
• 29:08
  boutique whiskey that you just that, that, that that excites
• 29:13
  you when you're being a brand ambassador?
• 29:14
  What, what, what? What's the essence of it,
• 29:16
  really? Well, really, really.
• 29:17
  Because every time I went out with a, with a, with a show, I
• 29:21
  had a different box of toys to play with every week.
• 29:23
  I had to. I have to know stories about
• 29:27
  every. Distilleries.
• 29:28
  Not so many. So many distilleries, Yeah, we
• 29:30
  have 225 different labels. So some of them, you know, some
• 29:35
  distilleries will have the more than one label, like Brook
• 29:37
  Laddie, for example. There were four labels under the
• 29:40
  Brook Laddie for the each of their different whiskeys there
• 29:43
  that they make. But yeah, we bottled whiskey
• 29:45
  from not just the the Scottish distilleries, but right around
• 29:48
  the world. So I have to be able to tell a
• 29:50
  story about each of these distilleries.
• 29:52
  You know, sometimes I can't remember at all and I have to
• 29:55
  look at look at notes. But yeah, I have to know stories
• 29:58
  about. I'm actually Duncan Taylor
• 30:01
  Tasting recently hosted by our friend Mark Thompson, who of
• 30:04
  course was the best in the world for championing a solo brand
• 30:09
  that he knew and was known for and he absolutely loved.
• 30:13
  Okay, I've got a new box of toys every tasting.
• 30:17
  It's been years since I had a Glen Talkers.
• 30:20
  Let me go and rediscover each of these distilleries, what they're
• 30:24
  about. And I suppose you're always kind
• 30:26
  of kept on your toes as an independent bottle of Brand
• 30:29
  Ambassador. Yes, absolutely.
• 30:31
  Despite coming from actually maybe also because you come from
• 30:36
  Atom brands and you have such a vast portfolio of liquid.
• 30:42
  This is also, yes, boutique is, you say, relatively new brand,
• 30:45
  2012. OK, we've seen loads of new
• 30:47
  independent bottlers since then. But the volume of casks, the
• 30:52
  quality of liquid, the relationships that atom brands
• 30:55
  have with distilleries around the world mean that you're not
• 30:58
  just an independent bottler who's stuck with, let's say, ex
• 31:02
  foreign fauna. Diageo casts lots of liquid for
• 31:04
  sailors, lots of. And I love a manic more.
• 31:06
  I love a Ben Renis. But you go to a whiskey show,
• 31:09
  there will be seven of them. Yeah, different bottlers.
• 31:12
  You're bottling some really interesting stuff from all over
• 31:16
  Scotland as well, and all over the world.
• 31:18
  All over the world, yeah. There I always talk about as a,
• 31:21
  as a brand ambassador. There are 95 established single
• 31:23
  malt distilleries in Scotland, 95 and that's everything younger
• 31:26
  than older than Kilhoman. Kilhoman founded in 2005.
• 31:32
  There were two distilleries in 2005, but when no one talked
• 31:35
  about that other one until at least 10 years, and there's
• 31:38
  always whispers about that. And there's never really been
• 31:40
  one independently bottled as a single malt, I guess.
• 31:44
  We yeah, we bought 7. There's there's some what we
• 31:46
  won't get. Yeah, there's some we can get,
• 31:48
  you know, with. I'd love a Talisker.
• 31:50
  Yeah, I'd love a Poultney. Yeah, we might be able to.
• 31:53
  Yeah, we might be able to. We wouldn't get a Talisker, We
• 31:55
  wouldn't get a Royal. We wouldn't be able to.
• 31:57
  Get a falsely anyway. We wouldn't you?
• 31:59
  Wouldn't be able to name though, as we had Pete from Woven the
• 32:05
  owner and blender. Woven said his dream blend
• 32:08
  worked with him previously he said would be Spring Bank and
• 32:10
  Talisker. And of course it's easy to say
• 32:12
  that because great whiskey is great, great profiles, but he
• 32:15
  knows he'll never be able to buy casts of them.
• 32:18
  James Edie was an example of they'd done a Fife blend that
• 32:21
  was known to be Daft Mill and Cambridge, but it really
• 32:27
  shouldn't have been known to be that because it's not like they
• 32:28
  bought a parcel of cast from DAF Mill.
• 32:31
  They might have bought 100 bottles or something and done
• 32:34
  whatever they've done personally or buying closed doors with it
• 32:37
  and but it is hard to do establish facilities.
• 32:39
  That's still a good amount, 90 odd.
• 32:42
  Yeah, 79 of the 95 and I think 4 of the new distilleries.
• 32:46
  Yeah, 6 of the 7 grain and then lots of clothes distilleries.
• 32:49
  Because that, that was the thing I was, I was on your website
• 32:51
  this morning and it was remarkable, actually.
• 32:53
  I know head of research. Yeah.
• 32:59
  But it was really. What indicates his boss's
• 33:02
  listing? I know, I know.
• 33:04
  This is before this is. It was.
• 33:06
  June, my lunch break. 490. Yeah.
• 33:08
  June, my lunch break, I was looking at your website.
• 33:11
  And it's remarkable, some of the distilleries that you.
• 33:18
  You. You.
• 33:18
  You don't. Necessarily see them frequently
• 33:21
  with other independent bottlers that you know you've bought
• 33:25
  yourself like you said 7979 out of the 95 and not just that but
• 33:29
  also. Close.
• 33:30
  Distilleries so I with that 95 you know, you've you've had
• 33:34
  little mills and so forth as well.
• 33:36
  So, and I think probably this is a good time to say, you know,
• 33:39
  you've you've kind of empty handed tonight here.
• 33:42
  I haven't, no. I've got some world whiskeys.
• 33:44
  Got some world whiskeys and I'm I'm haven't seen what you've
• 33:47
  got. It kind of exemplifies what
• 33:49
  you've got on your range. So I don't know if you've got
• 33:52
  something we could. We definitely want this is where
• 33:54
  we're gonna start and this is from our end of the World
• 33:58
  Series. So we did a 15 different
• 34:01
  bottlings from different distilleries, some of them
• 34:02
  worldwide. This is a nine year old.
• 34:05
  We call this space eyed #8 and this is a, this is the very
• 34:11
  first cask we've ever had of this distillery.
• 34:16
  I'll just I'll just have a small one.
• 34:18
  I think I'm driving you home tonight.
• 34:19
  So this is. Your first ever cask from this
• 34:26
  distillery. Yeah, this is we.
• 34:27
  We. I've wanted one of these for a
• 34:28
  long time. And So what is what's named on
• 34:31
  the bottle? Do we get any kind of wee clue?
• 34:33
  Right, Yeah, we did do it on on our website.
• 34:36
  We did put some clues here. So our end of the World Series
• 34:40
  is there we. Go.
• 34:44
  Our end of the World Series we it's, it's a tongue in cheek
• 34:48
  joke because master of Malt was an independent company, Atom
• 34:53
  Group was an independent company and five years ago it was bought
• 34:55
  by a big international company. And the, the, the time of their
• 35:02
  the, the, the, the like the directors earn out was ending at
• 35:05
  the end of last year. So this was the end of the end
• 35:07
  of our world. We didn't know what was going to
• 35:09
  happen and it was our tongue in cheek little joke.
• 35:13
  You know, we hid from everybody. It was all very, very much close
• 35:17
  in, in the, in in the whiskey team.
• 35:20
  And so we have 15 labels depicting different scenes of,
• 35:25
  well, this. One, you've gone for nuclear.
• 35:29
  Nuclear nuclear apocalypse here this is, and I just love this
• 35:33
  label. Check out the Instagram we'll
• 35:35
  get all the labels and stuff but our.
• 35:37
  Content, you know, I mean, we've talked to independent bottlers
• 35:40
  about labels and, you know, different in the power of the
• 35:43
  bottlers. I mean, fragrant drops, for
• 35:45
  example, very much go for the kind of black and white sketch.
• 35:48
  Yeah, it's, it's something quite, you know, you know,
• 35:53
  connected with the whiskey. They've gone for, you know, for
• 35:55
  example, you know, they they've looked at things that happened
• 35:58
  on the day that the bottle was in the news, the day the bottle,
• 36:01
  the gas. Was, yes, nice.
• 36:03
  Gordon Macphail, which is very numbers heavy and consistent and
• 36:07
  people like that. But I suppose you've told his
• 36:09
  Angus, you have a lot of miniature series from within the
• 36:12
  boutique brand. And so I think that's quite
• 36:15
  interesting. You'll have big fans that follow
• 36:17
  Boutiki whiskey, Boutiki rum, and then they'll say, oh, but
• 36:19
  have you seen the the kind of movie series, the cinema series
• 36:23
  that you do? Yeah, we started doing things.
• 36:25
  Well, we, we start because we, we, we've got a collection of
• 36:27
  labels for all the, all the distilleries.
• 36:31
  We started noticing when we first came on the scene, all the
• 36:33
  labels were fairly plain, not for Boutiki, but every other
• 36:36
  independent bottle. The whiskey labels were quite
• 36:38
  dull and we wanted to put some fun back into it, so that's
• 36:41
  where we found Emily Chapple, the artist who does all of our
• 36:44
  labours. One artist, one artist.
• 36:45
  Has done everything so we wanted to put the fun we wanted to
• 36:49
  start telling stories and, and put that bit of fun we we don't
• 36:53
  take ourselves seriously, but we take the whiskey seriously.
• 36:56
  So we we we started seeing you know even the Diageo special
• 37:00
  releases started putting illustrations on their labels.
• 37:04
  So we thought, well, we need to up our game.
• 37:05
  Let's do a series, let's do collections, let's put our our
• 37:10
  whiskey's out as a as an out turn some.
• 37:12
  Really serious, like go to some really tongue in cheek labels
• 37:15
  which I always loved. When I first got into whiskey,
• 37:18
  1819 years old, I had never seen anything like it to be honest,
• 37:22
  and I knew it even when I was learning about independent
• 37:25
  bottlers. This was a little bit outrageous
• 37:27
  as far as I was concerned. You.
• 37:28
  Know we were the naughty boys. You really were.
• 37:30
  Yeah, we definitely were. OK, this label here, we, we, we
• 37:35
  did choose of all of our disasters to to suit a story at
• 37:40
  the distillery. So we had a super volcano on the
• 37:42
  Ben Nevis label, for example, because Ben Nevis is one of the
• 37:46
  old super volcanoes. So there's a little tie in
• 37:49
  there. We put the bomb on this because
• 37:52
  a well known independent bottler dropped the bomb last year or
• 37:56
  the end of last beginning of the year before wasn't it said they
• 37:58
  weren't going to be an independent bottler anymore, but
• 38:00
  they have a distillery in space side, Yeah.
• 38:04
  That we always wanted a bottle, so we're not allowed to name it.
• 38:06
  Yeah. Of course.
• 38:07
  Actually interesting. And so that's why we put the
• 38:10
  bomb on it. And this is this is, I mean, you
• 38:12
  can see we haven't touched it. Yeah, it is just a refill.
• 38:14
  Hoggy. It's.
• 38:15
  Like lightly pitted as well then?
• 38:17
  It's there's a there definitely seems to be that standard style
• 38:20
  and that's old space side style and I think it's.
• 38:23
  There's Dave. I love this because you and I
• 38:26
  are now thinking the same thing, you know, and Angus and Graham
• 38:28
  are going what the hell is he? Talking, I think we do.
• 38:31
  And also these ones have been growing in confidence for us.
• 38:34
  Well, I'm thinking. Something, but I'm probably
• 38:36
  wrong. Once the cameras and the
• 38:37
  microphones are awful, be interesting for us to find out
• 38:39
  what. Well done, we went and got it
• 38:51
  so. Let's try it again.
• 38:52
  That's great, isn't it? So.
• 38:54
  Here's there wasn't there wasn't a problem with your audio there.
• 38:56
  We have literally cut the mics for half a second and Mr. Forget
• 38:59
  it if anyone can read my Graham's lips.
• 39:03
  I'm very nobody will be able to for that.
• 39:05
  That's that. But what I did, what I did catch
• 39:07
  my eye, weirdly enough, was there was a very weird and
• 39:10
  interesting story about how you came about to meet your artists
• 39:15
  and actually find her in the first place on a website.
• 39:18
  There was some story about reading at Abandon Wales or
• 39:20
  something. There, there, there, there's a,
• 39:24
  there's a, there's a right, there's a right kind of it's on
• 39:27
  there. There's a real nonsense story on
• 39:29
  the website. We, we actually met Emily on a
• 39:31
  booze cruise on Loch Lomond, on a boat trip on Loch Lomond, on
• 39:34
  a, on a whiskey trip on Loch Lomond.
• 39:36
  Our marketing director at the time, a young young lady, Emily
• 39:42
  Chappell, a young lady, we're talking got friendly on the
• 39:45
  boat. And so we were we're we're doing
• 39:49
  this. We're looking for an artist And
• 39:50
  basically she put her hand over here's a job.
• 39:53
  And so she's been with us and she's a, a a big friend of the,
• 39:56
  of the business. Now she's an independent artist.
• 39:58
  She doesn't work for us. She does her own stuff.
• 40:01
  Google her Emily Chapel illustration.
• 40:03
  She does some really she's got another company called Mutant
• 40:07
  mule. I buy all her T-shirts, her
• 40:09
  T-shirts. Just bring them the three three
• 40:11
  eyed Don Mule. Interest.
• 40:14
  That's cool. The fellow fox, the Three Eye,
• 40:17
  all got three eyes. Yeah, Is that what happened
• 40:19
  after the bomb is actually an artist.
• 40:23
  I remember a Scotch. We're all artists.
• 40:25
  No, I guess a Scotch and sketch. Remember Rossi surprised us.
• 40:29
  We were at it was actually the glass house.
• 40:31
  We're doing an event in the summer in the in the garden area
• 40:34
  upstairs and. It was a new Adelphi.
• 40:37
  In Adelphi, yeah, it was a new way of sort of tasting whiskey,
• 40:40
  where it was a Scotch and sketch that they had an artist over who
• 40:43
  was set up a few nice wee scenes and we had to enjoy sipping
• 40:47
  whiskey and drawing pictures and Angus.
• 40:51
  It was absolutely fantastic. What what I would?
• 40:52
  Say is it's amazing how the prospects of public ridicule can
• 40:56
  really focus on if. We were to ever bring out our
• 41:00
  own bottle range. Angus should design the lead.
• 41:03
  Absolutely. I'll get the crayons out.
• 41:06
  But we are, I should say as well, we we are sitting here,
• 41:09
  thanks to Dave, we're enjoying this lovely whiskey.
• 41:11
  We've got plenty of other drams as well, which we're really
• 41:13
  looking forward to. But what drams have we got in
• 41:16
  front of us this evening? Well, you've finished your
• 41:18
  drama, Angus. What was it you had?
• 41:22
  Sorry, I I had a Loch Lee and it was just I did take a picture.
• 41:26
  I get it right because I'll get it wrong if I don't, but it was
• 41:29
  a sewing edition, first crop so it was all first.
• 41:31
  Well where I went. Non chill feller.
• 41:33
  Does he describe natural colour for a?
• 41:36
  That's an 848%, yeah. It was really nice.
• 41:40
  I actually had it before. We have that at the Whiskey.
• 41:42
  Friend, we had it, a whiskey friend, I remember I had it a
• 41:44
  whiskey fringe and I remember it.
• 41:45
  I just wanted a nice first of all, but you know, a nice
• 41:48
  bourbon whiskey just to get me off.
• 41:50
  And one thing we remarked on it really light in colour.
• 41:55
  But I mean, don't don't like that fool you.
• 41:57
  And so now they've just lost their distillery manager
• 41:59
  locally. Oh, right.
• 42:00
  And who's got away to to the West Coast of America to be
• 42:03
  interested. He was the ex Lafroy distillery
• 42:06
  manager. So they were very, very proud
• 42:07
  about having Mr. Campbell there. And they were saying this is
• 42:09
  amazing. It's all going to go very well.
• 42:11
  And he's done a very good job for the first releases to come
• 42:13
  out and now is now is left. She's got a bit interested.
• 42:16
  On the California aren't. They Yeah, yeah, it's going to a
• 42:17
  very kind of outrageous looking online California distillery.
• 42:21
  Ginger boy, what have you got or what did you have?
• 42:23
  Well, I I had the the new Hollywood release, a single
• 42:26
  cast, heavily petered and you know the.
• 42:29
  Same as Ross was that? Exactly shook my hands up in
• 42:32
  there. I've finally got back to my
• 42:34
  favorite pub and it's the first time in ages that I've cracked
• 42:37
  the seal of a bottle because I used to be my I used to come and
• 42:40
  take it and it's. Something heavily petered.
• 42:42
  Well, I wouldn't because it's heavily labeled, heavily
• 42:45
  petered. It's smoky again if it take
• 42:48
  quite an early cut as we discussed in the Are you going?
• 42:50
  To pretend to like it. No, I'm not like no, no, no, no,
• 42:55
  no. We might even see a little
• 42:57
  snippet snippet, score it with it.
• 43:00
  But no, you'll get your honest opinion from me.
• 43:02
  But quite interesting. Again, I've I like Hollywood.
• 43:06
  I like their head distiller, Connor O'Keefe, good guy.
• 43:09
  And I'm actually going to visit the distillery this December.
• 43:11
  The first time I feel like it's terrible that I've not been, the
• 43:14
  fact that I've been to AILA and back before.
• 43:16
  You went to Portland? Have you been to Portland?
• 43:18
  I've not been, no. Anyone from Portalita is.
• 43:20
  Listen, we would love to come along absolutely for a freebie.
• 43:27
  Dave's talking about these press passes that you.
• 43:29
  See what we can do We've. Been a year in podcast.
• 43:33
  I actually know we have had we. Will get, yeah.
• 43:36
  We had an invite from Scotch Whisky Experience for a while.
• 43:41
  It felt like we were sponsored by them because every every
• 43:43
  second guest either worked there or was but.
• 43:45
  To be fair, you were getting global brand ambassadors on.
• 43:47
  So where did you start? Well, Scottish experience,
• 43:49
  obviously it. Was fantastic, but we have had
• 43:52
  an invite there. But yeah.
• 43:53
  So that's my second DRAM. We get the same DRAM.
• 43:56
  We've got the same. I'll let you introduce it then.
• 43:57
  Well, I think what we've got is a cabin heads knock do 11 year
• 44:02
  old and it's been matured in a Ruby port cast.
• 44:05
  Very tasty as. Well, nice isn't?
• 44:07
  That so knock do obviously not a DRAM that you see and that often
• 44:11
  will certainly not titled knock do that's very Caddenheads to do
• 44:14
  that. So this is what you would see as
• 44:16
  a knock that you that we all had before.
• 44:18
  Yeah, and very tasty. Very, very tasty.
• 44:20
  I do a bit of water as well, and actually I don't drink much from
• 44:23
  Caddenheads very often. No, and I've put quite a few
• 44:28
  behind the bar recently, so it's.
• 44:30
  One of the biggest collections in Edinburgh for sure.
• 44:33
  Open whiskey bottles in a pub. But it's great to get the sample
• 44:42
  like a distillery that when Angus and I, we've talked about
• 44:47
  this with, we do our indie bottler spotlights, which we're
• 44:49
  actually recording tomorrow night.
• 44:51
  And one of the things that Angus and I have really sort of worked
• 44:54
  our way into is the Cindy bottler scene, so to speak.
• 44:58
  There's so much whiskey out there that people can drink.
• 45:00
  And as I was saying earlier on a journey to be master of malt by
• 45:04
  my sort of expenditure and stuff like that, what I look back and
• 45:09
  I'm thinking I'm buying bespoke whiskey and stuff like that
• 45:12
  where it's not bespoke whiskey at all.
• 45:14
  It's fairly accessible whiskey. And I actually can remember
• 45:17
  boutique and purposely staying away from them at the time
• 45:21
  because it's such a difficult thing when you're new to whiskey
• 45:25
  to understand what is single cast independently.
• 45:28
  But I can't remember, I think it was, was it Ryan from Tricara
• 45:34
  was kind of saying, and they said it effectively is to some
• 45:40
  people ask knock off whiskey, isn't it?
• 45:42
  Because if it's why is it if it's a distillery, you're
• 45:44
  getting the are you getting the crap version or the knock off
• 45:47
  version of it? Because it's somebody else has
• 45:49
  managed to get hold of it and they've put their own bang on
• 45:51
  it. And it's it's fascinating to see
• 45:53
  how quickly that we've changed. But the other thing is, it's
• 45:55
  international whiskey as well. Yeah, we, we recognised that the
• 45:59
  even even my own personal journey, it was just going to be
• 46:04
  Scotch single walks. That's where I was going to
• 46:05
  start. And then I read a book and oh
• 46:08
  OK, I need to investigate blends and oh there's a whole world of
• 46:11
  making whiskey. Let's dig deeper and go further.
• 46:14
  And boutique did exactly the same.
• 46:16
  We say our first 4 releases were Scotch whiskey's as boutique
• 46:19
  whiskey. So we had a McCallum and AD Beg
• 46:23
  with our first 2 releases alongside Capodonic and a Port
• 46:26
  Ellen. So two of the most arguably
• 46:30
  collectible single malts and two closed distilleries.
• 46:34
  And then we went on just bottling new distilleries as
• 46:37
  we're getting parcels of whiskey.
• 46:38
  In 2014, we bottled our first American whiskey and then we
• 46:43
  bottled some English whiskey and we bottled some Australian
• 46:47
  whiskey. First ever Australian whiskey we
• 46:50
  bottled were two casks of Ovaryn.
• 46:53
  Nobody even knew about Australian whiskey.
• 46:54
  No, and we've done a couple of Australian whiskey series, which
• 46:58
  brings me nicely. Oh, seamless.
• 47:02
  Oh, to. Have.
• 47:03
  You done this before, David. Australian.
• 47:06
  Whiskers, a man who's podcasted before.
• 47:08
  I know well whilst you're ported that if you can, you have, you
• 47:13
  know, through your blog, it then went into a podcast as well.
• 47:16
  You've done as well. We did a boutique podcast called
• 47:20
  It Wasn't It Was, it's sponsored by boutique, but it was called
• 47:23
  Uncorked podcast. That was Sam and I talking
• 47:28
  originally just Sam and I in a room talking nonsense.
• 47:32
  SU-1 with eight downloads. I probably and and then it grew.
• 47:36
  We started getting guests in to talk and let them do all the
• 47:39
  work and and and, but then, yeah.
• 47:42
  It's an easy model, isn't it? Yeah, you get against it to do
• 47:45
  all the work talking poorly drives, but you talk about
• 47:50
  sponsorship, you know, we're we're still looking.
• 47:53
  Marks and Spencer's please. Whiskey.
• 47:56
  Stories broadcasters still Marks and Spencer's have a Glen going
• 47:59
  and they're kind of exclusively bottled for and yeah, I've got
• 48:03
  my. Own we're getting them lots of
• 48:04
  product and I kill Holman as well and I.
• 48:07
  Got the kill Holman. I and and I think another going
• 48:11
  farthest, as well as the fact that before we dive into a
• 48:15
  second whiskey, he tells me a bit more about it.
• 48:17
  Dave. OK, What?
• 48:19
  Yeah, Tell us what you tell us about it.
• 48:21
  I've just had a look at what I've done.
• 48:23
  OK, this is a little, this is from our Return to Oz series.
• 48:28
  You know, only in, in, in the UK do we call it Oz OZ.
• 48:32
  But we wanted to get that yellow brick road on our label as a
• 48:35
  silly little shockingly bad pun. Yeah, and then they're having a
• 48:38
  Barbie there. I mean, no, no one's throwing a
• 48:40
  shrimp on it. But I mean, there's a shark in
• 48:42
  the. Background I mean.
• 48:43
  Yeah, there's a surfboard. I mean, you're, you're, you're,
• 48:45
  you're. Hitting all the stuff is what I
• 48:47
  didn't really do. We we tried not to do anything
• 48:52
  like that. Oh, no, hang on a minute,
• 48:55
  there's King Charles getting heckled by it.
• 48:56
  We. We, we, we did.
• 48:59
  Very topical. So on our first series of
• 49:02
  Australian whiskies, the the first time we did it, we hid the
• 49:08
  Australian flag, the constellation, the stars in, in
• 49:12
  the, in the labels, either rivets on the steel or a little
• 49:16
  flag here or on the end of a cask.
• 49:18
  It was just the, the constellation that's on the on
• 49:21
  the Australian flag. We the southern Southern Cross.
• 49:24
  We put that on every label and whenever the, the distillery had
• 49:28
  a connection to Bill Lark, the, the sort of the, the, the father
• 49:33
  of modern Australian whiskey, we had a little lark flying across
• 49:36
  the label somewhere, all sitting on his daughter's label on the
• 49:39
  Kalawa. We had him the, the Lark sitting
• 49:42
  on her shoulder sort of thing, overlooking it.
• 49:44
  On this one. We decided we'd go for this this
• 49:48
  series here. We put dangerous animals on
• 49:50
  them. And so it's a collection of
• 49:52
  dangerous animals on every, every different label.
• 49:55
  Every distillery label has got a dangerous animal because
• 49:58
  everything wants to kill you in Australia, from box box
• 50:01
  jellyfish to to great whites to saltese crocodiles.
• 50:07
  So. Kangaroos aren't even that
• 50:08
  friendly it turns out. Sorry Kangaroos, not even that
• 50:10
  friendly it. Turns out, no, we didn't.
• 50:12
  We didn't have any Roos on there, but we on on that one is
• 50:15
  the Great white. Now this is Chief's son
• 50:19
  distillery. It's a tiny little distillery.
• 50:21
  It's a husband and wife team. They're they're Mackintosh,
• 50:27
  which is a Scottish name and their heritage goes back and
• 50:32
  Mackintosh is the clan of the chief son.
• 50:37
  Basically what what the name of the means of this city?
• 50:39
  They have one still 4000 litre and it's electrically heated.
• 50:44
  It's still. I mean, Australian whiskey's
• 50:46
  played quite a big we've had that quite a few times.
• 50:48
  We've had a lot of people who have visited Australia.
• 50:52
  And got their kind of break in whiskey.
• 50:54
  In Australia there has been a lot of kind of mentions of Lark
• 50:57
  and Starward and some of the kind of bigger brands, whether
• 50:59
  it's been Tasmanian or whether it's been mainland Australian.
• 51:02
  But this is certainly be a distillery first for all of us.
• 51:05
  Yes, you wouldn't. Find for sharing.
• 51:06
  That's really. You wouldn't find this
• 51:07
  distillery and lots of the distilleries you wouldn't find
• 51:10
  in this country. So this is, I thought ah, you
• 51:12
  wouldn't have tried this one. Now this has been in an
• 51:15
  Australian Sherry cast. What we love about that's.
• 51:18
  Interesting. What we love about the the
• 51:21
  Australian whiskeys, I mean, they're, they're making.
• 51:23
  Has it been in an Australian cherry cast or an Australian
• 51:25
  fortified wine cast? It's a power.
• 51:28
  They call it a power, all right, and they're not allowed to call
• 51:30
  it Sherry. No, they do call it Sherry
• 51:32
  amongst themselves, but on the bottle it'll be called a power.
• 51:35
  Do you know why they call it a power?
• 51:37
  No, it's Australia. No, it's short for a pair of
• 51:39
  teeth power. It is.
• 51:42
  It is, yeah. I got told that, Yeah, that's.
• 51:45
  Fantastic. That's interesting.
• 51:47
  That's a really. And again, I don't think I've
• 51:49
  had actually much Australian whiskey or Tasmanian whiskey and
• 51:53
  European or an idea of fortified wine style casks, but it's
• 51:57
  always Britain's Shiraz because obviously they produce a lot of
• 52:00
  it, or Shiraz. But then I mean, remember we had
• 52:05
  George Keble talking about, you know, with regards to like ABV
• 52:09
  and how it can go up and fluctuate because the cast the
• 52:12
  heat in Australia. So which part of Australia?
• 52:14
  Sorry, I don't. Know this quickie they they,
• 52:17
  they don't make their own wash. They're based down on the
• 52:20
  Mornington Peninsula, which is in South Australia.
• 52:24
  I'm pretty certain it's down in South Australia and they use the
• 52:27
  local brewery to make their wash and then they distill it in this
• 52:30
  in this still. Originally we wanted them in
• 52:35
  Mackintoshes, but the fun police said that's too Scottish and we
• 52:39
  we got banned. So we ended up with their
• 52:40
  professions. He was military and she was a
• 52:43
  scientist, so she's there with a Bunsen burner they're putting
• 52:47
  there's. Camouflage.
• 52:48
  They're putting shrimp on the Barbie.
• 52:50
  They want to surf shack. I mean, it is very, very yes I.
• 52:53
  Love that. You're just missing a guy of a
• 52:54
  cork car. Yeah, but all the bottles still
• 52:56
  on the cork. But I mean, you, you talk about,
• 53:00
  we were talking like the attention the devil is in the
• 53:04
  detail. And for people you know, it's
• 53:06
  another like you mentioned about the fragrant drops, Yeah, labels
• 53:11
  and. I think, and I think people like
• 53:14
  the little nod stuff, but you know, it's.
• 53:16
  Making people aware of it as well.
• 53:18
  So for me, looking at your looking at your your bottles and
• 53:23
  looking at your labels. Is there a place where people
• 53:26
  can actually on your website or is there a way where someone
• 53:29
  could actually read the story on the on where they can say right.
• 53:32
  So if I was to look at that in the shop, I'd be looking at that
• 53:35
  going. That's a cool label.
• 53:37
  It's a cool label. I've no idea what the.
• 53:39
  Reference point of all all. Yeah, if you go to
• 53:41
  theboutiquewhiskey.com website, there is a home page there that
• 53:46
  I put series links that goes to each of the page.
• 53:49
  So each of these new schools have definitely got them there.
• 53:51
  Yeah, great. Because I mean, I think that for
• 53:53
  me, if you see it and you go, I want to know what the back story
• 53:56
  is. And what's really good as well
• 53:58
  is there's sometimes a nice feeling of like, if you know,
• 54:00
  you know, and one of the things that we were talking about
• 54:03
  before we started recording was, you know, a good friend of
• 54:06
  yours, friend of the show, Mark Thompson, you know, bottles that
• 54:10
  he's actually featured on one of the labels as.
• 54:12
  Well, he is, yeah. He got in a bit of a trouble for
• 54:14
  it. Yeah, we got into a bit of a
• 54:15
  trouble. We got told to cease.
• 54:17
  We had to pull it. We didn't because it was such a
• 54:19
  small batch. It was, it was all gone very,
• 54:21
  very quickly. But yes, we bottled some ward
• 54:24
  head. We never called it a ward head.
• 54:26
  We called it blended malt #3 so we had blended malt because
• 54:30
  that's what a teaspooned whiskey is.
• 54:33
  William Grant and Sons will never sell a single malt to
• 54:36
  anybody. They were really coined the
• 54:38
  phrase teaspooning. So this this is where just to.
• 54:42
  I guess I once went camping and ended up teaspooning.
• 54:47
  Can I just maybe explain what? Teaspooning is for somebody
• 54:50
  that's maybe not familiar. With the non camping content.
• 54:53
  OK, what teaspooning is so Glenfiddich, Balveny, Ken, Envy,
• 54:59
  Glenmorangie, they're highly regarded single malts.
• 55:03
  They're known. Certainly Balveny and
• 55:06
  Glenfiddich are known as well were known as certainly if you
• 55:09
  look at the old blenders handbook from the 1970s, they
• 55:12
  were known as dressing malts. They were top class malts, the
• 55:15
  space items. And so they're needed in blends.
• 55:19
  And so that's, you know, Scotch whiskey is unique in the, in, in
• 55:23
  the world that everyone trades casts amongst each other.
• 55:27
  But William Grant, if you're trading casts, a single malt of,
• 55:30
  of Balveni or or Glenfiddich, that cast could go astray
• 55:34
  somewhere else. And you know, there was in the,
• 55:37
  in the early 2000s, there was a lot of independent bottlers
• 55:40
  bottling lots of nonsense. And it then it became really
• 55:43
  difficult. There were we known as armchair
• 55:45
  bottlers. So bottling anything when there
• 55:46
  was a lot of whiskey on the, on the, on the market.
• 55:49
  But William Grant and Sons protected that by saying they've
• 55:52
  become a blended malt. So as soon as you add a teaspoon
• 55:56
  of Glenfiddich into a Balveny, it's now a blended malt.
• 55:59
  There's two malts in there now and they have trade names and
• 56:02
  you can go into warehouses and you will see casks labeled
• 56:05
  Burnside. That's right with head of
• 56:06
  Burnside Warrant Williamson. For example, is that no?
• 56:11
  Williamson is Lefroy. Williamson is just Lefroy.
• 56:13
  It's not a teaspoon at all. That's just because the next
• 56:16
  facility manager was called. What's the difference between
• 56:19
  something that calls itself Williamson that isn't a teaspoon
• 56:22
  malt and then a teaspoon? So that's just it.
• 56:24
  Protects the brand just. Saying it costs them.
• 56:28
  So Hunter Lang who we had on have a very good relationship
• 56:30
  with Lefroy, right. So for a long time, Hunter Lang
• 56:33
  can bottle Lefroy, can call it Lefroy, but that's highly
• 56:36
  unusual. Well.
• 56:37
  That'll be like Highland Park and Whitlaw.
• 56:39
  Am I right in saying that? So you'll see a lot of Whitlaws
• 56:42
  out there, but a lot of people like myself wouldn't know what's
• 56:45
  a Whitlaw. They're.
• 56:45
  Quite happy for you to know that.
• 56:47
  That's Highland Park Lefroy. People who are buying Williamson
• 56:51
  know that it's Lefroy. Yeah, and Lefroy are fine with
• 56:53
  that. But it's the commercial value of
• 56:56
  a cast of Whitlaw. There's way less and that you
• 57:00
  can't take it around the world and try and sell it for three
• 57:02
  times the amount to somebody else and say this is the
• 57:04
  Highland Park because you'd be lying, right.
• 57:07
  And so it's. Two different ways really of but
• 57:10
  solving the same problem. But teaspoon the.
• 57:12
  Teaspoon malt is highly unusual and it really is only specific
• 57:15
  cases which was Glenn Murray and Glenn and Glenn Morandry which
• 57:19
  they teaspooned. I don't know if they do that.
• 57:21
  We don't. Anymore I don't actually
• 57:23
  actually. But it's still Westport.
• 57:24
  Yeah, yeah, there is still Westport, which.
• 57:27
  Is so Westport. That's Teaspoons and Margie.
• 57:29
  With Glenn Murray. It used to be or.
• 57:31
  We don't know, yeah. Or we don't know.
• 57:33
  Yeah. We don't know if it's the.
• 57:34
  Same I think. I think teaspoon is just a term
• 57:36
  and it's just a bar, a barcoding operation.
• 57:39
  This is what I was going to say if you believe that as I just
• 57:42
  recently bought a 27 year old Burnside.
• 57:45
  Now do I believe somebody went to A1 warehouse, got a teaspoon
• 57:49
  out at another house and put a teaspoon in to make it?
• 57:52
  I don't. Really so so just to confirm,
• 57:54
  right, So let's break this down to make the most simplest form.
• 57:56
  The reason it's called teaspooning or teaspoon whiskey
• 58:00
  would be a a Burnside would be. A single cask of balvenic with a
• 58:04
  single teaspoon of glenfedic in it.
• 58:06
  What about vice versa? That would be a ward.
• 58:09
  Head, ward. Head right.
• 58:10
  But that's the names are just what the brands come up with and
• 58:13
  that's how they were selling. Cats.
• 58:15
  It's to protect their brand. So no, if that cast slipped into
• 58:19
  somebody else's hands, it could never be bottled as a.
• 58:22
  Single. I bought a.
• 58:23
  Yeah, and it could never be bottled as a balveni or.
• 58:26
  I bought a 27 year old Balveni single cask for about 180 lbs
• 58:31
  recently. A 27 year old Balveni single
• 58:34
  casket officially bottled Balveni right now would cost me
• 58:37
  two and a half three grand. But you were.
• 58:39
  But yours was bottled under the name Burnside.
• 58:42
  Yeah. So that's so.
• 58:43
  Yeah. So basically from a distillery's
• 58:44
  point of view, if you're going to do that, you you can just say
• 58:48
  right, we've stuck a teaspoon in there, which means that you
• 58:50
  officially can never call that single Balveni single malt and
• 58:54
  independently bottle it. Yeah, Right.
• 58:56
  Or vice versa. What?
• 58:58
  But but something like a Williamson is a single malt, but
• 59:00
  you can't. Exactly.
• 59:02
  Take that. So Williamson is the name.
• 59:05
  That's just a deal they've had with any of these sold it to.
• 59:07
  So we'd like you to call it Williamson.
• 59:09
  And the original thing with Lefrog was that they were happy
• 59:12
  for everybody calling the independently bottled Lefrog's
• 59:15
  Lefrog. And then at one point you get a
• 59:18
  lot of secret Ilas. You can debate who they are.
• 59:20
  And so Lefrog done the same thing.
• 59:22
  Nobody can call us Lefrog. And then somebody released a
• 59:24
  bottle and called the Leapfrog single malt from Isla.
• 59:27
  And so that was. And so everybody looked
• 59:29
  terribly. Yeah, somebody always ruins the
• 59:32
  fun for everybody else. This.
• 59:35
  Goes back to something Dave was talking about you're mentioning,
• 59:37
  and I kind of pick my ear up. Is it, you know, there was a
• 59:40
  certain period of time, I think you said in the early 2000s,
• 59:43
  where you had something called armchair?
• 59:45
  Armchair indie bottlers, yeah. Armchair indie bottlers.
• 59:47
  So what? What kind of things were these
• 59:49
  guys getting up to? And what?
• 59:50
  Well, whiskey was, you know, you've got to remember in the in
• 59:52
  the 80s when everyone started closing distilleries in the 90s.
• 59:55
  And this is when you had the kind of the whiskey.
• 59:57
  Lock whiskey. Lock whiskey was basically
• 59:59
  worthless. So you know people were paid in
• 1:00:01
  whiskey. You know those that if you see
• 1:00:03
  these cask investment counts. Task investment comes.
• 1:00:09
  We, we put this on our labels. There's a couple of our labels
• 1:00:12
  where we've got we, we managed to get it through the fun place.
• 1:00:15
  We've got it on a on a finish single malt.
• 1:00:17
  We've got a little drop. We, we have because we spelt it
• 1:00:21
  KUNTZ Cask Investments. So we've done it on a few.
• 1:00:30
  We've got a few labels like that where we, where we put tongue in
• 1:00:32
  cheek, you know, have a dig at them.
• 1:00:34
  There's another one on another finish Rye where we we put them.
• 1:00:38
  They lie on the movie instead of they live.
• 1:00:41
  And it's all about casks. Make your fortune.
• 1:00:44
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:00:45
  No, I mean, and I think when like when you look at that
• 1:00:49
  situation and I think it's quite prominent just now in the news
• 1:00:51
  about the fact that there's a lot of Advertising Standards
• 1:00:54
  agencies getting involved and starting to look at into these
• 1:00:57
  people. Because if you can get a well
• 1:00:59
  it's liquid gold, a 30% return on investment.
• 1:01:01
  And then every year, if you buy this cask etcetera, etcetera,
• 1:01:04
  etcetera, it's very easy for people to get caught up in that.
• 1:01:07
  It is I get caught. We get caught up regularly.
• 1:01:10
  You know isn't friends know that I work in the industry and said
• 1:01:13
  I want to invest in whiskey. What do you think?
• 1:01:15
  Yeah, because they've read something they've seen in AD
• 1:01:17
  you. Know, you see these news stories
• 1:01:20
  about individual casts selling usually in the Far East for kind
• 1:01:24
  of seven figures. And people think, well, if I had
• 1:01:27
  a cask and I can buy it now and in 20 years I can sell it for
• 1:01:31
  these sorts of figures. And you know, I think that.
• 1:01:33
  And from an independent bottler point of view as well, the big
• 1:01:36
  thing that that does is it takes that cask out of circulation
• 1:01:39
  from ever being bottled because by the time everybody's added
• 1:01:42
  their markup on it, it becomes that cast becomes far too
• 1:01:46
  expensive. For if anybody actually wanted
• 1:01:48
  to bottle that cast, yes, they would have to put a margin on
• 1:01:52
  the on the bottle astronomically.
• 1:01:55
  And then try and convince people that Oh yeah, see my 10 year
• 1:01:57
  old. We've, we've been offered casks
• 1:02:00
  at that retail value basically. Why, how can we pay that?
• 1:02:04
  Because if you know, we've got a, we've got a now we've got to
• 1:02:06
  dump that. We've got to pay duty, you know,
• 1:02:08
  with we've got a bottle it, we've got all those costs we'd
• 1:02:11
  never be able to sell and. Again, the reality is maybe the
• 1:02:12
  person selling it as a third and 4th owners of the cast, which is
• 1:02:16
  where that. Problem, I think, I mean on the
• 1:02:19
  subject of this, but we're seamless tonight, I have to say.
• 1:02:22
  Oh well, we are featuring the very first and it's, it's
• 1:02:26
  interesting you say because this is my Lindor's Abbey and this
• 1:02:30
  was, we could crack this open if you like lads, I've got plenty
• 1:02:34
  of, I've got plenty of the balls.
• 1:02:37
  I, I, I think investing in in a small distillery like you've
• 1:02:41
  done here at your local distillery, I think that's,
• 1:02:44
  that's great you're helping that economy.
• 1:02:47
  But you know, buying a cask of something that someone's selling
• 1:02:50
  you that maybe not that what you think.
• 1:02:53
  You'll never see it and you're. Like, well, it's 100%, but this,
• 1:02:56
  I mean this basically, and it's interesting because look bought
• 1:03:00
  this. It was, in fact, I didn't buy
• 1:03:01
  it. I was given it as a 30th
• 1:03:02
  birthday present. Mum and dad surprised me with
• 1:03:05
  it. I liked whiskey at that time,
• 1:03:07
  and this was what kick started. It ramped up everything because
• 1:03:11
  I suddenly went, I've got a cask now.
• 1:03:14
  I have it, you know. Oh, you like whiskey, do you?
• 1:03:17
  Well, I've got bloody cask and stuff, you know, And I remember
• 1:03:21
  actually swagger. Yeah.
• 1:03:23
  And, you know, went to the, we went to the space side whiskey
• 1:03:29
  festival two years ago, I think my wife and I and we stopped in
• 1:03:31
  at the Aberlower whiskey shop in there.
• 1:03:33
  And that's actually the Lindores were set up in there that day
• 1:03:37
  and there was an American couple and they were getting the, you
• 1:03:39
  know, the, I don't know who the, the guy was.
• 1:03:41
  It might be Matt actually, who's who's shouted to Matt, who's
• 1:03:44
  been great help with these bottles actually.
• 1:03:46
  But and he's standing there and he says, oh, do you know
• 1:03:49
  Lyndor's Abbey? I've got a gasket and stuff.
• 1:03:55
  And it was great and I felt great.
• 1:03:56
  But two weeks ago got the bottles we have sit in front of
• 1:04:01
  us, our first Phil Ryoka ex Ryoka Firkin Cask five years.
• 1:04:07
  You can tell me the colour. It looks a lot older and one of
• 1:04:09
  the things was for people who are on the.
• 1:04:13
  In the natural colour as well of.
• 1:04:14
  Course, people who are in the whiskey stories Facebook group,
• 1:04:17
  I posted it up on the DRAM weekend DRAM roll call a couple
• 1:04:21
  weeks ago and I must admit I was petrified.
• 1:04:23
  I've got 66 bottles of the stuff in the house, but I was pouring
• 1:04:27
  it and I'd had one sample of it earlier on in the year.
• 1:04:30
  May time I was please don't be shy, please don't be shy, please
• 1:04:34
  don't be shy. It is that it's not bad.
• 1:04:36
  I'll open up my recently purchased bottles so Dave can
• 1:04:38
  try. We get a sniff it, sniff it,
• 1:04:40
  score it out of Ross Bar. Actually, I'd like to do a sniff
• 1:04:42
  it, sniff it, score it for that. But but it's interesting 'cause
• 1:04:44
  you talk about labeling and my naivety at the time, couple of
• 1:04:47
  years in sort of speaking to the guys at the distillery and I did
• 1:04:50
  ask, right, Well, what if I just wanted to put it into my own
• 1:04:54
  glassware? And they were like, well, you
• 1:04:55
  would you categorically you would not be able to do that
• 1:04:58
  under our branding. Yeah, it would have to be under
• 1:05:00
  slow and Malt, that brand. They were very strict on that.
• 1:05:04
  And, and of course I'm glad it didn't because two things.
• 1:05:06
  Number one, I think the Lindores Abbey brand, the Lindores brand
• 1:05:10
  carries well. And secondly, I mean, I would
• 1:05:13
  have been, I would have been much cheaper bottles and much
• 1:05:15
  cheaper labels, to be verbally honest with you.
• 1:05:17
  And that bottle looks absolutely fantastic and the bottles are
• 1:05:19
  great. So well, but we don't have to
• 1:05:21
  crack it tonight. So now do you have an empty
• 1:05:23
  Ryoka Firkin? I do, I do and.
• 1:05:26
  So you this is this is interesting.
• 1:05:29
  Yeah. Because now what?
• 1:05:30
  You know, whiskey sodas, podcast experimenting time.
• 1:05:33
  Well, who knows? We just need to get Angus with
• 1:05:35
  the crayons in the paper. So you can buy some new Mike's,
• 1:05:39
  go into the district, I guess some new Mike's experience
• 1:05:41
  someone. Well, I, I think you've got,
• 1:05:42
  what do you have right now in your portfolio?
• 1:05:45
  I've got, I've got a few, are we?
• 1:05:47
  No, I've got like 3 or 4 casks sitting there through through a
• 1:05:52
  couple of people. An inch Gower, an inch Gower, a
• 1:05:55
  couple of Dean's then. 1/3 of an inch Gower.
• 1:05:57
  No. Oh, yeah.
• 1:05:58
  So my cousin, my brother and I, we we, we bought, we, we went in
• 1:06:01
  on a cast of Inch Gower. And again, similarly from a
• 1:06:05
  naivety point of view, and my cousin was saying, I hear
• 1:06:10
  everybody's investing in whiskey.
• 1:06:12
  And I've looked into it. And I was able to sort of say
• 1:06:16
  through a little bit of my own experiences, no, let's not do
• 1:06:19
  that because he was saying let's buy a cask with it was true.
• 1:06:23
  And my grandmother, we we all got a little bit of inheritance
• 1:06:25
  and it was like, well, let's do something instead of away.
• 1:06:28
  He said, let's invest in a cast and my grandparents both like
• 1:06:30
  whiskey was we're all whiskey family.
• 1:06:33
  I said, well, no, don't buy it as an investment.
• 1:06:35
  Let's buy it instead of trying to flip a cask and make because
• 1:06:38
  splitting it three ways, you know what you're actually going
• 1:06:40
  to end up. Yeah, great.
• 1:06:41
  We all end up with a few £100 or we wait 20 years and try and
• 1:06:45
  sell it and we don't know what's going to happen.
• 1:06:46
  Let's actually buy it and then put it in a glass and then we'll
• 1:06:49
  have and if look, we can muck about with it again naively,
• 1:06:53
  we've bought a hog sense we've got 250 fucking litres.
• 1:06:56
  We'll be giving that as Christmas.
• 1:06:59
  That's what I've but. I want whiskey, the bottle.
• 1:07:02
  But how old is that? It's it's 99 years.
• 1:07:05
  Old I personally, I would move some in school that's into into
• 1:07:09
  first of all, a tiny wee Ryoka Ferkin that had that and this is
• 1:07:12
  this was 5 five years old, six years.
• 1:07:13
  Old five years. Five years, just it was just
• 1:07:16
  five. Years and a month.
• 1:07:17
  I I would. I would.
• 1:07:18
  That's why. I mean, and also what's quite
• 1:07:19
  handy is it's that'll be a second fill now.
• 1:07:21
  So you're you're like the from a from a Woodman and again, from
• 1:07:24
  people that we've discussed that have spoken to.
• 1:07:25
  It's like, well actually, you know, you'll get maybe a little
• 1:07:29
  less heat off the cast from from that.
• 1:07:31
  That's a wee. Cask as well.
• 1:07:32
  Yeah. But anyway, look that it's
• 1:07:34
  fascinating and you talk about the independent bottlers versus
• 1:07:37
  the the cask investment. But yeah, like we've spoken to
• 1:07:40
  people and if you look at one of the things was Milton Duff holds
• 1:07:44
  a special place for me. We've always talked about it on
• 1:07:46
  the podcast. So I actually said, I wonder if
• 1:07:47
  there would be a way Brian Milton Duff cast to see if we
• 1:07:50
  could ever do it. And I put it out to three or
• 1:07:52
  four people who I knew. And I got I didn't know all
• 1:07:54
  these people, but people I've spoke to said, look, I'm looking
• 1:07:56
  for this. And I got offered the same
• 1:07:57
  parcel of seven or eight Milton Duff casks, 3 by 3 or 4
• 1:08:02
  different people at all different prices.
• 1:08:03
  Yeah. It's been interesting.
• 1:08:05
  Same cast number and what you were unable to do, thankfully
• 1:08:08
  and. You can work out where it
• 1:08:09
  started. Yeah, because you just got.
• 1:08:11
  Every, every margin on it, Yeah. And and.
• 1:08:14
  You get all the time. That must be really, really
• 1:08:15
  difficult to navigate, especially internationally then
• 1:08:18
  as well because you're buying Australian gas.
• 1:08:21
  I will the the the world whiskeys is is completely
• 1:08:23
  different. And they're coming straight to
• 1:08:25
  you directly because of. The size of the bread.
• 1:08:26
  When we first started, we were calling them up and it was who?
• 1:08:30
  Now we have World Distilleries. Yes, we'd love to, you know,
• 1:08:35
  regularly calling us. Would you like to do something
• 1:08:37
  with us? Because we can put them in a
• 1:08:38
  market that they don't. Have and they want their bottles
• 1:08:41
  on Master of Malt first and foremost.
• 1:08:43
  Can can we get a small batch or a single cast the holiday that
• 1:08:47
  we are trying tonight? Local Edinburgh distillery.
• 1:08:50
  Yeah, exclusive to Master of Malt online really.
• 1:08:53
  And so this is actually one of the only bars you'll find that
• 1:08:56
  in an Edinburgh because we've got Kev, amazing pub owner,
• 1:08:59
  amazing landlord, who says, oh, well, I like that I've had every
• 1:09:03
  holiday so far, so I'll just buy it for Master of Malt.
• 1:09:05
  But a lot of bars we know in Edinburgh are rooted to Roma
• 1:09:08
  whiskey accounts and therefore won't get it.
• 1:09:11
  And so you've got this platform where you can learn about
• 1:09:13
  whiskey and get whiskey from all over the place and rum etcetera.
• 1:09:16
  Galaxy Master Malt sells everything.
• 1:09:17
  And so they'll go, yeah, well, why not do a boutique release
• 1:09:21
  because you're exploring a whole new market.
• 1:09:23
  You've taken our three virginities of that Australian
• 1:09:26
  facility straight away. I think it's interesting and
• 1:09:29
  it'd be nice as we're talking about Wild Whiskeys.
• 1:09:33
  I think you've got a really interesting point of view and I
• 1:09:36
  think you're incredibly open minded on World Whiskey and it's
• 1:09:41
  probably because you are with this kind of outrageous brand,
• 1:09:45
  intensive, independent, but on how they look, but also the work
• 1:09:48
  you've done with Balconis as well and the idea of American
• 1:09:52
  single malt or American corn whiskey and coming to UK whiskey
• 1:09:55
  shows. Do you think people's perception
• 1:09:57
  is changing a world whiskey and do you think it's because the
• 1:10:00
  quality of world whiskey is just very good or it's still a hard
• 1:10:04
  point of view? It's still a hard sell.
• 1:10:06
  Yeah, it definitely is a hard sell here in the.
• 1:10:09
  I mean, English whiskey's a hard sell for.
• 1:10:11
  Around the world is that's what I was going to.
• 1:10:12
  Ask. But it's growing.
• 1:10:13
  It's growing rapidly. And it is.
• 1:10:16
  Scotch whiskey has got a long, long history.
• 1:10:19
  Irish whiskey got a long, long history.
• 1:10:21
  English whiskey is 18 years old. Is that, is that right?
• 1:10:25
  Yeah. Saint George's or something is
• 1:10:27
  it? 2006 was their first
• 1:10:28
  destination. They've just, I think they've
• 1:10:30
  just got an 18 year old in their founders.
• 1:10:32
  I was up to the distillery in the summer.
• 1:10:35
  Yeah, they'll be, they'll be coming up to a 20 year old soon.
• 1:10:38
  Pandaren. They were the first yeah
• 1:10:40
  distiller. Very much.
• 1:10:41
  Established 2000, they started distilling in the year 2000.
• 1:10:45
  So just before the English whiskey, you know, English
• 1:10:47
  whiskey were on their own for a long time, which is why they
• 1:10:50
  called themselves the English Whiskey Company, because I
• 1:10:52
  didn't think anyone else was going to do it.
• 1:10:54
  But then making some great whiskey.
• 1:10:56
  And I remember sneaking in English whiskey up into the
• 1:10:59
  Glasgow Whiskey Club when I did a tasting a long time and time
• 1:11:02
  ago, and I sneaked it in at #4 there was uproar when.
• 1:11:07
  I've done exactly the same with wire works from the White Peak
• 1:11:10
  Distillery and I've been at whiskey shows and poured it
• 1:11:14
  blind to people who claimed to be, you know, God's gift to
• 1:11:17
  whiskey. And they say that's really good.
• 1:11:19
  And because it was slightly peated as well, I'm just kind of
• 1:11:22
  funk about it. Yeah, we had people guessing it
• 1:11:24
  was old Spring banks because we were also known for pouring
• 1:11:26
  ridiculous stuff at the table. Yeah.
• 1:11:28
  So they're like, oh, that's got to be a really old interest in
• 1:11:31
  European Spring Bank. And it was 3 or 4 year old White
• 1:11:35
  Deep Distillery from Derbyshire. That's also, it's not even that
• 1:11:37
  far north. I mean, that is the middle of
• 1:11:39
  it's just brilliant liquid and you, you've got a whiskey if you
• 1:11:43
  3. I don't know if I'm jumping a
• 1:11:44
  whiskey ahead from Adams. I've got an Adams.
• 1:11:48
  Yeah, so Adams is the first English whiskey I ever reviewed
• 1:11:51
  online on the On the Baby YouTube channel.
• 1:11:54
  I don't think they started until 2010.
• 1:11:56
  And I had never heard of it until the day it was put in
• 1:11:59
  front of me and said, right, you're going to open and film
• 1:12:01
  this next, right? And I was like, OK.
• 1:12:03
  And it was a massive malt bottling as well.
• 1:12:06
  And so, OK, so there's a name I don't know.
• 1:12:08
  There was a 7 year old single malt whiskey.
• 1:12:10
  It said English whiskey. So I've already got my hackles
• 1:12:12
  up. And I was like, what's what's
• 1:12:13
  going on here? That's basically because I'm no
• 1:12:16
  expert, but also I need to come across like I know a wee bit
• 1:12:18
  about it. And it said it was using French
• 1:12:20
  virgin oak, which we thought was limousine.
• 1:12:22
  It was really interesting and it was tasty.
• 1:12:24
  And I think that's why my certainly why my perceptions
• 1:12:28
  change. I'm not.
• 1:12:29
  I was never as as naive as as mystical Gower next to me at
• 1:12:33
  this time, but. I'm away that Hadrian's Wall
• 1:12:35
  tomorrow with some stone. Yeah.
• 1:12:39
  They try to feed us whiskey. Yeah.
• 1:12:41
  Because it was genuinely very, very good.
• 1:12:44
  Was it OK? I need to investigate this
• 1:12:46
  further. And even brands like Bimber and
• 1:12:48
  such have been around for a long time and but White Peak, Adams,
• 1:12:53
  Cotswolds Distillery, Fantastic Blackwood coming from the
• 1:12:56
  Cotswolds, annoyingly good whiskey coming from the
• 1:12:59
  Cotswolds. So as you can tell themselves,
• 1:13:01
  got a wee bit better nest themselves.
• 1:13:02
  And there's some tiny, I mean, some of these distilleries are
• 1:13:04
  big, like, you know, the ones we just mentioned there.
• 1:13:06
  And then there are others that are just one man in a shed.
• 1:13:09
  There's this little little distillery, tiny little
• 1:13:11
  distillery, direct fire still. He's peating his own malt.
• 1:13:17
  He's using floor malting from the oldest English he's doing.
• 1:13:20
  He built his little smoker and he's using Somerset Pete.
• 1:13:25
  So he's got him found some Somerset Pete and smoking his
• 1:13:29
  own barley. There's a little distillery in a
• 1:13:32
  farm in the middle of nowhere and it's a like pain in the arse
• 1:13:35
  to get to the skinny little lane to get into and retribution
• 1:13:40
  distilling and it's just tiny. It's just one man in a shed.
• 1:13:44
  I don't know how he can work there.
• 1:13:45
  Must get lonely talking to himself.
• 1:13:46
  But The thing is like you're, you're talking about whiskey
• 1:13:49
  geek, being a whiskey geek. And I, we, we talked to guys at
• 1:13:54
  Blind Summit, Jamie and James and they were talking to them
• 1:13:57
  about their, how they got into the business.
• 1:13:59
  And one of the things is they were very, very, very close.
• 1:14:03
  I don't know how dangerously close they were to actually
• 1:14:05
  starting their own distillery in New Zealand.
• 1:14:07
  And one of the things is when you, when you look at English
• 1:14:09
  whiskey and you hear about this guy and we, we've talked earlier
• 1:14:12
  on about the, the you, you've mentioned the fun police and
• 1:14:16
  stuff like that. But like Scotch whiskey is
• 1:14:18
  established. You've got the Scotch Whiskey
• 1:14:19
  Association and you've got all these rules and regulations that
• 1:14:23
  that stop US from being able to do right.
• 1:14:26
  Let's just set up a little still.
• 1:14:28
  Let's Pete our own malt. Let's let's, let's source
• 1:14:31
  everything and let's create our own and stick it all in a
• 1:14:33
  bottle. And we can call it Scotch
• 1:14:35
  whiskey because we can't do it because we're in a hundreds of
• 1:14:38
  hundreds of year old industry that we just wouldn't allow that
• 1:14:41
  to happen and to protect Scotch. And there has to be a reason for
• 1:14:45
  that, I'm sure. But but you look at the whiskey
• 1:14:47
  abroad and you look at all these other countries and it's an open
• 1:14:51
  playing field, isn't it? People can just do what they
• 1:14:54
  want effectively to a level I suppose.
• 1:14:57
  EU rules, definitely they're they've got to.
• 1:14:59
  Be straight in our eyes. 3-3 years is is all EU, Australia 2
• 1:15:05
  years for whiskey yeah America no minimum age yeah just needs
• 1:15:08
  to go follow the rules of the you know the recipe and and.
• 1:15:13
  And type of. Type of wood, Yeah.
• 1:15:15
  New charred wood, New charred oak.
• 1:15:19
  But it doesn't. And there's no minimum
• 1:15:20
  requirement that that bourbon could just literally float
• 1:15:23
  through the cask and it'd be called bourbon and it's now as
• 1:15:26
  long. As it was 51% corn inverted.
• 1:15:28
  At least 51 yeah, as long as the mash bill was right and it's and
• 1:15:31
  it's distilled to a certain level.
• 1:15:34
  It's bottled at a certain level. There's no minimum age
• 1:15:36
  statement. I mean, no one does that.
• 1:15:38
  No, but you know, some of those early balconies were were very
• 1:15:41
  young. We as as boutique whiskey, the
• 1:15:44
  youngest and I call it whiskey because whiskey comes off the
• 1:15:47
  steel to me. The only reason we've got that
• 1:15:50
  three-year limit is because of that 1915 Immature Spirits Act.
• 1:15:54
  You know, when prohibition was coming into the UK, the youngest
• 1:15:59
  bottle of whiskey we've bottled is 40 days old.
• 1:16:02
  OK, wow. 40 days. It's never been in a cask, but
• 1:16:08
  it's had oak charred oak spindles suspended in it to.
• 1:16:11
  Accelerate much to accelerate. So this is, this is a little
• 1:16:15
  distillery in Bristol and it's a weak spirit.
• 1:16:17
  And it's it's, it's darker than that.
• 1:16:20
  And it was called whiskey on the.
• 1:16:21
  Bar no, we could. Call it whiskey, of course.
• 1:16:23
  It's a, it's a weak spirit, but yes, it's 40 days of maturing in
• 1:16:26
  these. And I think that's that's
• 1:16:28
  innovation in whiskey because there's that one oak stave, not
• 1:16:33
  just one side is charged all, all four sides of that spindle
• 1:16:38
  has been charred. So the surface area of that one
• 1:16:42
  piece of oak is all round, not just one surface.
• 1:16:45
  It's funny having like this open mind to whiskey and because.
• 1:16:49
  Because there would be people that would listen to that and
• 1:16:51
  say sacrilege. Well, even like we'll go back to
• 1:16:54
  your bottle bottle labels and you see, like there'll be people
• 1:16:57
  that look at your bottles and go Nah.
• 1:17:00
  Oh yeah, I've had it in the whiskey shows.
• 1:17:01
  They they see all these. Cartoons and they.
• 1:17:03
  What's all that nonsense? They walk past it and then
• 1:17:06
  eventually when they've run out of oh, what's so oh bloody hell,
• 1:17:09
  we should have come here. 1st I know because the.
• 1:17:11
  Label puts some people off. And it has, I guess, and I like
• 1:17:14
  I say this, our minds have been completely bent and opened a
• 1:17:17
  little bit in the sense of trying these things and foreign
• 1:17:22
  whiskey abroad. We've had a few on, on the
• 1:17:25
  podcast. The fact that we have to go
• 1:17:27
  back, we were we were trialing, we were giving out drams from
• 1:17:31
  our Bevy calendar. So Nika Double gold I think it
• 1:17:37
  was or something like that. Samurai.
• 1:17:38
  But if I I bought 2 two of that last year and the last ones that
• 1:17:43
  were left were like the Nika, the Bimba.
• 1:17:46
  That killed Kenan 16 or something.
• 1:17:48
  No, but no. But yeah.
• 1:17:49
  But it was like, it was almost like you look at the out of this
• 1:17:53
  12 drams, 3 or 4 of them that I got were not Scotch.
• 1:17:58
  And just my own perception at that stage a year ago was, well,
• 1:18:01
  I'm not going to drink them. I'll leave those until
• 1:18:04
  eventually it's like, right, well, I might as well try these
• 1:18:05
  things. And it's like it is.
• 1:18:08
  And it's fascinating because there will be people that when
• 1:18:11
  you look at marketing and you look at how you're going to say
• 1:18:13
  it, Mark Davidson, when you do his blind tastings, he then
• 1:18:18
  produces the bottles afterwards and he lets you see the bottles
• 1:18:21
  or after you've tasted it. And then you ask and it's like
• 1:18:25
  price, bottle, flavour, all these different things, the
• 1:18:28
  factors that come in. But it's amazing, like what your
• 1:18:30
  mind will walk. Past yeah, I like doing tastings
• 1:18:33
  blind. I always used to peel the labels
• 1:18:35
  off and I would make club labels.
• 1:18:37
  So we'd do like a basic boutiquey brick wall on the
• 1:18:41
  label and then I'd put the club logo on them with the date.
• 1:18:43
  And so they'd be whiskey 1:00 to 6:00 because my, one of my first
• 1:18:47
  early whiskey tastings as a part timer for boutique was with the
• 1:18:50
  Whiskey Squad, which is a, a whiskey club in London.
• 1:18:53
  And they always used to do their whiskey or still do blind
• 1:18:57
  tastings. And it was never to catch anyone
• 1:18:59
  out. It's always about removing that
• 1:19:01
  perception, open your mind and taste the whiskey rather than
• 1:19:04
  look at the label. But they always used to serve
• 1:19:07
  them, you know, they used to have these like velvet socks
• 1:19:09
  with numbers on them. I thought, well, that's not,
• 1:19:11
  it's not on brand. I want to get on brand, so I
• 1:19:14
  carefully peeled the labels off with a razor blade and A and a
• 1:19:17
  hair dryer. And I sketched up something on,
• 1:19:21
  on paint. Yeah.
• 1:19:22
  Microsoft Paint and sent it off to the art department.
• 1:19:26
  Our artists said could you do something like this?
• 1:19:28
  This is what I'm trying to do. I couldn't do it, you know, on,
• 1:19:30
  on on Ms. Paint. Yeah.
• 1:19:31
  And they just printed them off for me, sent them back and I
• 1:19:33
  stuck them all on there. And so I started that first year
• 1:19:36
  as a part timer. I was doing whiskey tastings
• 1:19:38
  with blind labels. And it was never to catch anyone
• 1:19:41
  else. It was literally just to remove
• 1:19:43
  those preconceptions and get the Glasgow Whiskey Club thinking,
• 1:19:46
  wow, this is really lovely. Yeah.
• 1:19:48
  What is it? Yeah.
• 1:19:49
  But even things like the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society?
• 1:19:54
  Yeah, again. I have a bottle of Balconis at
• 1:19:58
  home from Scotch Malt Whisky Society.
• 1:20:00
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:20:00
  And so I think you gave not that long ago that would have been.
• 1:20:03
  I think you did, yeah. It's three years old.
• 1:20:06
  It was rum finished. It was an American.
• 1:20:08
  It was a Texan single malt bottled by the Scotch Malt
• 1:20:11
  Whisky Society. Now, did pit pills intend for
• 1:20:14
  that to be the deal back in the 1980s?
• 1:20:17
  Probably not. But I tell you what, as a
• 1:20:18
  member, I was delighted. And I tried it blind and I said
• 1:20:22
  that's the best whisky I've had this morning.
• 1:20:23
  What's that? It was a three-year old.
• 1:20:27
  It was. It was.
• 1:20:27
  Out time days I was there at 11:00 in the morning of us as
• 1:20:31
  the best I've had this morning. What's that That's the
• 1:20:33
  three-year old Texan great to have a bottle of that.
• 1:20:35
  And I always thought because we've you guys have found it
• 1:20:38
  more this year as well and people in whiskey.
• 1:20:41
  It's very trendy actually used to be cool about two years ago
• 1:20:44
  to say how much you like grain whiskey and there's so much
• 1:20:46
  affordable, delicious grain whiskey out there.
• 1:20:48
  Everybody loves grain whiskey. But I always wondered why people
• 1:20:51
  in Scotland didn't like bourbon bourbon.
• 1:20:54
  I drink a lot of bourbon and it tastes like grain whiskey, but
• 1:20:57
  it's generally I mean, it's also very cheap and I thought, OK,
• 1:21:00
  Scottish mentality. It's cheap and that's not meant
• 1:21:03
  to be complex. It's not meant to be thought
• 1:21:06
  provoking. It tastes like vanilla, but it's
• 1:21:08
  bloody tasty. And I always thought I was
• 1:21:10
  surprised that bourbon wasn't a bigger hit here.
• 1:21:12
  And I'm always annoyed when I try old Irish whiskey because
• 1:21:15
  it's always very good and now getting annoyed when I try some
• 1:21:18
  of these new English. Yeah, but even things like, you
• 1:21:21
  know, and as my mum and dad would say, Graham's a whiskey
• 1:21:25
  drinker, so we'll get him a whiskey present for his birthday
• 1:21:27
  or Christmas sort of thing. And it would often, I think I
• 1:21:30
  had like 3 memberships of the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society.
• 1:21:33
  I would never utilize them because if I'm being honest and
• 1:21:36
  I want somebody Vidyan Damon on, I'd love somebody from the
• 1:21:39
  Scotch Malt Whiskey Society to come on the podcast Talk, talk,
• 1:21:42
  Talk because we've had some great chats about them.
• 1:21:44
  But I used to hate it because at the time, in my whiskey drinking
• 1:21:49
  I was doing, I liked a trusted brand.
• 1:21:53
  You wanted the name. Brand the thing that was doing
• 1:21:55
  yeah and and I knew but what I was trying to do was like
• 1:21:58
  explore the range a little bit more I.
• 1:22:01
  Used to, but you would have went in the bar and said what Blair
• 1:22:05
  Apple have you got Well. You.
• 1:22:07
  Say, oh, do you mean do you mean 49?
• 1:22:09
  Do you mean 67 or whatever? That I just I and also it wasn't
• 1:22:15
  that because it was an independently bottle, so it
• 1:22:17
  wouldn't they I get it. And I said no, this isn't the
• 1:22:19
  kind of whiskey that I actually like to drink because it's in a
• 1:22:22
  different that is different colour, It's a different
• 1:22:24
  flavour. It's not this, it's not that,
• 1:22:26
  but now it's like that appeals to be so much more now than it
• 1:22:30
  did 4 or 510. It's not industrial liver Taser
• 1:22:33
  BSMWS so it's. And then it becomes what's even
• 1:22:38
  better about independently bottled stuff.
• 1:22:40
  And just an interesting question on your labels.
• 1:22:42
  Do you as an independent bottler, do you put bottle
• 1:22:45
  numbers on your on your labels? Yes, they're all individually
• 1:22:49
  numbered 1234. SO11 of or just one?
• 1:22:53
  No, this is bottle 74 of 240. Two and again, that instantly
• 1:22:59
  just makes it so much more appealing in the sense that this
• 1:23:02
  is it. You know, if you don't get that
• 1:23:05
  bottle or you don't get to try it, it's gone.
• 1:23:08
  We were talking about Texan whiskeys.
• 1:23:09
  This is a Texan whiskey. It's almost like you were primed
• 1:23:12
  to do this is we've done it. For a year.
• 1:23:15
  We know what we're doing now. The professionals of this this
• 1:23:18
  is from Iron Republic, this is from our USA series.
• 1:23:22
  We had a collection of nine American whiskeys and we were,
• 1:23:27
  we were looking for a theme. And I said, what about the World
• 1:23:31
  Series? Because, you know, they're
• 1:23:32
  American sports. They always got it World.
• 1:23:36
  Well, you know, they have the World Series that only Americans
• 1:23:38
  can play. And I think one of the other
• 1:23:41
  options was America has no class or something like that.
• 1:23:45
  But we, we ended up with we 9 whiskeys that we were looking
• 1:23:48
  for a theme. And then I looked on that World
• 1:23:52
  Series and it was a baseball. I thought, well, there's nine.
• 1:23:56
  None of us knew anything about baseball, but they're, you know,
• 1:23:59
  a bit of Googling. All right, there's nine
• 1:24:01
  positions on a baseball field. OK, that works.
• 1:24:04
  And one of one of the members of the team where we're talking
• 1:24:07
  about label design, it was a was a magazine and card collector.
• 1:24:11
  And so we ended up with this vintage baseball card series.
• 1:24:16
  And then we went a bit geeky. So we made it into the sort of
• 1:24:18
  the vintage baseball cards. Each of them, the distillers
• 1:24:22
  sent themselves a picture holding something.
• 1:24:25
  One of them dressed up in baseball gear for us and
• 1:24:27
  everything, and Emily drew them, and then we put this little bar
• 1:24:32
  across the top of the label here, which is if you have
• 1:24:35
  collectible cards or collectible magazines, you send them off to
• 1:24:38
  get them validated. PSA will give you a rating of
• 1:24:41
  PSA Mint 10. So we put them in like it's been
• 1:24:45
  validated, but instead of that PSA, we've got NCS in there
• 1:24:47
  because these are all natural cast strength.
• 1:24:49
  This is a 2 year old bourbon. It's made from 100% Bloody
• 1:24:56
  Butcher corn, which is the red corn, a native corn to Southern
• 1:25:03
  America. You know maize comes from
• 1:25:04
  Southern America and this is not normally bottled from Iron Root
• 1:25:10
  Republic as a bloody butcher corn on it's own.
• 1:25:14
  They usually use this as a flavouring.
• 1:25:16
  So it's 100% corn, but because it's been in Newark and
• 1:25:19
  suburban, it's technically a what's the.
• 1:25:22
  Strength of this one, Dave. 56.9 Yes.
• 1:25:25
  We just have to be careful when we're talking about baseball
• 1:25:27
  around Ross because he suddenly turns out he gets It's really
• 1:25:30
  annoying. He transatlantic twang to his
• 1:25:33
  voice. He goes fit in with his
• 1:25:36
  American. Folks that that well that's
• 1:25:38
  that's how married into it so we.
• 1:25:40
  Even put the little baseball on there and they've all got a
• 1:25:42
  position. So what?
• 1:25:43
  What position have we got here? He's first base.
• 1:25:46
  Oh great. It's not with the tall guy.
• 1:25:48
  The tall guy is it not me? 1st place man.
• 1:25:52
  He wishes our first place. So this is a collection of ryes.
• 1:25:56
  We have some Pennsylvania rye from Dad's hat.
• 1:25:59
  We we have the right with two ryes from Colorado from a little
• 1:26:04
  distillery called 291. Smooth and easy going.
• 1:26:07
  There, it's dangerous, isn't it? Two years old, you know. 291
• 1:26:12
  distillery in Colorado, these guys have win, you know, be in
• 1:26:15
  the world whiskeys awards. These guys are all winning
• 1:26:17
  awards, but you just can't see them over here.
• 1:26:19
  Yeah, they win all the big awards, but there's they're
• 1:26:21
  small distilleries and. So they are all places are
• 1:26:24
  distilling spirit as well. They're not.
• 1:26:26
  There's no MGP that's being matured.
• 1:26:28
  Now these are proper distilleries.
• 1:26:29
  We we're, we're approaching us and.
• 1:26:32
  Because what what people and people aren't bourbon drinkers
• 1:26:35
  aren't rye drinkers. What you see a lot of just now
• 1:26:38
  is there's thousands of quote, UN quote distilleries in the US
• 1:26:40
  and Canada that actually aren't distilling that will basically
• 1:26:45
  order X amount of this and this from Indiana, mature it and
• 1:26:49
  everybody so state proud, right. So if you're from Nebraska, you
• 1:26:54
  open up the Nebraska distillery and it all comes from Indiana.
• 1:26:58
  I'll have to say in the back of the bottle, distilled in Indiana
• 1:27:00
  and people will go, well, that's my closest distillery.
• 1:27:02
  I'll buy so much of it. So again, the law is actually
• 1:27:05
  your own things. It's not still there to see
• 1:27:07
  mature though. It's I've been on a hunt in in
• 1:27:10
  Michigan. I've had maybe now 810
• 1:27:14
  distilleries in Michigan and always try one.
• 1:27:17
  And then I realise it's MGP. I mean, it's mass produced
• 1:27:21
  grain. There's also a lot of Americans.
• 1:27:24
  Also, get some very good Oh there is, there is and you can
• 1:27:27
  get some very good MGPS too, which.
• 1:27:28
  Is really. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:27:29
  And but then I always go hunting for, OK, I need one that's
• 1:27:33
  distilled here. And it ends up being, as David
• 1:27:37
  mentioned before, one guy in a Hut 1 still, there's one, a
• 1:27:43
  great one in Mission. It's called the Iron, his own
• 1:27:45
  barley. It's called the Iron Fish
• 1:27:48
  Distillery. And it's got to be the worst
• 1:27:50
  name for a distillate I. Don't know 291 isn't.
• 1:27:55
  Sorry, 291. Just went for numbers.
• 1:27:58
  Oh, I I think fainting goat spirits is my favorite.
• 1:28:00
  Fainting goats. Fainting goats.
• 1:28:03
  Fainting goats. Where?
• 1:28:04
  Where's that I? Can't remember where we have
• 1:28:07
  whereabouts in America it is, but yeah, fainting goats.
• 1:28:09
  Yeah, Iron fashion. I was like, that's terrible.
• 1:28:11
  And it's just two guys that love fashion.
• 1:28:13
  I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why this is called
• 1:28:15
  iron rope. This is called iron rope because
• 1:28:17
  it's, it's the the, the stories in in the town and I can't
• 1:28:20
  remember the name of the town, but there was a guy there who
• 1:28:24
  basically saved the French vines, the cognac industry.
• 1:28:30
  Oh yes, he created the iron roots in America that went back
• 1:28:36
  and saved. And of course this is a big play
• 1:28:38
  in the popularity of Scotch whisky because once they, you
• 1:28:42
  know, in France, the disease that wrecked this destroyed the
• 1:28:45
  kind of cognac and Brandy industry.
• 1:28:48
  Therefore the the popular drink became Scotch whisky because
• 1:28:52
  Brandy was, so the supply of it was.
• 1:28:54
  Just disappeared. Just disappeared.
• 1:28:56
  So, but then, of course, the story goes.
• 1:28:59
  Well, it is true that the vines, the original vines, had been
• 1:29:03
  taken over to America, and evidently this is where.
• 1:29:07
  Iron root. Wow.
• 1:29:08
  And then they came back, just planted back.
• 1:29:10
  In France. So he's, he's in.
• 1:29:12
  The research there what you. Do in your.
• 1:29:15
  Lunch breaks. All in about the kind of 1860s,
• 1:29:18
  wasn't it? Yeah, that sort of time.
• 1:29:20
  Yeah. So this is.
• 1:29:21
  I think that's really, really tasty.
• 1:29:22
  It's got a kind of art, that artificial vanilla that I look
• 1:29:26
  for. Also a kind of plastickiness
• 1:29:29
  that I love that in a really strange way.
• 1:29:32
  But I think that's. Now we have.
• 1:29:34
  We're men. Feel on a the kind.
• 1:29:35
  Of whiskey that. A mouth the men feel on that For
• 1:29:37
  a 2 year old, whiskey is not something you can experience.
• 1:29:40
  Kind of whiskey that I just know.
• 1:29:41
  Junk Girl having a a ridiculous tasting note for that.
• 1:29:44
  That's it. Yeah.
• 1:29:45
  Well, we have a feature, a new feature based on, in fact, a big
• 1:29:50
  shout out to Nadia, who is probably the first person to
• 1:29:54
  call it out, I think on our Facebook group, a new feature.
• 1:29:58
  We're still trying to work out how it's going to go, but the
• 1:30:00
  the feature is wanky tasting notes.
• 1:30:04
  More outlandish than that? Yeah, and I think what, what was
• 1:30:06
  it She. Posted a retro can of fruit
• 1:30:09
  salad. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:11
  Yeah, Did you say that it's that brilliant?
• 1:30:14
  But I have to say we are fast running out of time because
• 1:30:16
  that's that's an hour and a half already.
• 1:30:18
  Oh man. And you've got two more
• 1:30:19
  whiskies. So what we'll do is.
• 1:30:21
  Do them with the stories. Well, yeah, talk us through the,
• 1:30:24
  the, the drams that you've got because there's one in
• 1:30:26
  particular that number one, I'm desperate to see the label and
• 1:30:30
  #2 it's, it'll have a, a close sort of.
• 1:30:33
  Tie for. You tie for me as well.
• 1:30:35
  English whiskey. Brand and also thank you for
• 1:30:37
  your generosity. This is brilliant.
• 1:30:39
  This is and the podcast. So the next the next couple, I
• 1:30:42
  guess. I hope you're not.
• 1:30:45
  You're going to help your game with your.
• 1:30:48
  Precious. OK, we've got an Indian whiskey
• 1:30:49
  here from the Paul John Distillery.
• 1:30:51
  They single malt, they were generally when we when we first
• 1:30:57
  got to know them, they were only using first fill American oak.
• 1:31:01
  They use six row barley, so it's a much oily, it's a really heavy
• 1:31:06
  meaty barley. It's like grown domestically in
• 1:31:10
  India. It's in Indian Bali, six row
• 1:31:12
  Indian Bali and distilled in India, put into new bourbon
• 1:31:18
  cast. These are generally about six
• 1:31:20
  years old. They have a horrendously high
• 1:31:23
  Angel share, which is what we have on the original Indian
• 1:31:26
  label, the Paul John label. But on this one we did a cinema
• 1:31:28
  series. So we did a whole flight of
• 1:31:32
  whiskeys with spoof movie labels on like the Unquenchables
• 1:31:36
  instead of the Untouchables. I mean, don't ask me because I
• 1:31:38
  don't seen any of the movies. I'm not a film person, I'm not
• 1:31:43
  ATV person. I was rubbish.
• 1:31:46
  The the Italian whiskey was my favorite one.
• 1:31:48
  We did the the pony, we bottle a pony and we did a spaghetti
• 1:31:52
  western, the good, the bad and the ugly.
• 1:31:54
  And on our original pony label we've got dogs running our our
• 1:31:59
  dogs in, in barrels, running down the Alps there.
• 1:32:01
  And I thought, well, dogs can do no wrong.
• 1:32:04
  So it was the good boy, the good boy and the good boy.
• 1:32:07
  We've got the three pictures of the, the dogs heads on, on the
• 1:32:12
  characters of the spaghetti Western poster and all stupid
• 1:32:16
  things like that. But this Paul John, we went, you
• 1:32:18
  know, some of these you can see online if you if you, if you
• 1:32:21
  Google yeah, please. And, and help yourself.
• 1:32:25
  You, you, you see these certainly in the Far East.
• 1:32:28
  They, they hand paint movie posters and they, they see it
• 1:32:32
  online and they do it by hand and they're, they're, they're,
• 1:32:35
  they're right. And but we wanted to get that
• 1:32:37
  sort of Bollywood feel, that colour, that bright vibrancy of
• 1:32:40
  the Bollywood and Paul John, it's almost, you know, under
• 1:32:44
  Bond. I've got to say, especially with
• 1:32:48
  people that when we share whiskeys with our friends or I'm
• 1:32:52
  sharing wishes with colleagues, I want to give them a story and
• 1:32:55
  what I've learned tonight about Patiki whiskey and why I need to
• 1:32:57
  buy more Patiki whiskey because every bottle has a story.
• 1:33:00
  Yeah. And we that's what we love about
• 1:33:02
  whiskey. It's whiskey stories podcast.
• 1:33:04
  If I can bring say or have a go on this and let me tell you
• 1:33:06
  about it. It's more enjoyable for
• 1:33:08
  everybody before we even tasted the liquid and that genuinely
• 1:33:11
  thought provoking conversation starting brand and I think
• 1:33:16
  that's really interesting. And there's people, myself
• 1:33:18
  included, like that is what I love to do is with people who
• 1:33:22
  maybe enjoy a drum but don't know too much about it.
• 1:33:25
  I liked it now and I liked that before that.
• 1:33:29
  It sounds so stupid, but like saying earlier on like being on
• 1:33:32
  brand. But the one I always would go
• 1:33:34
  to, it was like I'd got a couple of Glenn Fennick whiskey
• 1:33:36
  tastings and it was the 15 year old Salera.
• 1:33:39
  And basically what it was. It just shows you how few people
• 1:33:42
  know much about whiskey. It's saying I like the Glenn
• 1:33:45
  Fennick. Have you ever tried the 15
• 1:33:47
  Salera? And it was like a go to,
• 1:33:49
  birthday, Christmas, any kind of present I could get for somebody
• 1:33:52
  because you could. Tell the story about the 15.
• 1:33:55
  You know the salera, which obviously is quite unique.
• 1:33:57
  Have you been up to the Sala that have you talked?
• 1:34:00
  But, but, but my point is like if I, if you get somebody who
• 1:34:04
  I'm sure most of the drinkers of Petechi whiskey are, if you're
• 1:34:08
  at home and you say, do you want a DRAM?
• 1:34:10
  And you pull out a bottle and you put it down and say, look at
• 1:34:12
  that and they'll look at the label and then somebody else
• 1:34:15
  tells your story for you, it basically me.
• 1:34:18
  And that just keeps passing it on and passing on.
• 1:34:20
  It's such a clever tool. To be able to get it, yeah.
• 1:34:23
  And brings us on to the final whiskey you brought along with
• 1:34:28
  us tonight, the one that you know, they might sneer up a
• 1:34:31
  little bit. And and just before.
• 1:34:34
  The the the single malt English. Just just before we move on.
• 1:34:36
  Just before. That's called the referendum
• 1:34:38
  have. You had an Indian whiskey before
• 1:34:43
  I. Have My dad is actually a big
• 1:34:44
  fan. Contrary to what a popular
• 1:34:46
  belief may be, he loves it. Really loves it.
• 1:34:48
  Every Christmas he gets one. From Paul John.
• 1:34:50
  Paul, do you have Indian whiskey in the house?
• 1:34:52
  Yes. I've got a bottle of AM root and
• 1:34:55
  what else have I got? There was.
• 1:34:57
  Fusion or something? I, there's a couple, but I mean,
• 1:35:00
  when you go over to India, the cost of Scotch is so high that
• 1:35:03
  you, you have to drink then, then whiskey, unless you're
• 1:35:05
  willing to drop. I mean, it becomes, I've said it
• 1:35:07
  so many times a year before it becomes just I, I visit India
• 1:35:12
  some, you know, hopefully two or three times a year over the next
• 1:35:15
  few years. Because with, especially with
• 1:35:16
  the, with, we go out now and we daughter and with family being
• 1:35:20
  over there. But when I've been over there,
• 1:35:22
  you like to take whiskey with you.
• 1:35:25
  He doesn't listen to the podcast, so I could say it.
• 1:35:27
  father-in-law likes to give. I bring bottles with me.
• 1:35:30
  Yeah. And I've learned the first time
• 1:35:32
  I've brought two really nice bottles.
• 1:35:33
  I said I've brought these first time I were there.
• 1:35:35
  Oh, brilliant. Took them and put them on a
• 1:35:37
  shift and I never got to try. Yeah.
• 1:35:39
  So now I take 4 bottles with me, two forever and two in my bag up
• 1:35:42
  the stairs so that I can actually have it.
• 1:35:44
  But I remember walking down. One day you'll have a great
• 1:35:47
  taste in it and then oh. I know, but bottles?
• 1:35:48
  Will be half empty. I walk.
• 1:35:49
  I walk down to the shop. And it was like, hi, there is a
• 1:35:54
  shop literally a stones throw away from their house and it's
• 1:35:57
  probably got, I mean it's got a better whiskey collection in
• 1:36:00
  that shop down the road from their house than you could find
• 1:36:03
  in just your standard shops in Edinburgh.
• 1:36:05
  It's got a massive collection of great whiskey.
• 1:36:07
  But the issue is for a standard ram, as I said, I think when we
• 1:36:11
  tried to get bottles of Glenfedec 12 for our wedding,
• 1:36:14
  the cheapest that we could get them was for about 100 and 2000
• 1:36:17
  and 50 LB a bottle. And I just couldn't justify
• 1:36:20
  that. Can't justify that at all,
• 1:36:22
  especially when you know how. I mean, I don't mind sometimes
• 1:36:24
  going over there. I've been in a bar before where
• 1:36:27
  I'll maybe say, you know what, fancy a drama, I'll pay 7 or £8
• 1:36:32
  for a drama standard, whatever. But to have to pay that much for
• 1:36:36
  a bottle just so I have to do. We get laid down on their way
• 1:36:39
  through. But then the whiskey is
• 1:36:40
  fantastic. But I could do of an education
• 1:36:42
  on it really, because I'm not much of it.
• 1:36:44
  Dave, as have you bottled many, Paul Jones of many.
• 1:36:48
  Bottled and we bought I think this is this is match 5 is it?
• 1:36:52
  I think I know this is batch 6, but some of them were split
• 1:36:58
  batches where we did batches that went to America in 37
• 1:37:01
  fives. And is that a style of whiskey
• 1:37:03
  and a kind of whiskey that you generally enjoy?
• 1:37:05
  It it, some of the unpeated stuff is absolutely superb.
• 1:37:09
  There was a, there was a single cask that was bottled.
• 1:37:11
  It was cask #1908. This is not a boutique.
• 1:37:14
  This is an actual Paul John. I remember it.
• 1:37:16
  I've still got a little bit. There was a 686 which was very
• 1:37:18
  good, which was peated. I still got some of.
• 1:37:21
  That you are a whiskey now Dave. I like that this cast numbers is
• 1:37:25
  impressive. Yeah, cast numbers.
• 1:37:26
  I remember 19. Yeah.
• 1:37:27
  If I see one, you know, I'll buy it.
• 1:37:31
  I do like their unpeated one. This is a little bit peaton here
• 1:37:35
  I think. We dropped, not me.
• 1:37:37
  Yeah, just a touch. Yeah, Festival.
• 1:37:39
  I think this might be in a marriage of of two remnants.
• 1:37:43
  But it's a really interesting characteristic, It's a.
• 1:37:45
  Really oily? Yeah.
• 1:37:47
  Husky Yeah, they have a very high Angel share.
• 1:37:51
  There's six years, most of it's gone.
• 1:37:53
  There is there is AI don't know who it is, but there is a
• 1:37:58
  whiskey company in India who bond underground for that reason
• 1:38:02
  to try and that they actually there.
• 1:38:04
  So they they their bonded warehouses are actually
• 1:38:06
  underground. Try and stabilise the.
• 1:38:08
  Temperature, yeah, and there are, I think I'm maybe wrong
• 1:38:11
  here, but there is Underground in Scotland as well.
• 1:38:14
  Oh, is it? I think there's a big.
• 1:38:17
  One kind of in form a coal mines up in the connect to the good
• 1:38:23
  True but nice one. I'm sure that what's the one up
• 1:38:25
  in the northeast? The right N is a new distillery
• 1:38:27
  is it not bonded in an old airline shelter?
• 1:38:31
  I'm sure someone's going to be scammed.
• 1:38:33
  It's currently screaming at you right now in.
• 1:38:36
  The very far northeast you can think of, there's a distillery
• 1:38:39
  in Jordan Groats and there's Wolfburn on Thursday.
• 1:38:42
  Is it that far northeast? North maybe NI don't know.
• 1:38:45
  It's in the north in. Fact.
• 1:38:46
  It's very. Someone.
• 1:38:48
  I know someone I know from a new.
• 1:38:51
  Distillery and the the reason that they picked that new
• 1:38:54
  distillery to to buy a cast is because the the quirk of it
• 1:38:57
  being stored in a air raid shelter.
• 1:39:01
  Warehousing, the friendship been using warehousing for cognac,
• 1:39:06
  you know, dry warehouses, damp warehouses to to change the
• 1:39:09
  spirit. And it's really important.
• 1:39:11
  We've noticed that with one of our manky warehouses that we
• 1:39:15
  we've been mature in spirit and you get a very different spirit
• 1:39:17
  from it. Yeah.
• 1:39:18
  Well, great. Graham noticed it when he tried
• 1:39:20
  to mature some spirit in his earring covered, and it tastes
• 1:39:22
  not like washing up. But imagine I've tried that
• 1:39:25
  recently. We've not tried very nicely.
• 1:39:27
  Yeah, right. We've got this thing first, but
• 1:39:29
  yeah. Hen hen South.
• 1:39:30
  Now we should probably should let you talk about this, this
• 1:39:33
  last whiskey you have. Well, this is an English single
• 1:39:36
  malt from Adnam's. This is our second batch.
• 1:39:39
  This is a peated. So this is originally in French
• 1:39:45
  oak. So refill French oak originally
• 1:39:48
  and then it's been put into a Nile.
• 1:39:50
  It's been finished in a Nile a cask.
• 1:39:53
  So this is that French oak that you pass, pass you, you can pass
• 1:39:58
  it pass it pass. It that's a lot easier.
• 1:40:01
  While I'm talking, yeah. Sorry.
• 1:40:04
  So Adams Distillery was the first brew Hillary, because it's
• 1:40:09
  a Brewer first and foremost. Adams make beer.
• 1:40:13
  They make Ghost Ship. They're based on the coast in a
• 1:40:19
  little village in Suffolk, beautiful little place.
• 1:40:23
  And they they put a distillery in there.
• 1:40:25
  They make vodka from the same mash bill as as the make the
• 1:40:29
  beer. The wash.
• 1:40:30
  They're huge. Great big.
• 1:40:32
  I mean, they're, they're, they're wash backs, big
• 1:40:34
  stainless wash backs are huge. They're monstrous things because
• 1:40:37
  they make beer. And they'll be able to
• 1:40:38
  experiment with their fermentation and and do really
• 1:40:41
  interesting things coming from a brewery background I would
• 1:40:43
  assume. It's Brewers yeast that's over
• 1:40:45
  80 years old. It's a, it's a yeast that
• 1:40:48
  they've been cultivating for over 80 years and they built the
• 1:40:53
  distillery within the brewery. And then they, you know, the
• 1:40:56
  whiskey got better and they had to put a dedicated whiskey
• 1:40:58
  steel. So at first they had a pot steel
• 1:40:59
  with columns on the side, really tall columns, so they could do
• 1:41:03
  the, the really high stripping for vodka.
• 1:41:06
  They do a gin, but then the whiskey took off.
• 1:41:09
  So they put a proper whiskey steel.
• 1:41:11
  But their USP has been French oak.
• 1:41:14
  So they used New French outcasts.
• 1:41:16
  They've been making rye whiskey and it's fantastic.
• 1:41:19
  And this is a single malt and this this has been an iron cask.
• 1:41:23
  The first one that we did was a 7 year old and it was just
• 1:41:28
  unsmoked. So that's this is the second
• 1:41:31
  Atoms I've tried and they've both been under the Atom brands.
• 1:41:37
  And I was really impressed with the seven-year old limousine,
• 1:41:40
  French Virginal, because it gives a real maturity, A7 year
• 1:41:43
  old, but you could have told me it was much older.
• 1:41:46
  And also it's a nice tram to end on.
• 1:41:48
  It is worth saying about bringing the mid down.
• 1:41:49
  The distillery managers very recently and quite suddenly
• 1:41:52
  passed away. Yeah, John McCarthy.
• 1:41:54
  He we sadly learnt of his demise last week.
• 1:41:58
  Yeah, Nick knocked me for six because he was only 55 in
• 1:42:01
  September. Oh well.
• 1:42:02
  And he he looked in top form. He was running marathon, you
• 1:42:06
  know, half marathons not so long ago.
• 1:42:08
  And. The liquid history can't be
• 1:42:11
  taken away, and that's what you produced and.
• 1:42:13
  Yeah, he built the distillery effectively, went in there to do
• 1:42:15
  some installation, and ended up building it, learning to distill
• 1:42:18
  and becoming the distiller. Cheers to him because this is,
• 1:42:21
  I've got to be fair, second Adam that I've tried and it's
• 1:42:25
  delicious again. Yeah, we'll raise a John a glass
• 1:42:28
  to John. Absolutely, absolutely to.
• 1:42:30
  John. To absent friends, yeah.
• 1:42:35
  And actually the peat is there on the finish.
• 1:42:37
  Yeah, the peat comes across on the finish.
• 1:42:39
  Yeah. So we did a series called World
• 1:42:41
  of Smoke and it was a series of eight or nine whiskeys.
• 1:42:45
  Oh, voice is going there, 8 or 9 whiskeys.
• 1:42:49
  And they were all different types of smoke.
• 1:42:50
  So there was a German peat in a Mizanara cast from a German
• 1:42:53
  distillery. There were four different wood
• 1:42:56
  smokes, Beech, Birch, Alder and Mesquite from different
• 1:43:00
  distilleries. So because, you know, wood has
• 1:43:04
  been used for smoking malt for years in in Germany for beer,
• 1:43:07
  beer and things. And what else was there?
• 1:43:09
  There was a German peat. There was this one which was a
• 1:43:13
  peated cask. So yeah, really interesting
• 1:43:15
  series of of smoke. But there was that you wouldn't
• 1:43:19
  expect to get that. It's not that big peaty slap of
• 1:43:22
  smoke. No.
• 1:43:24
  Absolutely not. Well, that leads us on to our
• 1:43:26
  final feature of the evening. You've been given some homework
• 1:43:29
  to do as all our guests are is our what, 3 drams?
• 1:43:32
  I'm interested to hear these. I think maybe I'm wrong, but I
• 1:43:35
  think you might have started talking about maybe one of them
• 1:43:38
  already. Then mentioned the Westgate 1
• 1:43:40
  bottle to change your mind and I.
• 1:43:41
  Was like, it was. It was.
• 1:43:43
  A whiskey either because I thought.
• 1:43:45
  Yeah, it was, so told them. That it was a whiskey.
• 1:43:47
  I carry a photograph of it around all the time, just in
• 1:43:50
  case there was only 368 bottles. So is this your what, 3 drams?
• 1:43:54
  One of them. One of them is is it's a
• 1:43:56
  Cabinheads Khalilah distilled in 1991, fifteen years old with 368
• 1:44:07
  bottles. I've got a picture of it on
• 1:44:09
  there just looking for I'll never find it again.
• 1:44:12
  And it was just one of those nectar moments and I just tasted
• 1:44:17
  them. Oh, everything just sort of fell
• 1:44:19
  into place in my head and thought, I've got to find out
• 1:44:22
  more. About this was this this is the
• 1:44:24
  one that you just this was the whiskey that got you on, yes.
• 1:44:28
  You know what's fun That changed my career?
• 1:44:30
  Effectively, it just made me to to be become the geek rather
• 1:44:34
  than just the drinker. Was it, was it one of the toll
• 1:44:36
  bottles? One of the old school?
• 1:44:38
  Do you remember how old it was, Dave?
• 1:44:39
  Let me get it. You know what's fascinating is
• 1:44:42
  not just not that long ago actually, Paul Main.
• 1:44:45
  Yeah, we had on from Hunter lane.
• 1:44:46
  That's right. And he was talking in the it's
• 1:44:48
  almost an exact same situation happened to him.
• 1:44:51
  It was a Cardin heads legit 24. Oh.
• 1:44:54
  Wow, old school. That really is an old school
• 1:44:56
  bottling there. So my sales manager is a whisk
• 1:44:59
  was a was a is a whiskey geek at the time in engineering and he
• 1:45:03
  had a little whiskey club down in London and he would bring a
• 1:45:06
  bottle of whiskey in at Christmas.
• 1:45:08
  The first time he bought 1 when was a Klein Leish curtain heads
• 1:45:11
  and that did it was lovely, but it didn't register.
• 1:45:16
  I just went back to drinking Guinness and red wine not in the
• 1:45:21
  same glass. And the following Christmas he
• 1:45:26
  bought this and I didn't need my arm twisting.
• 1:45:28
  I went for it straight away and tasted it and it just everything
• 1:45:31
  just registered cling, cling, cling, cling.
• 1:45:32
  And he said, oh man, I need that.
• 1:45:34
  He gave me the hill afterwards because I just fell in love with
• 1:45:36
  it and I started reading about whiskey that Christmas.
• 1:45:39
  I went out and bought 5 bottles over Christmas and New Year,
• 1:45:43
  five different whiskeys, 1-2 Le, four eggs, 1 Glen Kinchy, 1
• 1:45:47
  Juror Sorry, and one Dalwini. This stuff on the supermarket.
• 1:45:54
  I didn't know much about whiskey at all, apart from just for
• 1:45:57
  falling over, really. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:59
  Fantastic. I mean, I say it's incredible.
• 1:46:01
  Like I say, just a few weeks ago Paul made Garden hedge 24 Lijig
• 1:46:05
  Yeah, that and and again same situation where it was actually
• 1:46:09
  somebody from his work as well that actually come in and said
• 1:46:11
  try that. Yeah, you want to DRAM tried it
• 1:46:13
  and went at the moment. You could be interested in
• 1:46:16
  whiskey, try this independent bottling.
• 1:46:19
  And if you've got a friend that can introduce you to that, you
• 1:46:21
  probably weren't going to guide yourself to that.
• 1:46:23
  No, which is which is that kind of difficult jump, as you'd
• 1:46:26
  mentioned, to get from having something that was readily
• 1:46:30
  available and recognisable to something that's quite alien and
• 1:46:33
  challenging. And why would you?
• 1:46:34
  Maybe not even understanding why people are into stuff like
• 1:46:37
  cabinheads at 1st and try it. You go OK.
• 1:46:39
  It's a big step for an ABV like to give a non real whiskey
• 1:46:45
  drinker a cast strength whiskey. Yeah, because that again, I
• 1:46:49
  mean. And heartbreaking because you
• 1:46:51
  know you'll never get it again. So.
• 1:46:53
  Much. There's always that fear of
• 1:46:55
  missing out, though. You go through that phase of
• 1:46:57
  fear of missing out. But then I got over that and
• 1:47:00
  there's, you know, there's always more whiskey.
• 1:47:01
  Yeah, I'll always be. More there's always I mean, my
• 1:47:03
  little whiskey blog was called Whiskey Discovery.
• 1:47:05
  It was always about the next one.
• 1:47:07
  When everyone asked me what my favorite whiskey is, I'll always
• 1:47:10
  answer, usually the next one. Nice.
• 1:47:13
  Because it is, you know, I'm always seeking.
• 1:47:16
  And the next one you're trying is Graham's bottles of Lindores.
• 1:47:20
  As well I. Was in the market.
• 1:47:24
  I like, I like, I used to keep a whiskey log, you know, every,
• 1:47:27
  every discovery. And at first it was all about
• 1:47:30
  the details, details, details, whiskey.
• 1:47:32
  And then it become where and who with and it became about the
• 1:47:35
  people. And then that was more than
• 1:47:37
  anything. Then there's a new whiskey
• 1:47:39
  discovery. 1st. Story running theme right?
• 1:47:42
  OK, drum #2 then. Telesco 18 I love the Telesco
• 1:47:47
  18. I just think it's I can't afford
• 1:47:49
  it anymore. Right out of it, I know it.
• 1:47:53
  Went from £60 to 100. And 80 I know I think someone
• 1:47:56
  told me it was 215 at the distillery now yeah.
• 1:48:02
  So we so we blended a whiskey that we blended a Highland
• 1:48:05
  peated whiskey. We'll put put a handed that
• 1:48:07
  tastes just like a telescope. 18 I had it in here last night.
• 1:48:12
  Yeah. Are.
• 1:48:12
  We are we selling it for 215. Pounds 8585 retail.
• 1:48:17
  Is that just just you love it? I yeah, it's one of those
• 1:48:21
  whiskeys that I remember I was very lucky at a W1 of the first
• 1:48:25
  whiskey shows. I, I went through all the
• 1:48:26
  Talisker range, including the 25 and the 35 that were special
• 1:48:30
  releases at that year, 2011. But the 18 is just one of those
• 1:48:34
  ones. A it was affordable.
• 1:48:35
  It was, it was a treat, but it was affordable.
• 1:48:39
  And it's, it's just beautiful whiskey.
• 1:48:41
  I just absolutely love it That that that's maritime sort of has
• 1:48:46
  a maritime sort of edge to it soft peak week to it that
• 1:48:50
  pepperiness that's been tamed. You know, get the really big
• 1:48:53
  pepper on the you're. Not doing anything bring the
• 1:48:55
  price down. No, I'm not doing anything to do
• 1:48:59
  bring the price down. No, it won't come down for a
• 1:49:01
  while. I don't.
• 1:49:01
  Think it used to be something you've seen in every bar and you
• 1:49:04
  would order it and it was affordable and actually no bar
• 1:49:06
  will even stock it now because of the price of it I.
• 1:49:09
  Think you can get hold of it because it's not enough of it
• 1:49:10
  around I don't think. But I remember the reason the
• 1:49:12
  old bottles went off because the rumour was the Diageo shop 0
• 1:49:17
  work for Diageo. You occasionally get this, a
• 1:49:18
  layer of Diageo shop and discount and somebody high up
• 1:49:22
  and bought all this discount at task at 18 and it disappeared
• 1:49:26
  for, well, it felt like 16 months.
• 1:49:28
  And it came out with a new bottle design and the new price
• 1:49:31
  and apparently very similar liquid but great whiskey.
• 1:49:36
  OK, for the third one, I'm going to go curveball.
• 1:49:39
  I I remember I fall, I fell in love with rye whiskey and I do
• 1:49:43
  absolutely adore rye whiskey and I love the versatility of rye,
• 1:49:48
  all the different recipes of rye.
• 1:49:50
  And I'm going to go with a Middle Stone rye, which is a
• 1:49:53
  Dutch rye. Sherry finished up.
• 1:49:57
  Don't they? He, he does a lot of Sherry
• 1:49:59
  finish in his, in his whiskeys and he has some of those really
• 1:50:02
  old Salawa Salawa casks, you know, dead cast really.
• 1:50:06
  You have to leave it in for a long time.
• 1:50:07
  But most of his rye is quite young and it goes into new oak,
• 1:50:12
  which it should be. But yeah, I, I remember the
• 1:50:15
  first rye I had was a Dutch rye and it just wow.
• 1:50:18
  This what this what is this, this is fantastic.
• 1:50:22
  I've got to name Patrick. Over the years, we've bottled
• 1:50:25
  some great millstones, both malts and and ryes over the
• 1:50:29
  year. This man grew up in a in a
• 1:50:31
  distillery. So as a kid it was distillery
• 1:50:34
  was his playground. And he used to have the clean
• 1:50:36
  Netherlands or in the Netherlands.
• 1:50:38
  Yeah, but his father was a distiller and thought he could
• 1:50:40
  do better. Than selling Gen. or whiskey.
• 1:50:43
  Or yeah, Geneva. Inspirits.
• 1:50:45
  Geneva. It was it was Patrick who talked
• 1:50:48
  his father into making whiskey. He made his first spirit cuts at
• 1:50:51
  the age of 12. What this man doesn't know about
• 1:50:55
  making whiskey isn't worth knowing.
• 1:50:57
  He he he collects pot stills. What?
• 1:51:01
  Where does he? Keep his pot still collection.
• 1:51:04
  In this distillery that's grown, I mean, when they, they, they,
• 1:51:07
  they used to mill all of their grain with windmills, proper
• 1:51:11
  windmills. They can't keep up.
• 1:51:12
  Now they still make Geneva and they use rye in the Geneva base
• 1:51:17
  as well, because rye is the poor man's wheat and.
• 1:51:21
  Fantastic. I love the flavours of rye.
• 1:51:23
  Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Well, Dave, honestly, thanks so
• 1:51:26
  much. Thank you for having me.
• 1:51:28
  I guess we've got the car running to take you home.
• 1:51:29
  Yeah. But look, Dave, how can people
• 1:51:35
  find you? We've mentioned, you know, where
• 1:51:37
  where can people keep up to date with what you're getting on,
• 1:51:39
  what you're doing what what you're up to?
• 1:51:42
  How can people find out about you?
• 1:51:43
  Normally I, I, I've been living on social media, normally on
• 1:51:46
  Twitter, but I've really falling out of love with Twitter at the
• 1:51:49
  moment. It's a bit of a cesspit, I must
• 1:51:51
  admit. I still call it Twitter.
• 1:51:53
  I think everybody calls it Twitter.
• 1:51:54
  But yeah, Boutiquey Dave on social media channels.
• 1:51:58
  The Boutiquey Whiskey website will have the news of the next
• 1:52:02
  release coming up soon. All the previous releases are on
• 1:52:05
  there. I I write the blog posts on that
• 1:52:08
  website as well. They should come up to see you
• 1:52:13
  at the next Whiskey Festival and say we listen to you on the
• 1:52:15
  podcast and. And yeah, and you've, you've
• 1:52:18
  kindly said as well that every Whiskey Story podcast, this is
• 1:52:22
  getting a 50%. Wow, good deals on there now.
• 1:52:32
  Yeah, just in case, Ambassador Balls, let's say.
• 1:52:35
  Can't you? As as a podcast can't you get a
• 1:52:39
  trade account? You.
• 1:52:42
  Probably sign up for a trade account, talk to Jodie, talk to
• 1:52:45
  Jodie, talk to YEAH here facilitator.
• 1:52:48
  Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks to everybody.
• 1:52:50
  I say what one year, one year on, guys, this is our first
• 1:52:53
  episode after being one year old.
• 1:52:55
  Thanks to everybody who's listening.
• 1:52:56
  Thanks to everybody who's commented.
• 1:52:58
  Thanks to everybody's just taking part and being involved
• 1:53:01
  past the podcast on where you know, we're growing and it's
• 1:53:04
  it's fantastic. We've got a really, really great
• 1:53:06
  community that every weekend. I've been smacking on a Friday
• 1:53:09
  night, but I've got to say the the scene, everybody's Friday
• 1:53:11
  night DRAM. Roll call guy.
• 1:53:13
  I mean, it's fantastic and thank you to just so many people,
• 1:53:17
  people that have given us kind messages of support and been
• 1:53:20
  being there to help us. Tomorrow night, I guess we are
• 1:53:22
  hosting our Finn Nixon Indie Bottler Spotlight with Finn
• 1:53:26
  Thompson. So you'll be looking forward to
• 1:53:27
  hearing that episode coming very soon that.
• 1:53:29
  Government 33 is very special. That's a great lineup.
• 1:53:32
  We've got so many things going on just now, but listen, thanks
• 1:53:35
  to him. Thanks for coming along, Dave.
• 1:53:37
  It's been great to see you. Oh, thanks for having me.
• 1:53:39
  Big thanks to the ginger boy. Yes, you, as always.
• 1:53:45
  The producer of the podcast. Thank you very much for for
• 1:53:48
  listening. Cheers, Spongevar.
• 1:53:50
  All the very best. Cheers.
• 1:53:51
  Cheers. Cheers and happy birthday.
• 1:53:54
  Oh, thank you. Drink to that.