Latest / Whisky Stories Podcast / Arthur Motley: Buying, selling and talking about whisky

Transcript

Arthur Motley: Buying, selling and talking about whisky · Whisky Stories Podcast

• 0:00
  Right, Angus, you're all set. Just.
• 0:03
  About. You know what to do?
• 0:04
  Clap us in we. Haven't got the Clipper.
• 0:07
  I know it's down the stairs, so back-to-back to manual clapping,
• 0:11
  back-to-back to clapping. Otherwise it's down to the
• 0:13
  dungeon to get it. Welcome to the Whiskey Stories
• 0:18
  podcast. I am going for something that
• 0:21
  doesn't quite exist yet, but I've tried to pre sample.
• 0:26
  It does that count? That counts, absolutely.
• 0:27
  Something that definitely exists and we should be proud that it
• 0:31
  still exists. And then something that I only
• 0:36
  smelt and licked and didn't get the taste.
• 0:39
  Oh, excellent. Sorry I.
• 0:44
  Didn't mean to look you in the eyes.
• 0:45
  No, that's quite all right. I got worried.
• 0:46
  I was like, oh, welcome to the Whiskey Stories podcast myself,
• 0:49
  Graeme Cogar. We're back in The Athletic.
• 0:51
  I was back in Diggers. Back where it all began, I
• 0:53
  guess. Over 100 episodes ago.
• 0:55
  Sandwiched nicely between the gents toilets and the bar.
• 0:58
  Absolutely. How are you, Angus?
• 1:00
  I'm very good. Glad to be back.
• 1:02
  It's been a week or two. So great.
• 1:06
  Yeah, no truck the leak if you were.
• 1:09
  Waiting on a plumber? The leak, it is flat, still not
• 1:12
  been fixed a week on. So I think it's been cold
• 1:14
  tremors for for Charles for the last week or so.
• 1:18
  So all very best. Chuck Chuck's in his flat
• 1:20
  waiting for a mustachioed man, and we're carrying a spanner to
• 1:23
  come round. It's nearly 7.
• 1:27
  O'clock and Truck. Truck's still waiting on a
• 1:29
  plumber for over a week now. So sorry you're not here.
• 1:31
  Chuck Ross is obviously working hard, employed at the Scotch bar
• 1:36
  where where we got him. His job really.
• 1:39
  Yeah, started out as a mere barman over 100 episodes ago,
• 1:42
  and now there he is running the joint.
• 1:44
  But of course, I guess, as we've always said on this podcast, we
• 1:48
  definitely need somebody who knows what they're talking about
• 1:50
  when it comes to whiskey. And we have no better man for
• 1:53
  it. We've got.
• 1:54
  Please show your appreciation for this team.
• 1:56
  Gentlemen. Mr. Arthur Motley, how are you?
• 1:59
  I'm doing great. Thanks.
• 2:00
  Thanks for having me guys. No, you said.
• 2:02
  Sure, do appreciate, although you're going to get me to clap
• 2:04
  again. It wouldn't have been a very.
• 2:08
  Unenthusiastic round of applause with just one person.
• 2:11
  Well, Arthur, it's great to have you here.
• 2:13
  Arthur Motley. Now you are Arthur Motley
• 2:16
  currently as we are Speaking of the Motley Spirit Agency, but
• 2:21
  people listening to this will know you, you've, you've worn
• 2:24
  many hats in the Scotch whiskey industry.
• 2:25
  You've been you've been well, managing director of the the the
• 2:29
  Royal Mile Whiskeys was your most recent recent job there.
• 2:32
  So welcome along. How?
• 2:33
  How are you? I'm good, thanks.
• 2:35
  I've kind of only really had two hats up to this one.
• 2:38
  Like I've only had two proper jobs since I graduated and 1 was
• 2:42
  SMWS buying whiskey for them. And then I did 21 years at Royal
• 2:47
  Mile Whiskeys. So I've been yeah, 24.
• 2:51
  So 25 years in the trade, I suppose, but only two jobs.
• 2:55
  So this is this is my third. Yeah, so there you go.
• 2:58
  Yeah, I mean, and of course, if you've you've reached the dizzy
• 3:01
  heights of the Whiskey Stories podcast, made it not only
• 3:03
  sandwich between The Jets toilets and the barley, you're
• 3:06
  sandwich between Graham and am yesterday.
• 3:08
  So great for you. The glamour.
• 3:11
  But yeah, so I think getting into whiskey, I think that's the
• 3:15
  best place to start really. After what?
• 3:17
  What was the journey like for you getting into whiskey?
• 3:20
  You said 25 years in the in the industry.
• 3:23
  Where did it all start? So I was a student, I came up to
• 3:30
  live in Scotland to Edinburgh as a student, the worst kind of
• 3:33
  student, an English student and it was doing a degree in
• 3:37
  archaeology and but I had a plan to do something else.
• 3:41
  So I worked out that wasn't a career for me, although it was
• 3:43
  very interesting, archaeology. And my last year at university,
• 3:50
  Palomine had been working on the bar, actually had been making
• 3:53
  the sandwiches I think at Scotch Mule Whiskey Society.
• 3:56
  And he said that for some reason everyone had got sacked on the
• 4:00
  bar. Let's not go into that.
• 4:02
  And they needed people quickly. And I got that bar job, but
• 4:05
  literally with the intention of learning about whiskey before I
• 4:11
  left Scotland. Were you a whiskey drinker
• 4:13
  before that? I had tried a few, first was
• 4:19
  Taliska 10, second was locked. Do infamous locked?
• 4:24
  Do I like them both? I'm embarrassed to say that.
• 4:26
  So what? Was the infamous locked do
• 4:29
  again? It was.
• 4:31
  Feel like I've heard the story. Important, was it not?
• 4:35
  It is now said to be the worst kind of bottling ever.
• 4:39
  It was, it was Manic Mall with I think the Azure basically took
• 4:43
  the view that people like dark whiskey.
• 4:46
  And that's absolutely true. People do like dark whiskey.
• 4:49
  And so they took Manic Mall and they put enormous amounts of
• 4:53
  spirit caramel in it and kind of marketed it as a black whiskey,
• 4:56
  and it was very black and it wasn't very good.
• 4:59
  I now see and know, but at the time I was just like, yeah, I
• 5:02
  like that too. Anyway, so I tried a few but
• 5:05
  couldn't really afford it. And so that was the appeal of
• 5:08
  working at SMWS. So I worked on the bar and just
• 5:11
  kind of threw myself into it. So that would be a cool thing to
• 5:14
  actually know about. But working over the bar, I just
• 5:17
  love the interaction of the members and the way people spoke
• 5:21
  about WW and the history and the culture and of course the taste.
• 5:25
  I then got to try lots of whiskeys in contrast to each
• 5:28
  other until filter whiskey, car strength whiskey, went to every
• 5:32
  single tasting panel I could. And then the week I graduated,
• 5:37
  someone left in the office and that person did everything.
• 5:41
  And one of the things this woman did, Kate, was she bought all
• 5:45
  the whiskey and the managing director came through and I was
• 5:50
  on shift that day. And he'd obviously noticed my
• 5:53
  enthusiasm and said, do you want a job buying whiskey?
• 5:57
  And so I became a bulk cask whiskey buyer and organized the
• 6:02
  panels and, and did that. And so when he.
• 6:04
  Yeah, when he. Said unbelievable timing.
• 6:08
  I mean graduating that week and then fall straight into a job
• 6:11
  you're at. Yeah, I like, I, I some of my
• 6:14
  least express favorite expressions in life are kind of
• 6:17
  like it was meant to be, or everything happens for a reason
• 6:19
  or all. That before you won't go by you
• 6:21
  Graham all. That stuff.
• 6:22
  But I do believe that if you like, if something lucky falls
• 6:25
  on your laps, then just go for it.
• 6:28
  And that's what And that's what I did.
• 6:29
  And and I was, I just thought, wow, what?
• 6:32
  That sounds like a really interesting thing to do.
• 6:34
  So yeah, I did that. And you know, I got to meet a
• 6:39
  lot of the old boys of the industry and as they were and
• 6:45
  learn about whiskey, get involved in bulk purchasing,
• 6:48
  which is was his whole whole different world.
• 6:51
  It's it's kind of similar, but different now.
• 6:53
  But it was pretty old fashioned back in those days.
• 6:56
  I mean. What are you talking?
• 6:57
  What, what, what time? What year are we talking about?
• 6:59
  This I think I started working about 1999 and I got the proper
• 7:03
  job 2000. Right.
• 7:06
  We've had a lot of people on the podcast, people you'll you'll
• 7:10
  definitely know as well, like Mark Davidson.
• 7:13
  He was, he was, again, I don't think everyone had suddenly been
• 7:16
  sacked from from the SNWS when he got the opportunity to work
• 7:20
  behind the bar. But his story was, I think it
• 7:23
  was a Christmas night out or there was there was the staff
• 7:25
  basically were short of it and they were like, well, Mark,
• 7:27
  you're usually on one side of the bar, so.
• 7:30
  You've seen how everything works from that side, but.
• 7:36
  The SNWS is, is a real gateway for so many people, has been for
• 7:40
  so many people as well. Because it's flavour first that
• 7:43
  you don't know about there. You know, we're talking about
• 7:45
  the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society. You don't know about what's in
• 7:48
  the bottles really. You get a number, you get
• 7:50
  flavour profiles and stuff like that.
• 7:52
  Did you accelerate yourself? Because you talk about luck,
• 7:55
  right? And you're sitting there going
• 7:56
  now there's every chance that if you were like, I just need to
• 7:59
  get a job to get me through uni, you did that.
• 8:01
  You're working behind the bar, you had that big knowledge of
• 8:03
  it. You didn't show too much
• 8:04
  enthusiasm. The managing director pops his
• 8:06
  head through, goes off, Christ, it's Arthur on Shifter.
• 8:09
  Only to wait till somebody else comes on to ask them.
• 8:12
  You know, you must have put yourself in a position that you
• 8:14
  see going on tasting panels and things like that.
• 8:17
  Did whiskey tasting come natural or did you have to train
• 8:20
  yourself to do it? I I think it was just instantly
• 8:26
  fascinating. I was enjoying it.
• 8:28
  I was, you know, the chat around the tasting table during the
• 8:31
  tasting panel. I just loved it.
• 8:33
  And that enthusiasm, you know, makes it easy.
• 8:35
  It didn't feel like work. You know, I was, I just enjoyed
• 8:39
  it. And I suppose they recognize
• 8:40
  that. It's interesting what you say
• 8:42
  about that SMWS being, you know, like a breeding ground for
• 8:46
  people who started working in the industry.
• 8:48
  And I'm not saying it's because of me, but that year, 2000 to
• 8:53
  year 2025 has been utterly extraordinary in the industry.
• 8:57
  And one thing is in the year 2000, there were not many jobs
• 9:01
  in whiskey at all. I was extremely lucky.
• 9:03
  And you, you hear a lot of these places like SMWS, the Heritage
• 9:07
  Centre, and I'd add Royal Mile whiskeys to that as well.
• 9:11
  The people who passed through Royal Mar whiskey stores, who
• 9:13
  then went on to do other things. It was a student job or
• 9:16
  something like that. Ewan Kennedy, for example, we, I
• 9:18
  was talking about him as someone, he's making whiskey at
• 9:21
  McAllen now. You know, he's putting together
• 9:23
  the cast. He was just, you know, had a
• 9:25
  student job with us, and there weren't many places where you
• 9:29
  could get jobs in those days. You know, the very early whiskey
• 9:33
  festivals, you turned up there and it was all master distillers
• 9:36
  and master blenders because no such thing as a brand ambassador
• 9:38
  but one or two. Well, you mentioned something
• 9:40
  very interesting when you were working for you, said the old
• 9:43
  faces of the whiskey industry, the old characters.
• 9:44
  Are there any characters in particular that stand out?
• 9:47
  Left an impression on you? Well, yeah, loads too many to
• 9:52
  mention almost, because like, there's so many cool people and
• 9:56
  the people were really fun. And that was part of the appeal
• 9:58
  of it, of how helpful people were to me.
• 10:01
  When you talk about the old guys, you know, I was turning up
• 10:04
  at meetings aged 22 talking about negotiating bulk whiskey
• 10:09
  purchases to some guy who had worked, you know, 20
• 10:13
  distilleries that have been in the industry.
• 10:15
  But they were also kind of also nice.
• 10:16
  But to illustrate my point, I suppose they needed staff
• 10:20
  quickly and those there, there was a guy who actually left the
• 10:25
  industry, went into brewing in France.
• 10:26
  He was a manager. And then the other, the other
• 10:29
  people on the bar team who also didn't know what they were
• 10:32
  doing. And we all looked at each other
• 10:33
  and said what are you supposed to be doing?
• 10:34
  I don't know. I just started yesterday was
• 10:36
  Mark Watt. And Annabel Mikkel, who was
• 10:40
  until recently director of keeps of the quake.
• 10:43
  She had come in from cheese, a cheese merchant or something and
• 10:48
  just thought it sounds interesting and like sound of
• 10:50
  whiskey. And Mark had actually come down
• 10:52
  from space side because he wanted to just work other places
• 10:55
  and it was clear that he wanted to work.
• 10:57
  So like there's a core of people who all bumped into each other
• 11:01
  because there were many of us back in those.
• 11:04
  Days. I mean, I'll be perfectly
• 11:06
  honest, I've said it before, the SMWS at the time for me actually
• 11:12
  put me off whiskey because I, I, I need to be at the time when I
• 11:19
  was, you know, it was one of those ones maybe in my mid 20s,
• 11:23
  I'm showing a little bit of interest in whiskey.
• 11:25
  So I got given an SMWS membership for my Christmas mum
• 11:29
  and dad, right? What, what do we get Graham SMWS
• 11:31
  like, And I like the idea of it. I didn't like the, I didn't like
• 11:34
  the I first of all, that stage for me in whiskey drinking cast
• 11:38
  strength whiskey was something I, I found really, really
• 11:41
  challenging. Secondly, not knowing the brand
• 11:45
  made it really, really difficult because I was, I was the whiskey
• 11:48
  drinker that would go, I know that brand, I trust that brand,
• 11:51
  I'm going to go and drink that brand.
• 11:53
  So, so for me, I found it actually a little bit difficult
• 11:57
  to to get myself into that environment.
• 12:00
  But for other people like yourself, and there's so many
• 12:02
  other people that we've talked about, where have taking that
• 12:07
  brand away and just making it flavour first made it so much
• 12:11
  less intimidating and more enjoyable.
• 12:13
  Yeah, I get, I get it. It's a really odd presentation.
• 12:17
  It's a really odd way of doing things.
• 12:20
  But I kind of thrived in that environment.
• 12:23
  I liked the de branded element of it.
• 12:26
  I like the neutrality of and people would talk about it a bit
• 12:30
  more and you'd just cut through big names of distilleries
• 12:34
  occasionally. It'd be excitement, especially
• 12:36
  as it was getting harder to get some of the big name brands.
• 12:39
  But you know, Manic Mall stood next to McAllen and stood next
• 12:43
  to all the other things. And you know, that's why I found
• 12:46
  my love for Khalila, for example, which I might not have
• 12:50
  done before. Did that make it a challenge
• 12:52
  when you were then buying? Because you, you know what
• 12:55
  you're buying, you know the brand.
• 12:57
  So you're instantly, you know, brand.
• 12:59
  You can be LED, brand LED quite easily where you're sitting
• 13:01
  there going, oh, like, I don't know, I'm trying to think about,
• 13:05
  I think like a Glenn Farquist for example, right.
• 13:07
  We know Glenn Farquist is probably, what is it?
• 13:09
  A Glenn Farquist is not one of the first, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:12
  So you suddenly you're having a meeting with the people at Glenn
• 13:15
  Farquist with buying casks and buying liquid.
• 13:19
  Did how easy was it to remain completely neutral when you were
• 13:22
  going to different distilleries? Because there's other
• 13:24
  distilleries that a lot of people would look at the
• 13:26
  branding of it and go, it doesn't stand anywhere near
• 13:29
  that. You know, you, there's a
• 13:31
  hierarchy of distilleries is what I'm trying to say.
• 13:33
  And you're buying that whiskey and people are consuming it at
• 13:37
  face value. They're not getting to see what
• 13:39
  it actually is, but you're buying it.
• 13:41
  So you do know. And did that make it difficult?
• 13:44
  No, because I hadn't really had time on or couldn't afford to
• 13:48
  drink the branded whiskey and I would just go into work and all
• 13:52
  I'd be drinking is SMWS stuff. So yeah, you know, that was, I
• 13:56
  was straight into judging liquids as liquids I suppose.
• 14:00
  And I didn't have any brand preconceptions.
• 14:02
  I mean, I read stuff and I would try a few bits and bobs, but I
• 14:05
  was still coming out being a student and they paid me peanuts
• 14:08
  as well. So I couldn't afford to drink a
• 14:10
  lot of the other stuff. But also I'll correct you
• 14:14
  slightly there. It, it didn't work like that.
• 14:16
  Just rocking up at distilleries and being able to buy direct and
• 14:19
  things like that. It was through brokers and, and
• 14:22
  those, those early days, which people like to mythologize and
• 14:25
  kind of think about. And the early days when Pip did
• 14:28
  it, you know, it already started to move away from that when I
• 14:32
  was doing my job and supplies were constricting and it was
• 14:35
  harder to get certain Isle of whiskeys and the closest dealers
• 14:38
  are fading away. Even then I think about some of
• 14:41
  the stuff we rejected. It's far better than it was now.
• 14:46
  You know, you would get to use Gwen Farkas, you know, 5 samples
• 14:51
  of late 1960s Gwen Farkas, and you'd be picky about it.
• 14:54
  You'd pick a couple of them. That's that's hard now that that
• 14:58
  doesn't happen. Yeah.
• 14:59
  But already in those days, supplies were starting to
• 15:02
  restrict and the future of independent bottling was being
• 15:05
  questioned. Was it even going to be viable?
• 15:07
  All those kind of questions were a real concern and I suspect
• 15:11
  probably LED up to one of the reasons why Glen Moringy and the
• 15:15
  Glen Moringy SMWS purchase happened, because there was
• 15:19
  concern about that. I don't know that for sure.
• 15:21
  I wasn't party to that discussion.
• 15:22
  I mean, you wonder, I guess, about the the glory days or the
• 15:26
  golden ages of Scotch whisky. Yeah.
• 15:29
  And you hear after talking, there'll be people we know,
• 15:32
  people who are massive whisky enthusiasts who are desperately
• 15:39
  keen to forge a path in the whiskey industry.
• 15:41
  Sure. And then they'll hear, hear
• 15:43
  after say that I was on shift and suddenly, almost by
• 15:48
  accident, I became the buyer of for Essex.
• 15:51
  Yes. And people were going well, I
• 15:53
  mean that. I mean, that's the racket saying
• 15:55
  because I mean, I think we've heard, you know, we've heard
• 15:57
  stories, particularly for maybe brand ambassadors, so
• 16:00
  competitive to get these jobs, hundreds of people applying,
• 16:03
  people having to put on special presentations.
• 16:05
  And then sometimes and you know, it just sometimes being in the
• 16:09
  right place at the right time. We all know that that is is is
• 16:12
  some you know, We've all you know.
• 16:15
  Because I mean, you look at today right now, yeah, people
• 16:18
  are saying, I mean, I saw an article this morning actually
• 16:20
  about White and Mackay talking about, you know, their losses.
• 16:24
  Everyone's books are starting. You know, over time all the big
• 16:27
  guys are releasing their their financials for the years.
• 16:30
  Or sure. And you're seeing whiskey is in
• 16:32
  a difficult situation right now. But is it?
• 16:34
  Is it as bad as people are saying?
• 16:35
  You'll speak to some people and they'll say, yeah, look, we're
• 16:38
  probably and after you, you'll maybe know a bit better than we
• 16:40
  will, but we're probably where pre COVID numbers where before
• 16:44
  people. That's one line line of
• 16:47
  conversation through the covert period.
• 16:49
  There was a massive inflation of purchases of whiskey which made
• 16:53
  the industry look like it was, you know, it was performing
• 16:55
  really, really well. It was performing really well,
• 16:57
  not just looking like it. But then of course, it's come
• 16:59
  almost not crashing, but it's come back down with a bit of a
• 17:02
  bang. So is it, Is it, but is it a
• 17:06
  time for opportunity? Is it a time where when things
• 17:09
  are a little bit trickier, when things aren't in the the places
• 17:12
  they are. You speak to an independent
• 17:14
  bottler and they'll tell you right now there's never been a
• 17:16
  better time to buy whiskey because it's a buyer's market,
• 17:18
  because all these brands, distillers have overproduced or
• 17:21
  maybe have too much stock now trying to offload that.
• 17:24
  People aren't buying whiskey over the shops anymore, so
• 17:26
  they've got casks that they can offload at much better price.
• 17:29
  Well, that, that's an interesting thing.
• 17:30
  You mentioned obviously that there was this constricting
• 17:34
  availability of spirit. Do you think now you might not
• 17:36
  know first hand, but do you think there's a reversal of that
• 17:40
  in some aspects of it, that there's more becoming available
• 17:45
  online to independent producers? Yeah.
• 17:48
  I mean, I do know that is happening, you know that there
• 17:51
  are there are stocks being offered up that were not offered
• 17:54
  before and name malts being offered that weren't being
• 17:57
  offered before. And so the independent bottling
• 18:01
  lists of late this year and more likely early next year are about
• 18:05
  to get more interesting. So that's good.
• 18:07
  So that's a good. Thing for the consumer in a way.
• 18:09
  Yeah, no, I think there's going to be, you know, we'll know how
• 18:13
  bad it is, you know, springtime next year.
• 18:17
  Really, it's it's we shouldn't be surprised that the thing
• 18:23
  everyone said was going to happen happened overproduction
• 18:29
  just. Demand falling or a.
• 18:32
  Bit of both. Yeah, I mean, well, it was more
• 18:37
  the. I mean, obviously I've got a
• 18:39
  deep interest in looking at the past, the Scotch whiskey and,
• 18:43
  and what you see before times of turbulence often.
• 18:47
  And I'm doing a bit of work for a, a conference I'm presenting
• 18:51
  at looking at boom and bust and crash and this idea that whiskey
• 18:55
  moves in cycles. I don't really.
• 18:57
  Repeating and. Well, history doesn't repeat
• 18:59
  itself, but it rhymes. That's the expression I like and
• 19:04
  what in at least a few of the times of turbulence that I see
• 19:10
  or I have looked at, what you do see before a period of
• 19:14
  difficulty and distillery closure or Moss balling or
• 19:17
  things like that is overconfidence and.
• 19:21
  Going before a fall? But also that overconfidence
• 19:24
  comes from A rush of capital in and A rush of money in there
• 19:27
  might be turned into making stocks and things like that.
• 19:30
  And if you look at 1898, for example, you know, that's people
• 19:34
  from the outside investing in whiskey.
• 19:36
  And we absolutely saw that leave the cast stuff, scarf scandal
• 19:40
  stuff to one side. But even the secondary market,
• 19:43
  and this like using the secondary market as a kind of
• 19:47
  bellwether of how successful whiskey is being auctions,
• 19:52
  auctions and things like that, being a bellwether of success.
• 19:55
  And wow, aren't we brilliant because we bought out this thing
• 19:58
  at £300 and now it's selling next week at £500.
• 20:02
  And that was a false indication of success.
• 20:05
  And also within that secondary market and that confidence that
• 20:08
  it gave people to buy more bottles than they needed, you
• 20:11
  know, that happened really quickly and ultimately people
• 20:13
  have more bottles than they needed.
• 20:15
  So we had this. Shortage of stock in COVID that
• 20:19
  produced scarcity, that secondary market love scarcity.
• 20:24
  Everyone plowed in. And, and by that I mean general
• 20:27
  consumers as well. And and and and suppliers had
• 20:33
  the confidence to bring out far too many releases, some of them
• 20:36
  pretty, I'll conceived poorly branded, you know, like just no
• 20:40
  proper, I don't know, a rigor that wasn't there, that was
• 20:44
  there 15 years ago. Sure.
• 20:47
  And now that's stopped. And if you use that as your
• 20:50
  metric and you see both prices coming down, everyone kind of
• 20:52
  panic. But look, I mean, I'm still
• 20:55
  obviously good pals with everyone at Royal Malt Whiskeys
• 20:58
  after I left and they had a great summer, you know, normal
• 21:02
  people walking into the shop, coming to Scotland, what I've
• 21:06
  heard single malt whiskey school, they've got no idea that
• 21:09
  Macallan X used to be worth 3 grand and now it's only worth 2
• 21:12
  grand. And you know, the Noble Report
• 21:14
  and all this type of nonsense, they've got no idea about car
• 21:18
  scams. They've got no idea about
• 21:19
  overproduction. They just want to buy a bottle
• 21:21
  of whiskey. You know, people are buying
• 21:23
  whiskey in bars. You know, it's there's a lot to
• 21:25
  be positive about as well. And one of the things I would
• 21:27
  say is having been here a little while now, is the size and the
• 21:32
  scale of the whiskey core community who are into whiskey
• 21:36
  and count it as their hobby And try 3040 fifty different
• 21:40
  whiskers a year. That's huge.
• 21:42
  Yeah. Whiskey Fringe, you mentioned
• 21:44
  before we started, you know, we had, we, they had to, well,
• 21:49
  you're a part of that. Yeah, Yeah.
• 21:50
  But I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm trying, I'm trying to get used to saying
• 21:54
  they now, you know, I had to put the price up because our costs
• 21:59
  have gone up quite significantly and it's sold out quicker than
• 22:01
  ever. Glasgow Whiskey Festival, all
• 22:03
  tickets are sold out. You know, there's a, there's a
• 22:05
  big whiskey community that wasn't there 10-15 years ago and
• 22:09
  they're annoyed about certain things.
• 22:11
  And I would say in many cases rightly, but they're still
• 22:15
  there. And I think the opportunity and
• 22:18
  the challenge for the industry is to slow down a bit, know that
• 22:23
  their next release is extremely important, put together a really
• 22:27
  good release which has a really good position and a good story
• 22:30
  around it. And appeals to that market as of
• 22:33
  people or. I mean, knowing your market's
• 22:36
  important. I mean, I think like we spoke
• 22:39
  last week with Dougal Gordon and he was talking about, yeah,
• 22:45
  well, I, I mentioned it was in, it was in the, it was in the
• 22:47
  Whiskey Stories newsletter a few weeks ago.
• 22:49
  And it was after episode 100. And it was 5 lessons I've
• 22:53
  learned from starting a whiskey podcast.
• 22:56
  And the last lesson was, and I rewrote that paragraph 100
• 23:00
  times, but it was basically the lesson was we are the minority.
• 23:03
  And you find yourself when you sit around the room with people
• 23:07
  like yourself, Arthur, and other people that we've sat and had
• 23:09
  drams with and recorded with, it's an echo chamber where
• 23:12
  everyone just assumes everybody knows the same thing about
• 23:15
  whiskey. It isn't until you meet somebody
• 23:17
  who maybe just likes a drum but doesn't understand the
• 23:20
  difference between Castro and single cast teaspoon and blended
• 23:23
  malt, blended Scotch, all that kind of stuff.
• 23:25
  But you think, how could you not know that?
• 23:27
  Because it's information that's so readily available, but that's
• 23:29
  information that we've consumed and learned and gone out.
• 23:31
  Actively to do that, sure. Well, as you've said, Arthur,
• 23:35
  that percentage has probably grown massively in the last five
• 23:40
  years, 10 years. So instead of it were 1520 years
• 23:44
  ago, the whiskey geeks, the people that were buying tickets
• 23:47
  for Whiskey Fest, even just people that are putting whiskey
• 23:50
  festivals on. You look at many whiskey
• 23:51
  festivals there are now versus what they're probably where when
• 23:54
  you guys started Whiskey Fringe and when you look at it and you
• 23:57
  say the people that were probably going to Whiskey Fringe
• 23:59
  in the early days where you're hardcore and there's still are,
• 24:04
  I'm not doubting that, but that percentage is probably a lot
• 24:07
  smaller. We had Paul Main on on the
• 24:09
  podcast from our. And.
• 24:15
  He was, you said that, you know, he was a whiskey geek in the 90s
• 24:18
  and he's like, you were reading about Aaron starting up and you
• 24:21
  were getting excited because you were reading about it in
• 24:23
  magazines. There was no social media.
• 24:24
  You couldn't geek out on whiskey.
• 24:26
  You could, but you had to really, you were, you were kind
• 24:29
  of in that those tiny little groups of geeks that were
• 24:32
  getting together and talking about it.
• 24:33
  Whereas now, like we've started the podcast.
• 24:36
  There's you're enough, you've got a podcast about whiskey,
• 24:38
  which we'll talk about. There's there's whiskey
• 24:41
  influencers, there's YouTube channels, there's so much
• 24:43
  information out there now so that that maybe that percentage
• 24:48
  is still the same. It's maybe only 10% of the
• 24:50
  whiskey drinker. But The thing is, the volume of
• 24:52
  that 10% has got it's 10% of a much bigger number than it was
• 24:56
  20 years ago, which suddenly means that there is a market
• 24:59
  there for people that are still interested in buying whiskey and
• 25:02
  drinking it. Yeah, I, I don't think it's
• 25:06
  disastrous, you know, but having said that, you know, some
• 25:10
  distilleries are going to struggle.
• 25:11
  You know, there's, there's no doubt and, and maybe some big
• 25:15
  companies are going to struggle as well.
• 25:17
  And there are going to be, there's going to be more bad
• 25:20
  news. But that doesn't scare me.
• 25:22
  Like it feels like it's magnifying to the point that,
• 25:25
  oh, it's a disaster. But I quietly speak to some
• 25:28
  brands. They're doing all right.
• 25:30
  They're doing well because they were doing the right thing when
• 25:33
  all the silliness was happening. That's the kind of pattern that
• 25:35
  I noticed. But yeah, some distilleries are
• 25:39
  going to close down. A lot of distilleries are going
• 25:42
  to reduce the amount of their producing.
• 25:47
  Some people are going to lose their jobs.
• 25:48
  And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not glib about that.
• 25:50
  That's absolutely true. But Scotch whisky, I don't think
• 25:56
  it's lost its shine to the general consumer.
• 25:59
  I think that core customer is actually kind of waiting and
• 26:03
  seeing and thinking, well, you know, I've still got all these
• 26:05
  bottles and the industry is going to have to work quite hard
• 26:10
  to make them buy that new thing now.
• 26:12
  Whereas before, for a while it was just a mania.
• 26:14
  New thing come out, everyone's competing against each other,
• 26:17
  everything would sell out and, and, and maybe the industry got
• 26:20
  a little bit lazy, like, you know, just selling things on
• 26:24
  allocation is the easiest job in the world.
• 26:27
  And then he didn't have a Plan B.
• 26:28
  Yeah, so and it probably happened.
• 26:29
  You know, I said that that line about we shouldn't be surprised.
• 26:33
  I think for some people it happened kind of quicker than
• 26:35
  they expected, expected it to be like that.
• 26:38
  But that's the thing. It's looking at the past.
• 26:41
  These things can happen. Yeah, very quickly.
• 26:43
  So do you see it, do you see it more than of a, as a correction
• 26:46
  rather than a, you know, a downturn as such?
• 26:48
  It's more of a kind of we went too high and now it's going back
• 26:52
  to where we should have been sort of thing rather than.
• 26:55
  Yeah, I, I hear that word a lot. Like I've talked to a lot of
• 26:58
  people in the industry and that they kind of, it's a correction,
• 27:01
  it's not a crash. I, I don't really know what
• 27:03
  these words mean. And that's why I'm, I'm doing
• 27:05
  the historical research, kind of trying to just look into it to
• 27:08
  see those kind of patterns of what it is.
• 27:09
  But whiskey is still selling. But there was just way too much
• 27:14
  further down the line in the supply chain, which also
• 27:18
  includes the consumer what was in their house.
• 27:20
  And you know that there was just no room for more whiskey for a
• 27:23
  while. But I think I do think that will
• 27:25
  work as. Well, so very well, there was a
• 27:27
  time, you know, we, we, we've, we've had George Keeble talked
• 27:30
  about it at the George and Rachel talked about it on the
• 27:34
  Fragrant drops independent bottler in the bottler spotlight
• 27:37
  that we did just support, support local as you know,
• 27:40
  support, support of you guys support independent support that
• 27:44
  there was ever a time that independent whiskey makers,
• 27:47
  distilleries, bottlers, retailers needed that support.
• 27:51
  It's probably now, you know, and you look at Royal Mile whiskeys.
• 27:54
  I do have a question for you after, you know, as I shop on
• 27:56
  the Royal Mile, when you were there, did you ever think about
• 27:59
  bringing out, you know, messy decanters or anything like that?
• 28:04
  Did you guys sell that stuff? No.
• 28:07
  So if you if you go, yeah, moving on to Royal Mile
• 28:09
  Whiskeys. So I joined it and the business
• 28:11
  was already have kind of been turned into a modern whiskey
• 28:15
  specialist is how I like to describe it, which there was
• 28:19
  Loch Fine Whiskey's but with a chap called Richard Joyce.
• 28:22
  And Milroy's is a bit older down in London, but a shop that just
• 28:26
  sold whiskey was actually quite an unusual thing.
• 28:29
  So when did Royal Whiskey start? Because I've always remembered
• 28:32
  it there. It's always been there as long
• 28:33
  as I can remember. The other one, the pod, Yeah,
• 28:36
  last year he talked through the story and I can't remember.
• 28:39
  Yeah, just remind. There was a shop in 19/19/91
• 28:45
  right? But that was a shop that sold
• 28:48
  lots of whiskey, but it also show sold Nessie decanters and
• 28:52
  there was one with the castle in the in.
• 28:55
  The well, I I just talked about on episode 100 because we we
• 28:57
  were asked a question about what whiskey would we use to fight
• 29:01
  off a bear. I was one of the listener
• 29:03
  questions. We're quite high private this
• 29:06
  podcast and I just suggested that salmon shaped decanter
• 29:10
  which would distract. They would distract the, they
• 29:12
  would distract the bear. And I'm thinking.
• 29:14
  Yeah, filled with spay burn if you get that joke.
• 29:16
  I don't know if you know. That, yeah.
• 29:19
  Yeah, of course. Yeah, very well done, Right,
• 29:21
  Right. So, so yeah.
• 29:22
  So I mean, first of all, before we actually, before we do go
• 29:25
  into Rome at Whiskey Church, we have one more SMWS question as
• 29:29
  well. We have we have drums in front
• 29:31
  of us. 1st. Time.
• 29:32
  Yes. What are you?
• 29:33
  What are you? Drums.
• 29:33
  So I have got first drum, which I've kind of battered through
• 29:36
  because it's very, very nice. Actually.
• 29:38
  I've got a single cask release above any single cask release.
• 29:43
  14 year old bourbon, Really, really nice, very nice indeed.
• 29:48
  But part of their, I can't remember what they call it
• 29:50
  curious casks or I can't remember, but it's very, very
• 29:54
  nice. 14 year old Balveni on brand in our last last week's
• 29:58
  episode with oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:02
  Second, I've got it's from Brave New Spirits and it is called the
• 30:07
  old the Highland Shepherd. OK.
• 30:09
  So I had to I had to go for this Kevin, the fight comes put it on
• 30:14
  the story on his social media said this will appeal to one
• 30:17
  particular podcast. And I think you meant me.
• 30:21
  So yeah, yeah. So I think it's I think it's
• 30:27
  it's from a it's from an under score space side.
• 30:30
  I think so. I don't really know much because
• 30:32
  Highland Shepherd, Highland Shepherd and and then lastly,
• 30:37
  I've got because you are going mad for 12 year old whiskey's,
• 30:40
  which I'm sure you'll explain about in a minute.
• 30:42
  Yeah, I've just gone for 12 year old bow more.
• 30:44
  Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Good, good, good, good way of
• 30:47
  introducing. I've gone.
• 30:48
  I've got 312 year old drams in front of me now.
• 30:51
  It was, it was mentioned on episode 100.
• 30:55
  I don't think it was a question that we actually got around to
• 30:57
  asking, right, But it was referenced episode #4 or 6.
• 31:03
  I need to double check with Cody Reynolds.
• 31:06
  Cody went through the cycle of a whiskey drinker and basically,
• 31:11
  and it was fascinating and I, I, if I'd done proper preparation
• 31:16
  as we've talked about, it was episode 4.
• 31:18
  As we talked about, no, it wasn't episode anyway.
• 31:22
  It doesn't matter what episode it was, but it was episode 5 or
• 31:26
  4 or 6. It was episode 5, but basically
• 31:28
  Cody Reynolds good part of the pod.
• 31:32
  He explained something really, really well and it stuck with me
• 31:36
  and it was the journey of the whiskey drinker, right?
• 31:38
  And it's it's stuck with me because I found myself following
• 31:42
  it almost to tea. And basically he talked about
• 31:47
  you start the normal whiskey drinker starts drinking cheap
• 31:50
  blinds because that's what they can afford.
• 31:52
  That's what they can track. I missed that bit out a little
• 31:54
  bit. Maybe if you include a night I
• 31:56
  had on High Commissioner, 1/2 bottle of High Commissioner when
• 31:59
  I was, I'll say for the purpose of the pod of legal drinking
• 32:02
  age, but I would say that was probably there.
• 32:06
  You talked about a grouse on episode #1 I did, yes.
• 32:09
  Drinking a famous grouse on the way up the train as a student,
• 32:11
  you were, you were looking for something to get you where you
• 32:13
  needed to be. Exactly.
• 32:15
  Not that that's what Gross's purpose is, of course.
• 32:17
  But anyway, he said you start there and then what you do is
• 32:20
  you move into the sort of core, core range, you're back.
• 32:23
  And he said normally you're looking for a big flavour
• 32:27
  profile that grabs you right? And it's either Sherry or Pete.
• 32:31
  OK, you went in the peated root. I went down the Sherry root.
• 32:34
  Hence the reason became the Sherry tart.
• 32:36
  And he did say as a caveat to this, that people stick in this
• 32:40
  cycle. You don't always get through it,
• 32:42
  but what you do is you some people will just step find their
• 32:44
  spot and they'll stick to it. Then you, you need something a
• 32:47
  bit more and then you go into the, the cast strength stuff,
• 32:50
  right, Cast strength stuff. Then you start experimenting
• 32:53
  with a single cast kind of thing.
• 32:56
  And then that's when you really open up your flavour profile and
• 32:59
  then what tends to happen. And this is where I am at the
• 33:01
  moment, in between two things. Then you go around and you
• 33:05
  suddenly re explore bourbon casks because, and he explained
• 33:09
  it really, really well that your flavour, your palate has
• 33:12
  developed. So previously when you were at
• 33:15
  the cherry or the Peach side of things, your palate just needed
• 33:18
  something with a bit of something big.
• 33:20
  Whereas once you've developed that palate, gone through it,
• 33:24
  you suddenly appreciate a little bit more the nuances that come
• 33:26
  with first full, second full bourbon cask whiskey.
• 33:30
  And I would definitely agree with that.
• 33:31
  Right now, I've gone off the cherry and I'm 100% on the
• 33:34
  bourbon side things. I really do appreciate bourbon
• 33:36
  cast. Then he said, then what happens
• 33:39
  is you end up going back to the core and appreciating the
• 33:42
  blends. And one of the things I'm now at
• 33:45
  is I think we've been spoiled on this podcast, Angus.
• 33:48
  We've had a lot of very, very good whiskey that people have
• 33:50
  treated us to. But at the same time, I think
• 33:53
  it's really, really good to go back to.
• 33:56
  I've always been jealous of people.
• 33:58
  We've had people on the podcast a year ago who.
• 34:00
  Said if I hadn't just finished it, I would have offered you
• 34:02
  some of this. But when a bourbon.
• 34:06
  We've had, we had, we had on the podcast a year ago and they said
• 34:11
  it was actually at Whiskey Fringe.
• 34:13
  They said they went to Whiskey Fringe, they didn't know what
• 34:16
  they wanted to do, so they just wanted to go back to all the
• 34:18
  core releases instead of going down the stairs and trying all
• 34:21
  the fancy new stuff or seeing what new new distillers are
• 34:24
  bringing. It's new.
• 34:24
  They just, yeah, I just want to align myself back with what's
• 34:27
  the core releases like and what people what, what does it like
• 34:30
  for F-12 like. So I've put it on the Facebook
• 34:33
  group, like this week we were asking about I'm wanting to find
• 34:37
  the best 12 year old core release whiskey.
• 34:39
  OK, We're looking for the top ten, right?
• 34:41
  And that's what I'm wanting to try and find and I'd be
• 34:43
  interested to speak to yourself about that.
• 34:44
  So I've got a Glenfidd 12, albeit it's an old Glenfidd 12.
• 34:49
  Yes. So it's kind of 90s bottling or
• 34:51
  an 80s. Early 2000s or 90s bottling, I
• 34:55
  don't think it's got pure malt on it, so I think it is still a
• 34:58
  single malt. So if it was pure malt, it would
• 35:00
  probably age it. Yeah, I think it was a.
• 35:04
  Single malt. So it's single malt.
• 35:05
  So that would be, what, 2000s after?
• 35:07
  Yeah, Yeah, but it still looks nice and old, the bottle.
• 35:10
  I've got Dalmore 12, yeah. And I've also got an Oban 12
• 35:17
  Natural cast strength however from ex Bourbon and refill casts
• 35:21
  and that's one from Massartha. Not.
• 35:23
  Really the core release, no more of a, but annoyingly it's the
• 35:26
  one I prefer. Oh wow, so far.
• 35:29
  There you go. I'm going to have to discount
• 35:31
  that. So if I was going to the two of
• 35:32
  them, I'm going to stick with the Glenfiddich 12 at the
• 35:34
  moment. Can I go back on your point
• 35:35
  there? Could you say Cody?
• 35:37
  Cody, who's he work for again? He's, yeah, I know the colour.
• 35:42
  Yeah. I think that starting on a blend
• 35:47
  thing is becoming less, a lot less relevant now.
• 35:51
  I think a lot of people go straight into the single mole.
• 35:53
  That might change as well. Whiskey's not getting going up
• 35:56
  in price, but people's disposable income has gone down.
• 36:00
  And I think it's going to be a bit more focus on blends and
• 36:03
  blended malts. But having said that, if we talk
• 36:06
  about recent history, I think more people are going straight
• 36:08
  in and malt. And I think that Sherry Pete
• 36:11
  thing is because you part of the joy of getting into single malt
• 36:16
  is noticing the differences and navigating your way around
• 36:20
  something that's pretty bewildering.
• 36:22
  And so it's the first things you're able to spot the
• 36:25
  differences and and define your own opinion.
• 36:29
  So you spot something heavily shared.
• 36:30
  Yeah, yeah, I get that. I can understand that flavour
• 36:33
  because it's so big and bold. Same with Pete.
• 36:36
  And you can make your choice. Hopefully you like both, but and
• 36:40
  then you can start to look into spirit character a bit more.
• 36:44
  But it's reassuring. It's like your first, I don't
• 36:49
  know, like you're playing a football team and you, you,
• 36:51
  you've scored your first goal. That's your first goal.
• 36:53
  You can sit tell the difference between Sherry cars, whiskey and
• 36:56
  peated whiskey. And you're not one of those
• 36:58
  people that say I don't like whiskey.
• 37:00
  It all just tastes like whiskey. And so that's, that's your easy
• 37:04
  access navigation point. Then people work, work off from
• 37:07
  there. But yeah, I'm not.
• 37:10
  And, and my experiences of like that can be a general rule, but
• 37:14
  it's definitely one of those general rules is broken.
• 37:17
  And it reminds me the old way, say that I was kind of told how
• 37:21
  it worked and how it's often presented in SMWS tastings.
• 37:26
  They did a lot of corporate tastings for people who are
• 37:28
  trying whiskey for the first time.
• 37:30
  And you'd often hear things people like saying, oh, you
• 37:33
  know, you, you probably won't like if you're just getting into
• 37:36
  whiskey, you probably won't like this peated stuff.
• 37:38
  Which is. Kind of the wrong thing to say,
• 37:40
  isn't it? It was the wrong thing to say.
• 37:41
  Because we've had plain. I mean, just by the by, we've
• 37:45
  had first hand experience of people coming on saying the
• 37:47
  first whiskey I ever tried was a lager Villain 16.
• 37:50
  I thought it was amazing and that got me into whiskey.
• 37:52
  Yeah, it tastes different to anything else in the world.
• 37:54
  It's, you know, it's, it's amazing stuff.
• 37:57
  But it was that old fashioned journey of whiskey things that
• 37:59
  I, I'm slightly skeptical of. And I don't think people weren't
• 38:03
  like that. The other thing they used to say
• 38:05
  as well, that there was no hope that women would like that peaty
• 38:08
  whiskey. And I yeah.
• 38:11
  And and. More on our on our Walk 3 drams,
• 38:14
  which I do keep a note and I do keep promising that one day I'll
• 38:17
  sit down and write everyone's Walk 3 drams out on the blog.
• 38:21
  I I would comfortably lay my heart that more female guests on
• 38:26
  this podcast have referenced peaty whiskey as a Walk 3 DRAM
• 38:30
  than than than men. Yeah, I, that doesn't surprise
• 38:34
  me. Why should flavour style have a
• 38:38
  gender attached to it? But I would notice that.
• 38:42
  And they expressly said that this whiskey wasn't for them.
• 38:45
  But you would notice that people and women, they'd suddenly pick
• 38:49
  up this last drama and go, wow, what is that?
• 38:52
  And some people would be freaked out by it, but some people would
• 38:54
  be absolutely captivated by it. So I think I have a hesitancy to
• 39:01
  plot people or or try and shovel people into particular areas
• 39:06
  because there's such a breadth of style.
• 39:08
  Is perfectly valid to like one style and not the other.
• 39:11
  And you definitely shouldn't say that this is the order to do it
• 39:15
  in, no. You're right.
• 39:16
  And I would say, I would say that going back to my earlier
• 39:19
  point with the SMWS is my personal journey of it was like
• 39:22
  I say castrate whiskey because this is the thing about the SM,
• 39:26
  the Scotch mole whiskey society is the fact that it's an entry
• 39:29
  point for a lot of people. But at the same time, it's
• 39:31
  probably from my experience, it was a it was a stumbling block
• 39:35
  because I just, I just could not drink cashew whiskey and I
• 39:40
  couldn't understand it. And now I do, I totally
• 39:42
  understand it. I get it.
• 39:44
  And what I would say like why would anyone think that a 56
• 39:48
  percent whiskey was palatable because all your like that that
• 39:51
  side of it. Why would you not just drink a
• 39:53
  40 to 43%, which is completely manageable.
• 39:57
  You don't need to add ice, you don't need to add water.
• 39:59
  You can drink it yourself and what have you.
• 40:00
  But again, preconceptions maybe was that wrongly.
• 40:04
  I probably thought through some information I was given is that
• 40:06
  adding ice and water to your whiskey was was the wrong way of
• 40:10
  drinking it, which meant that single cast whiskey being drunk
• 40:13
  meat was just almost an impossible hurdle to get over.
• 40:16
  But anyway. 12 year old. 12 year old.
• 40:19
  Yeah. One last one.
• 40:20
  One last thing about S and WS. You mentioned it as a buyer and
• 40:23
  I was just interested. You mentioned that, you know,
• 40:27
  going up to, you know, Glenn Farkle, let's say, and shaking
• 40:30
  hands on a deal didn't really happen.
• 40:32
  So were you more like the, you know, because we've spoken to a
• 40:35
  lot of independent bottler or indie bottlers and they would
• 40:38
  talk about this process of parcels of whiskey.
• 40:41
  Obviously we've spoken to independent bottlers who are
• 40:45
  laying down. Fillings.
• 40:48
  Laying down their own, you know, lay down their own fillings.
• 40:51
  Is that something SMWS did? How did it change from when you
• 40:54
  started to how you finished? And were there any deals?
• 40:57
  I mean, were there any whiskey you bought directly from
• 40:59
  distillers and did that change over the years as well?
• 41:02
  There were a few, I mean there's only three years or so, maybe 4
• 41:07
  that I was doing the buying there, so.
• 41:08
  It's a relatively. It's a relatively short tranche
• 41:11
  of time, but yeah, there was the whiskey that we were buying
• 41:15
  direct tended actually to be fillings as we were trying to.
• 41:18
  Secure that future, yeah, Like it in your own your own casts
• 41:22
  or? Combination.
• 41:24
  Combination. Actually, our own cast on the
• 41:26
  whole. I think weirdly in that box
• 41:29
  there might be a picture of me filling up some cast for SMWS
• 41:32
  when we go into the book. Yeah, we'll have a picture for
• 41:36
  the for the Facebook, the. But yeah, it's a combination.
• 41:39
  But everyone like the members wanted to think there was this
• 41:43
  direct relationship, but there's just not how the structure, the
• 41:47
  structure of the industry works. The structure of the industry is
• 41:50
  unusual, really interesting to me and the historical reasons
• 41:53
  why it exists are really interesting.
• 41:55
  But on the whole it was through a neutral third party for very
• 41:59
  good reasons. And the trick was just to be
• 42:01
  able to get cars that you can sample and, and and get stuff
• 42:05
  that that was good because there's no issue with the
• 42:08
  pricing all. The time at all or?
• 42:11
  EV. No, no.
• 42:13
  We would insist on samples, but that was becoming more and more
• 42:15
  difficult. But as a bank, the bank power,
• 42:18
  the the SMW, I mean, we're talking to maybe early 2000s
• 42:23
  we're talking here what time. So was it as big as it is now
• 42:27
  the buying power, because we'll talk about where Royal Mail
• 42:29
  whiskey is. If you hold the power of what
• 42:32
  you can buy, the volume that you can buy, you obviously can't.
• 42:35
  We mentioned about the industry changing as a buyer's market.
• 42:39
  We had the indie bottlers on here a year ago saying that they
• 42:42
  get offered a parcel of gas and you say buyers is and it's
• 42:46
  whatever. You don't get a chance to sample
• 42:47
  them. The cast might be might be empty
• 42:49
  by the time they arrive or they might be completely dead or
• 42:51
  whatever, but you don't get a chance.
• 42:53
  That's changing slightly from some of the people we've heard.
• 42:55
  But did you have that already that buying power from the from
• 42:59
  as a independent but an established 1.
• 43:01
  SMWS then had no buying power. I mean, it's not.
• 43:05
  Maybe the change of ownership that that changed, I think it.
• 43:08
  Well, and yeah, yeah, and and going yeah to what kind of two
• 43:12
  changes of ownership, if not three, I think depending on how
• 43:15
  you look at it. But no, I mean the SMWS then and
• 43:20
  to a certain degree now is tiny compared to the scales at which
• 43:24
  the industry was used to operating.
• 43:26
  You know, it was yeah, buying buying 5 casks of old Glenn
• 43:31
  Farkas is not a big deal to these guys.
• 43:35
  It wasn't then and plus the prices were so low but.
• 43:38
  Yeah, it's fascinating like in any other industry and you know,
• 43:41
  you're a fresh faced young lad and there's early 20s suddenly
• 43:45
  thrust into having a chat with these brokers.
• 43:48
  There's a world in in any other industry, there's a world where
• 43:51
  someone sees you coming a mile away and goes, we're going to,
• 43:54
  you know, here's this young guy that doesn't have a Scooby about
• 43:57
  that being in the industry. He's not cut his teeth yet.
• 44:00
  But you were saying that actually the industry was
• 44:02
  supportive of you and very helpful and friendly and.
• 44:06
  Yeah, and a work to standards that were very decent.
• 44:10
  And actually the other thing that I think stood in my favour
• 44:15
  was I was so young and young people were not drinking whiskey
• 44:20
  at all. So there was.
• 44:22
  Yeah, they were like, that's great, this young lad is really
• 44:24
  into whiskey. This is exactly what the whiskey
• 44:27
  industry needs, because at that time there was a concern that
• 44:31
  that young people would ever drink whiskey.
• 44:33
  And whiskey's success and single bowl whiskey's success was not
• 44:37
  assured. And the boom that happened
• 44:40
  afterwards really triggered by the Internet, I would say is was
• 44:45
  not predicted. You know that they were really
• 44:48
  worried that young people would get into whiskey at all.
• 44:52
  We've always said, Angus, the Internet is always going to be a
• 44:54
  big thing. I've always said it was going to
• 44:56
  be big. We.
• 44:56
  Always said that, but right, Royal Mail Whiskeys then the
• 45:00
  move, making the move. How did the opportunity come
• 45:03
  around and what was it like walking into Royal Mail Whiskeys
• 45:06
  then? Because you said, what, 21 years
• 45:08
  at Royal Mail Whiskeys? Yeah.
• 45:10
  So 21 years ago, Royal Mail whiskeys didn't look like they
• 45:14
  looked like now. No, but it was a really, so I
• 45:18
  mentioned 1991, I think it was 1997 when a guy called Kia took
• 45:22
  it over. He'd worked at signatory and he
• 45:24
  actually started an independent bottler called Dormant
• 45:28
  Distillery Company, which is the name of the business that trades
• 45:31
  under, that Rome always gives trades under.
• 45:33
  And I bet it was run by relatively young guys and it was
• 45:42
  really forward thinking, trying to be a modern whiskey special.
• 45:45
  I think it's the second whiskey company to sell online to retail
• 45:49
  online. And Whiskey Fringe I think was
• 45:52
  the second whiskey festival in the UK.
• 45:55
  They've been one year of whiskey live.
• 46:00
  And so it was doing things like it was being innovative, but it
• 46:03
  was being creative and doing things that were really, really
• 46:06
  good. So it was well supported by the
• 46:08
  industry for that reason. And then The funny thing was
• 46:10
  actually almost as soon as we switched on the Internet, you
• 46:13
  got, I was talking about this with Ross the other day actually
• 46:16
  at Balmoral. As soon as you switched off the
• 46:18
  Internet, like guys, sorry, on the Internet, guys from Japan,
• 46:24
  like bars from Japan would be buying like 1960s Bow Moor and
• 46:29
  people in Germany would be buying Old Cherry Cask whiskey.
• 46:33
  We knew already where certain types of whiskey would go.
• 46:36
  And Sweden was a bit more mixed. So this is this is a market you
• 46:40
  were opening up to people that didn't have the possibility of
• 46:44
  buying certain bottles before. Now online, there you go.
• 46:48
  You can, you can click a button and you can order 19.
• 46:51
  You know a bottle, you'd have probably had to have spoken to
• 46:54
  hundreds of people before you'd be able to get access to it
• 46:56
  before. Yeah.
• 46:57
  Well, like route to market is boring, but it's important.
• 47:01
  Yeah. And the logistics is boring, but
• 47:04
  important. And that's maybe one of the
• 47:06
  reasons the big industry was hesitant to really embrace
• 47:11
  single molds. I mean, they did, but it was it
• 47:14
  was kind of pulled out of them as much as pushed out of them,
• 47:18
  with exceptions. There were some companies did a
• 47:20
  great job, Diageo for example, but like logistics and route to
• 47:25
  market abhors small batch things and that is single mode by
• 47:29
  nature. But somehow these silos of
• 47:31
  appreciation had built up around the world.
• 47:34
  Yeah, suddenly the Internet exists and immediately.
• 47:37
  And and those silos already have particular taste.
• 47:39
  Yeah, I found that quite interesting in retrospect,
• 47:41
  looking back at it. Really like in terms of the
• 47:44
  silos being regional silos where people, cuz you would know that
• 47:48
  people in that country or district prefer this particular
• 47:51
  flavor profile. It would be as specific as we're
• 47:55
  gonna get. We've got access to some 1960s
• 47:58
  Beaumont bottled by Duncan Taylor, I think.
• 48:03
  Yeah, we'll buy 3 cases, Japan will buy them all, and then
• 48:06
  we'll put it online and sure enough, like 3 or 4.
• 48:10
  So they'd already decided that amazing tropical pineapple, but
• 48:15
  a more star was their thing. It's interesting and how they
• 48:18
  got to that point. Yeah, I don't know how do they
• 48:21
  find because you're seeing that we're I've seen that in India.
• 48:24
  I was speaking to to somebody over in India last week.
• 48:28
  When we were talking about, they were saying that Karnataka state
• 48:32
  in Bangalore particularly is one of the fastest growing states
• 48:36
  for beated whiskey. Smokey whiskey flavour profile
• 48:39
  is now entering that market and it's actually accelerating.
• 48:42
  So suddenly you're looking at it going, we're selling the most
• 48:48
  beated whiskey at the moment. Smokey whiskey is, is Karnataka
• 48:51
  state, Bangalore. Why?
• 48:53
  I don't know why, I don't know what's causing it, but
• 48:56
  ultimately from a, from a retail point of view or from a
• 48:59
  distributor's point of view, like what you've just said, you
• 49:02
  could suddenly go, right, We've got, we've got somebody we know
• 49:05
  we that will buy a lot of this type of whiskey because it's
• 49:08
  selling very, very well. But it's fascinating to know
• 49:11
  what, what causes that, Why why is that there?
• 49:13
  And what, what, what you're talking about online retail with
• 49:16
  Royal My Whiskey is starting out on the Internet and what have
• 49:19
  you, But what about the trade side of things?
• 49:21
  Then what because was Royal Mail Whiskey's at that point
• 49:26
  distributing whiskey to the sort of end consumer through the shop
• 49:30
  and the online retail, but also to the trade?
• 49:32
  Or was that something that was sort of started up and and born
• 49:36
  out of of luck or chance or just have a plan?
• 49:42
  Well, it was been luck with just noticing an opportunity to
• 49:47
  success and actually without means seem arrogant that I drove
• 49:52
  that that was that was my thing. Yeah.
• 49:54
  So and it started because I took control of a van to save petrol
• 50:01
  money and and for I could start delivering and developing a few
• 50:06
  accounts and and drop them off on my way in and way out of
• 50:10
  town. So I started doing that and I
• 50:12
  got a few, got a few accounts early doors and then gradually
• 50:16
  we realized or I realized that actually there was an
• 50:19
  opportunity because traditional distribution again didn't like
• 50:24
  all these products. We had all these products
• 50:27
  anyway. And it was just this, your
• 50:28
  classic example of going into a hotel and it's the same 5
• 50:31
  bottles of Westgate. You know, at some point you
• 50:35
  would say, right, I know they're going to have ABC and D and
• 50:37
  that's what they had. Whereas you have that range of.
• 50:41
  Yeah, yeah. And the bigger wholesalers, they
• 50:44
  didn't want to deal with all these.
• 50:46
  They didn't think they needed much.
• 50:47
  Easier to deal with two or three people than deal with so many.
• 50:51
  Yeah, yeah. They didn't need 100 single
• 50:52
  malts or 200 single malts and they and so, but we have them
• 50:56
  anyway. And yeah, we, we spoke the same
• 50:59
  language as these whiskey bars or restaurants or whatever it
• 51:02
  was. It did really well and it's a
• 51:04
  hugely important the business now part of the business.
• 51:08
  I will say I kind of started it, but then there's many great
• 51:12
  other people that are sure. So what's the perfect?
• 51:15
  I was speaking to somebody who works in the industry, would
• 51:18
  remain nameless, and they said the perfect distributor of
• 51:23
  whiskey does not exist at the moment.
• 51:26
  Right now. What they said was there's.
• 51:29
  Feel free to disagree. There's no, they said there's a
• 51:31
  distributor and they mentioned raw male whiskeys.
• 51:34
  They said that there's, there's a distributor like raw male
• 51:37
  whiskeys where you can put an order in and it'll be sorted
• 51:42
  out, dispatched and delivered in a very quick and efficient time
• 51:46
  frame. You know, and that probably goes
• 51:48
  back to as you say, you stick it in the van and being able to
• 51:51
  drive and drop off. Am I right in saying that for
• 51:54
  certain clients at the time, you know, before when you were
• 51:57
  working for Royal Mail whiskies, any particular within reach
• 52:03
  could have a bottle if they desperately needed it within the
• 52:05
  same day or definitely within 24 hours of putting an ordinance
• 52:09
  depending on the volume? Yeah, we if, if they, if they
• 52:12
  say they'd screwed up or they had an emergency, we would do
• 52:15
  that. But it, it, it got, you know,
• 52:17
  logistics, it gets bigger that you need to organize.
• 52:20
  Absolutely. I mean, if someone up in, if
• 52:21
  someone up in the, you know, if the Highlander and someone said
• 52:24
  can you get us a bottle of this tomorrow?
• 52:26
  It would have been a difficult one to do.
• 52:27
  But obviously locally it might be easier.
• 52:29
  But then they also said there's another side of it where maybe,
• 52:33
  you know, everyone's squeezing margin, everyone's looking for
• 52:36
  the best margin in that market so that they can they can work
• 52:39
  out their profits, etcetera and make money on it.
• 52:41
  And everyone has to make a cut on it.
• 52:43
  And the problem you have with distribution model is the fact
• 52:45
  that you have the distillery or the producer of the whiskey or
• 52:49
  the bottler of the whiskey has to get their share.
• 52:51
  The distributor has to get their share and then the person at the
• 52:54
  end, if they're in the trade has to also get their share.
• 52:56
  So your problem with that is everyone's sharing the pie three
• 52:59
  ways effectively, which means that there's there's a way of
• 53:03
  saying, well, if you want to go with the person that's going to
• 53:05
  give you the best margin, you're going to get the best margin.
• 53:07
  But you're going to have to pay on the fact that you're not
• 53:09
  going to get the the delivery value.
• 53:12
  You're not going to you're not going to get the within within a
• 53:15
  day or two. You're not going to get your,
• 53:16
  your, your, your, your order. You may be going to have to fill
• 53:19
  out forms, go through processes, you know what have you if you're
• 53:24
  going through. But if you want to get in the
• 53:25
  next day or you want to get in within a few days, you're going
• 53:29
  to have to lose out on the price of what you're ordering because
• 53:32
  you're not going to get as big a margin on the value.
• 53:34
  But you get in return, you get that standard of delivery.
• 53:37
  Yeah. It's a bit more like going to
• 53:40
  pricing change. The structure is a bit more
• 53:42
  complicated than that, but I mean the biggest, the thing that
• 53:46
  we did really well is offering a really broad range of of
• 53:50
  products which people wanted. And they wanted independent
• 53:53
  bottlers and they wanted limited editions and they wanted all
• 53:56
  those type of things. And yeah, we've delivered really
• 53:59
  well and and did a good job. So it's it's yeah.
• 54:02
  So how do? You compare that, like Angus was
• 54:04
  saying, there's so many times you walk it like as a as
• 54:08
  becoming what what would I would self profess snobby whiskey
• 54:12
  drinker to the to where this is sometimes maybe go to a pub or a
• 54:17
  bar and the first thing you look at is I don't drink a awful lot
• 54:21
  of beer or lager or anything like that.
• 54:23
  So a couple of guinnesses and then on to the whiskey is
• 54:25
  probably my sort of usual routine.
• 54:28
  So if I go to a bar or a pub, the first thing I'm sort of
• 54:31
  doing when I'm walking in is you look at the back bar, you look
• 54:33
  at the shelf. And if you go into one of these
• 54:35
  places where you'll see Lafroid 10, Glenfiddich 12A, Bulmore 12
• 54:39
  or you know, you know, the very five bottles, 5 bottles, Johnny
• 54:43
  Walker black lid. Not that there's anything wrong
• 54:45
  with those drums, but surely to gain the accounts, did you ever
• 54:49
  have to? Is there any examples of
• 54:51
  conversion over to you've maybe met somebody that's gone.
• 54:55
  We would like to buy someone ski off you and you've been able to
• 54:58
  open that back bar right up by being able to see look at what
• 55:02
  we can offer you. Yeah, very often because very
• 55:06
  often the people working behind the bar don't want to be serving
• 55:11
  just the big 5. Often the obstacle is the people
• 55:15
  that own the organization. And if you look at a very big
• 55:18
  group, then they want to get volume through predictable type
• 55:23
  things and possibly be rewarded because those big brands will
• 55:26
  invest in that bar, in that bar and other ways to say stock our
• 55:30
  stuff like. What?
• 55:30
  Matt's beer? Matt earlier there point of sale
• 55:33
  stuff and things like that, yeah.
• 55:35
  Yeah. And cash, cash.
• 55:36
  Yeah, Yeah. I'm not saying that It's like we
• 55:39
  know. What happens if people say like,
• 55:41
  you sponsor a beer garden and you'll get 5 or 6 grand and
• 55:44
  we'll give you all your all your tables and chairs or your
• 55:47
  canopies? Etcetera.
• 55:48
  But the, but the level who actually work on the bar, the
• 55:51
  but you know, more often than not they're interested in
• 55:53
  wanting to get those things in. So yeah, loads, absolutely
• 55:56
  loads. And, and we, yeah, we became a
• 56:01
  very good specialist wholesale our, our spirit.
• 56:04
  Because interesting thing I find about, not just.
• 56:06
  Whiskey, by the way. No, of course, the interesting
• 56:08
  thing I find about distributors and wholesalers like yourselves
• 56:11
  is that you're in that funny position where you're #1 being
• 56:15
  sold to and then secondly selling on as well.
• 56:19
  So, you know, it's not as straightforward as naively I, I,
• 56:24
  I thought maybe a few years ago that Royal Mail whiskey just
• 56:27
  stalk everybody that does whiskey because why wouldn't
• 56:29
  you? But actually there's a lot of
• 56:31
  people who have probably sent you lots and lots of samples of
• 56:35
  whiskey and said, come on, Arthur, we're a new distillery
• 56:39
  or we're a distillery. We've got this release or we're
• 56:41
  a bottler or we're a blender. Here's our release.
• 56:44
  Buy, buy 100 cases of us and you'll be able to sell at this.
• 56:48
  And you'll have to say no more things than you've said.
• 56:51
  Yes, probably. Well, actually it's an
• 56:54
  interesting development over time, over 21 years, which is
• 56:59
  and I kept my first job was as buying within the business.
• 57:05
  I did that for quite a long time and then became purchasing
• 57:07
  director, sales and purchasing director, I think it was.
• 57:11
  But in the early days, any new distillery, including gin
• 57:15
  distilleries and things like that, we would hunt them out.
• 57:17
  We'd say we absolutely want to support your projects.
• 57:20
  So brave you start distillery, we really want you to succeed.
• 57:23
  Really, really enthusiastic. And then it just came to the
• 57:26
  point that there were too many products, too many distilleries,
• 57:29
  so that that had to change. But the beginning, we were able
• 57:34
  to stop absolutely everyone, including foreign whiskey like
• 57:38
  Mcmiro. When that first came out, we we
• 57:41
  did a huge amount of Mcmiro because it was genuinely, you
• 57:44
  know, exciting and challenging to have malt made over there.
• 57:49
  But at that, those days have passed.
• 57:52
  Now there's just way too many products and there are too many
• 57:56
  producers. Therefore, some will have to
• 58:00
  shut down and some people lose their jobs.
• 58:01
  Yeah. And there's Motley.
• 58:03
  So the Motley Spirit agency there.
• 58:06
  Yeah, sales, strategy, branding, research, presenting, coaching
• 58:10
  and storytelling. So I suppose there's a better
• 58:13
  gamekeeper turn poacher or poacher turn gamekeeper scenario
• 58:17
  here. Because if I'm a brand, OK.
• 58:20
  Because this is the thing, you know, the Roman Whiskeys are a
• 58:23
  big, big organization with the servicing.
• 58:26
  I mean, how many accounts was it that that were trade accounts
• 58:29
  that you guys have with the time you're you'd left there?
• 58:33
  400. Yeah, and that's UK wide, not
• 58:36
  just Scotland. Or is that Scotland and.
• 58:38
  Heavily focused in Scotland. Yeah, so, so suddenly it would
• 58:41
  be easy for me to naively think, well, listen, if I just bottle
• 58:45
  200 bottles of Hogs Head that I've got, I'll just phone after
• 58:49
  I get rid of my whiskey is to take it and sell it for me.
• 58:52
  But the problem you've got is that #1 you'll say to me, what
• 58:56
  would the first process be like? I certainly said to you right
• 58:58
  after I've got 200 bottles of single cast whiskey from our
• 59:02
  from us, our refill Hogs Head Cast that I've bottled under our
• 59:06
  brand Whiskey Stores podcast for you buy it off me at this pair
• 59:11
  of bottle and use can go wild with it and sell it to your
• 59:14
  consumers on the trade, your consumers through the shop.
• 59:17
  And why wouldn't they? Because it's bloody good
• 59:20
  whiskey. Yeah, I've heard that page
• 59:22
  before. I'll give you a sample for your.
• 59:27
  Yeah, like, I mean, it's a guy called Sam who who runs the
• 59:30
  buying team now. And like, you know, a sample of
• 59:33
  whiskey, like his desk is a disgrace.
• 59:35
  For all you know, for all the samples he's got on his desk.
• 59:38
  I bet you, you, you, you, you bought up the the business I'm
• 59:41
  doing now. So one of the areas of
• 59:45
  consultancy that I'm doing is about consulting on route to
• 59:48
  market and route to market into retail and route to market into
• 59:54
  into on trade because it's going to get more and more difficult.
• 59:58
  And knowing how to pitch and knowing to produce that either
• 1:00:02
  you even need proven demand or you need to make sure that
• 1:00:07
  product is needed. But not just for all my
• 1:00:09
  whiskeys, but any retailer. And I think I picked up a few
• 1:00:13
  things because I've been pitched to by pretty much everyone in
• 1:00:17
  the industry now and seeing all the different ways of doing it,
• 1:00:20
  and it's going to get more difficult.
• 1:00:22
  And I'm not going to tell him a secret because people have to
• 1:00:24
  pay for him that no, of course. What we'll do is we'll put the
• 1:00:27
  next half hour behind the paywalls.
• 1:00:31
  But I know because it's interesting that everyone will
• 1:00:34
  think, everyone will think their their whiskey is the best
• 1:00:38
  whiskey that they've ever tasted.
• 1:00:40
  And then they'll say to you, well, why wouldn't you?
• 1:00:42
  If I'm a new bottler, I'll just say to you, I thought, come on,
• 1:00:44
  why wouldn't you Now, is it a case of in these situations, are
• 1:00:48
  you able to, with being the size of what Royal Mail whiskey is,
• 1:00:51
  where were you able to sort of squeeze the margin and go, well,
• 1:00:54
  if you want us to take your whiskey that this, we've tried
• 1:00:58
  it, it's good whiskey. We think we could probably sell
• 1:01:00
  it. But at the same time, you can
• 1:01:02
  then suddenly go, this is the margin that we're going to start
• 1:01:04
  with. And once we build really because
• 1:01:05
  there will be legacy relationships that Royal Mail
• 1:01:07
  Whiskey had had you built up where you can suddenly go, well,
• 1:01:12
  first of all, we know that if we take this consignment off you,
• 1:01:15
  it's going to sell anyway. So we know that we're going to
• 1:01:18
  sell it and we don't have to be pernicated about how much money
• 1:01:21
  we need to make. We know we're going to sell it.
• 1:01:22
  It looks good for us to be dealing with a whiskey of this
• 1:01:25
  calibre, the size, etcetera, etcetera, whereas when it's a
• 1:01:28
  new guy entering the market for the first time.
• 1:01:31
  Yeah. I mean, margins important, sure,
• 1:01:33
  but the, it's a confidence that somebody's going to sell is the
• 1:01:38
  most important thing now and in a cluttered market and, and, and
• 1:01:47
  it was never that much about negotiation on price and margin.
• 1:01:51
  Sure, it was the thing, but it's more about working together to
• 1:01:57
  get successful products. And it's funny as you move into
• 1:02:00
  the other side of the fence. I mean, I'm not talking to
• 1:02:02
  retailers to talk about how Royal Marvelous does things.
• 1:02:07
  I'm talking to brands about how to sell into retail in general.
• 1:02:11
  And, and it's funny going to the consultancy position.
• 1:02:14
  I, you know, at times I thought, well, why am I going to tell
• 1:02:18
  these brands, you know, like, am I really able to give enough
• 1:02:22
  insight for them to pay me? But the first couple of meetings
• 1:02:26
  straight away you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do
• 1:02:29
  that. And it and it's, it's hard
• 1:02:31
  because, and it was hard for Royal Mile whiskeys,
• 1:02:35
  increasingly so because these meetings you're coming in with
• 1:02:38
  people and it was their heart and soul and they had invested
• 1:02:41
  millions in the distillery and they did obviously think it's
• 1:02:44
  good. They do obviously think it's
• 1:02:46
  good. But we're dealing with all these
• 1:02:49
  great products, you know, in the warehouse in.
• 1:02:51
  The crowded, crowded market. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:02:54
  And actually getting that thing now that's going to be really
• 1:02:58
  successful, it is harder than ever.
• 1:03:00
  And you've got to be really, really sharp about it.
• 1:03:03
  And yeah, I've found strong opinions have been really,
• 1:03:06
  really easy to express as the first class I've been talking
• 1:03:09
  to. So it's, it's funny, you do
• 1:03:12
  have, you do build up this knowledge or this instinct over
• 1:03:15
  time. But it's but it's interesting as
• 1:03:17
  well. Give one before like I want, I
• 1:03:20
  want you to, I'm going to put you on the spot.
• 1:03:22
  And I know you said that and I can't give away my secrets
• 1:03:25
  because you people have to pay. But if someone is watching this
• 1:03:27
  here in the England, right, OK, give one mistake, one very easy,
• 1:03:32
  one common mistake that you've seen that so many people fall
• 1:03:35
  into when they're trying to launch a brand or get a get a
• 1:03:39
  route to market that you know, people often fall into that
• 1:03:44
  mistake trap that you've seen that that is an easy fix
• 1:03:47
  straight away. It wasn't always a mistake and
• 1:03:53
  it was for a while successful and real, but selling something
• 1:03:58
  on the basis that it's scarce when it's not scarce and that
• 1:04:03
  and that, you know, all they're lucky to have me.
• 1:04:05
  You know, you're lucky to have my product that was actually
• 1:04:10
  really successful for, you know, because whiskey was scarce and
• 1:04:14
  things were selling out quickly. But now that don't work anymore,
• 1:04:17
  you know, it was very, very few. Well, any exceptions, one or two
• 1:04:21
  brands in the world, maybe Van Winkle, that doesn't count.
• 1:04:25
  Who else are we talking? Even even spring banks
• 1:04:28
  relatively available now. So those those days have passed.
• 1:04:31
  It's back to the days when people had to work to sell
• 1:04:34
  whiskey. And that's when I started in the
• 1:04:36
  industry and I was the 1st 10 years when I was in the
• 1:04:39
  industry. And it's been a full decade now
• 1:04:42
  of people not having to work to sell whiskey.
• 1:04:44
  And by work, I don't mean charm. That's, that's the other thing
• 1:04:51
  when someone in sales gives themselves too much credit, like
• 1:04:56
  I'm so charming and so I will say the right things and that
• 1:05:02
  will magically make them buy something.
• 1:05:05
  And that that, that is sometimes might work.
• 1:05:10
  But if you're working with a commercial buyer, I would say
• 1:05:13
  that will very, very really rarely work.
• 1:05:15
  And it's not about the person setting in the room.
• 1:05:18
  It's about wholesale strategy. It's about the marketing
• 1:05:21
  position. It's everything as well as the
• 1:05:24
  flavour you have to have. You have to have a product that
• 1:05:28
  the buyer wants now, and that's hard to do with a charm.
• 1:05:31
  Is that, well, first of all, Stuart Baxter, I'm sure it was
• 1:05:33
  Stuart Baxter, Barley Baxter who was on here.
• 1:05:36
  And he said the biggest lesson he learned becoming a brand
• 1:05:38
  ambassador is that put the whiskey first.
• 1:05:40
  It's not about you as a brand ambassador.
• 1:05:42
  It's very easy. Brand ambassadors have to have
• 1:05:44
  that charismatic character standing in front of rooms of
• 1:05:47
  people and give them the story and the patter and the and.
• 1:05:51
  They're a cocky bunch. Yeah.
• 1:05:54
  At the same time, the product that you're selling, the product
• 1:05:57
  you're giving people is. This is the centrepiece of the
• 1:05:59
  show. And don't lose sight of that.
• 1:06:00
  Yeah, totally say that. But yeah, but what's very
• 1:06:04
  interesting now with the challenges that the whiskey
• 1:06:07
  industry is facing and where we are at the moment and things
• 1:06:09
  like that. And it's like what you've just
• 1:06:10
  said is I think it took you 22 sort of other examples or two,
• 1:06:15
  two points before you got to flavour.
• 1:06:18
  OK, liquid to lips is what everyone talks about.
• 1:06:21
  Yeah, but I think, I think. I would get liquid to lips, kind
• 1:06:23
  of getting people drinking our whiskey so people can appreciate
• 1:06:26
  and realise that. Actually it's good, but actually
• 1:06:28
  there's loads of good. Ways.
• 1:06:29
  Well, this. Is a marketing part of that over
• 1:06:33
  like you speak to someone in production and they'll tell you
• 1:06:35
  like no, no, we use this fermentation and we do this
• 1:06:38
  distillation style. We use these cast mat and we buy
• 1:06:40
  the best wood and we do this and we do that.
• 1:06:42
  The next thing, then the brand ambassador will say, or the, the
• 1:06:45
  people in charge of the BDMS will say, get liquid to liquid
• 1:06:48
  to lips. Because once people try our
• 1:06:49
  whiskey, then people do it. But at the same time, then it's
• 1:06:53
  like, well, wait a minute, does marketing become more important?
• 1:06:56
  Because if people see your brand, people are more inclined
• 1:06:59
  to try your brand. Once they've tried your brand,
• 1:07:01
  people are more inclined to suddenly go.
• 1:07:03
  And then you get your opportunity to tell the story of
• 1:07:06
  here's our fragmentation process.
• 1:07:07
  Here's our distillation process. This is our maturation process.
• 1:07:11
  Yeah, but yeah, yeah, those are those are technical
• 1:07:14
  specifications. Like I'm a I'm a whiskey fan,
• 1:07:17
  like I don't want to make it too neutral, but those are technical
• 1:07:20
  specifications. And and the product, yes, it's a
• 1:07:24
  flavour, yes, it's a packaging. But I suppose a lot of people
• 1:07:28
  think marketing is social media or adverts or things like that.
• 1:07:33
  Marketing is also price positioning, the channels that
• 1:07:36
  it goes through, who you're trying to appeal to, what that
• 1:07:40
  messaging is. It's more than just fluffy fancy
• 1:07:45
  pictures and, and those are the nuts and bolts that need to be
• 1:07:48
  really, really right. And also, I suppose the other
• 1:07:51
  thing is that the the lifespan of a product is increasing
• 1:07:57
  because they're not going to sell out immediately unless
• 1:08:00
  you're going to do a limited run of 100 bottles.
• 1:08:02
  But that's not going to make the company any money.
• 1:08:05
  Yeah. So the life.
• 1:08:07
  And even if you did do a limited run of 100 bottles, it's still
• 1:08:10
  might not sell out. You, you've got to create a
• 1:08:13
  product that is good enough to exist on a shelf for months and
• 1:08:16
  months and months and months now.
• 1:08:18
  And part of the flabby, excuse me, part of the flabby way of
• 1:08:23
  doing business was, well, put this out, sell out, and then
• 1:08:26
  we'll put something else out and sell out and put out.
• 1:08:28
  You know, that's all changed now.
• 1:08:31
  So, yeah, absolutely. The product, the liquid, we can
• 1:08:35
  slow down, we can also be over aging stock a bit now because
• 1:08:40
  it's not so valuable that scarcity is gone and we can
• 1:08:43
  actually slow down a bit rather than that era.
• 1:08:46
  Whereas we need another 10,000 bottles.
• 1:08:48
  We need them by October. You know that that was the kind
• 1:08:51
  of that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:54
  You just felt this urgency of product creation MPD.
• 1:08:57
  So it's, it's really, you know, the NPD, the new whiskies,
• 1:09:03
  they've got to nail them and they've got to be really well
• 1:09:06
  thought through in their entirety because the whiskey
• 1:09:10
  that's been released hasn't been, you know, with some
• 1:09:12
  exceptions, it's not been awful. But, well, we've we've.
• 1:09:16
  Spoken about it, you know it's. Because it's all.
• 1:09:17
  Regulated in the same way, it's quite hard to make bad, you
• 1:09:20
  know, it's quite hard not to make a good product in some
• 1:09:23
  regards, you know, it's all made the same way, it's all the same
• 1:09:26
  product to the same specification.
• 1:09:28
  I think so. It comes down to go ahead,
• 1:09:33
  Graham. I think what Arthur's saying is
• 1:09:34
  for our next release, we'll just, we'll just create a ballot
• 1:09:38
  if you ballot it. Well, if you say we've.
• 1:09:40
  Got We've had to put this to ballots.
• 1:09:42
  We'll just release 10 bottles, yeah?
• 1:09:44
  We we put it to ballot, then everyone will just see that Oh
• 1:09:47
  yeah, there's so much demand for the next Whiskey stories podcast
• 1:09:51
  release dot dot dot that they've had to ballot it to make sure
• 1:09:55
  that because it's just so, so so.
• 1:09:57
  Highly so. Absolutely, Graham.
• 1:09:59
  Yeah. Arthur, you've mentioned you
• 1:10:03
  know your love for history and things like that as well.
• 1:10:07
  So looking back, you're also, I think Angus and I were Gangus
• 1:10:10
  mentioned it before we start recording.
• 1:10:11
  This is one of the first crossover collaboration podcast,
• 1:10:15
  Collaboration Labs because you're part of Liquid
• 1:10:18
  Antiquarium. Close right?
• 1:10:23
  Have another go. You didn't mention you dyslexic.
• 1:10:26
  YouTube the liquid antiquarium aquarium.
• 1:10:28
  That's it. M you could have made it an
• 1:10:31
  easier an easier spelling for the whiskey aquarium.
• 1:10:34
  It was aquarium right? Antiquarium, right?
• 1:10:37
  Don't worry, my wife still calls it Liquid Antiquarium.
• 1:10:40
  Antiquarium, yeah. So what is that?
• 1:10:43
  So yeah, it's an odd shift from really commercial chat to this,
• 1:10:49
  but that is my life actually. So and it has been for for a
• 1:10:52
  long time. So I've always been interested
• 1:10:55
  in the past and and would read a lot like, you know, I read a lot
• 1:11:02
  and over time I've good pals to Dave Broome right from the start
• 1:11:10
  again there when I'm many people working whiskey, you bump bumped
• 1:11:12
  into these people. And over time I would kind of go
• 1:11:16
  up to him and said, like, have you read the excise Act, for
• 1:11:19
  example, 1823? And it'd be like, I don't think
• 1:11:22
  he had it that stage actually. And I, and I said, I've read it.
• 1:11:26
  It's really different to the actual books, you know, the the
• 1:11:28
  whiskey books, including some of Dave's and and I was doing more
• 1:11:33
  and more of this and then COVID came along.
• 1:11:35
  We all started doing the stream yard tastings, the live
• 1:11:37
  tastings. And I said to Dave, because he'd
• 1:11:41
  stopped travelling as he does a lot in this normal day-to-day
• 1:11:44
  life, this would be a really interesting format that we could
• 1:11:48
  discuss and put on slides of the actual original documents.
• 1:11:53
  So we tried this in lockdown. And so the Liquid Antiquarian is
• 1:12:01
  a channel that looks at the past history of booze, not just
• 1:12:05
  whiskey. So we've done rum and we've done
• 1:12:08
  champagne and we have 90% of our our content is actually risky.
• 1:12:13
  But the idea is that we can do any drinks and we try and start
• 1:12:17
  with primary evidence. So we're not doing the secondary
• 1:12:20
  text everyone's read. That can be quite samey you.
• 1:12:22
  Go back to source. It's all a lot of that secondary
• 1:12:25
  text is based on the same stuff and in my opinion and Dave's
• 1:12:29
  opinion and actually an increasing number of people's
• 1:12:31
  opinion that is now out of date and we now have more
• 1:12:34
  information. So we started doing that.
• 1:12:38
  And I suppose the other thing that characterizes it is we try
• 1:12:45
  and look at quite a broad thematic approach to it.
• 1:12:51
  And then we're just not, we're not just looking at a brand.
• 1:12:54
  We're trying to look at how whiskey is influenced by rum
• 1:12:59
  politically and economically, which is a really big area.
• 1:13:02
  Well, technically. Brandy as well is a huge.
• 1:13:05
  All these things are linked, but a lot of the histories they
• 1:13:08
  either zoom in just on a brand which leaves out an
• 1:13:12
  extraordinary amount of amazing stories of deciduous don't even
• 1:13:17
  exist anymore. And it also is so narrow, like
• 1:13:22
  they talk about the the 18, sorry, the 1800s and don't
• 1:13:29
  mention the Highland clearances or don't mention the Napoleonic
• 1:13:33
  Wars or don't mention the abolition of slavery and the
• 1:13:37
  fact that the slavers got huge compensation, started investing
• 1:13:41
  that in lobbying government. And then when the Napoleonic
• 1:13:47
  Wars happened, the government banned the use of grain.
• 1:13:50
  So the slavers, ex slavers said, well, let's just distill using
• 1:13:54
  molasses. So a lot of whiskey or
• 1:13:55
  distilleries of previously distilling whiskey were then
• 1:13:58
  forced to use molasses. And then when they went back
• 1:14:02
  onto grain, those sugar plantation owners were still
• 1:14:05
  saying make this legal, put molasses into the wash.
• 1:14:08
  And people tried that and I suppose.
• 1:14:11
  So I kind of 5050W and rum. Yeah, sort of thing.
• 1:14:15
  Kind of. Yeah, Romski.
• 1:14:17
  Romski yeah. So like there's loads of really
• 1:14:21
  interesting big stories. There's loads of really
• 1:14:24
  interesting small stories that just haven't been told.
• 1:14:28
  So we do that through Antiquarian.
• 1:14:31
  It's pretty niche, I admit, but it's amazing.
• 1:14:34
  It's found this audience and people are now supporting us on
• 1:14:37
  Patreon, which is which is great and.
• 1:14:40
  Talk us for that. I'd love to know.
• 1:14:45
  Good. Please explain to us how you can
• 1:14:47
  monetize this. That's fantastic.
• 1:14:50
  If there's anyone listening, it's like, fuck, Graham's just
• 1:14:52
  have the word patriot and he's going to start charging us to
• 1:14:55
  listen. Yeah.
• 1:14:56
  How does that work? It's easy to set up, it's just
• 1:15:00
  whether or not people are. Actually, actually willing to
• 1:15:03
  open our I. Don't know if we got paid for
• 1:15:04
  content feature yet I guess. But Ross, I apologize and I
• 1:15:10
  don't apologize to our guests who come on where I do say I try
• 1:15:14
  and find I'm not being I am deliberately ignorant to try and
• 1:15:18
  not find it as much as possible. That's fine.
• 1:15:20
  So I doubt. So we do have conversation.
• 1:15:22
  It's natural. Ross did message me because he's
• 1:15:24
  not here tonight. And Ross always likes to as
• 1:15:27
  people listeners of the podcast, particularly Scott Moore and his
• 1:15:30
  current wife, who will be who happily shout at their they
• 1:15:35
  shout at their their their radio or.
• 1:15:38
  The Shut up, Ross. Shut up, Ross.
• 1:15:40
  Ross did say a couple of things to mention tonight.
• 1:15:42
  Whiskey myths is one of them, right?
• 1:15:46
  Talk about whiskey myths. What's, what are we talking
• 1:15:48
  here? You'll, it's because going
• 1:15:50
  through some of the history and you'll see myths that have
• 1:15:53
  appeared in whiskey that people will see, as you know, once it
• 1:15:56
  gets passed down and passed down and passed down, what kind of,
• 1:15:59
  what are the sort of bigger ones?
• 1:16:00
  Because this is really interesting.
• 1:16:01
  You're going to going back to the primary sources.
• 1:16:04
  You're not regurgitating the lines that maybe kind of almost
• 1:16:08
  Chinese whispers. You know, it's no new history,
• 1:16:10
  just new historians sort of thing, because the whiskey myths
• 1:16:14
  must perpetuate at some point and carry on down.
• 1:16:18
  I mean, I would say the story of whiskey is mythologized.
• 1:16:22
  I think we all know it in our heart that we love the drink and
• 1:16:27
  we love Scotland. You know, it's my home has been
• 1:16:30
  for a long time now. And we're happy to hear these
• 1:16:34
  stories about about the past that kind of fit with what we
• 1:16:39
  want to think about whiskey. And the industry has told those
• 1:16:42
  stories. And to be fair, they kind of
• 1:16:45
  told them based on books and amazing research done by people
• 1:16:49
  who didn't have the Internet, which has opened up a huge
• 1:16:52
  amount of other areas. But but a lot of it was done by
• 1:16:55
  people who worked for whiskey companies.
• 1:16:58
  And some of that needs to be unpicked, I suppose.
• 1:17:02
  Whiskey, Miss from the start point it is, it is all a myth.
• 1:17:09
  You know, it is a story that we tell ourselves and we kind of
• 1:17:12
  know it and some of it's true and some of it's not true, as is
• 1:17:15
  the case with all myths. But I suppose the first thing I
• 1:17:19
  would say is the whiskey industry is not that old.
• 1:17:23
  We say it is far older than it is.
• 1:17:25
  And then, you know, most BAS presentation that, well, not
• 1:17:29
  most, but a lot of them will start talking about invention of
• 1:17:33
  distillation in the Arab world and then something to do with
• 1:17:35
  the Irish and something to do with monks and all that kind of
• 1:17:38
  stuff. Yeah.
• 1:17:39
  Like the whiskey industry as such really started in 1823 with
• 1:17:43
  the Excise Act. That's 200 years ago.
• 1:17:46
  That's recent. Once you start looking at the
• 1:17:47
  broader picture, it was effectively an immature spirit
• 1:17:52
  that was drunk, unaged. Yeah, we've, Dave and I have
• 1:17:56
  actually pushed back the first evidence for conscious aging to
• 1:18:01
  quite a bit further back 1742. But it was it was rarely done.
• 1:18:06
  It wasn't, and if it was done, it wasn't necessarily deliberate
• 1:18:09
  like you're saying, unconscious aging.
• 1:18:11
  That's another myth. No, no, there were people saying
• 1:18:17
  that age whiskey is better and and absolutely you know that
• 1:18:21
  they were doing it by the 1740s for sure, but in tiny, tiny
• 1:18:24
  quantities commercially 1823 they change the legislation and
• 1:18:29
  you don't have to pay tax on whiskey until it leaves the
• 1:18:35
  warehouse. Right.
• 1:18:36
  There's reasons to do that, stamp out smuggling so the
• 1:18:39
  distillers can use surplus barley so it doesn't go into the
• 1:18:42
  smuggling system. So it's all quite logical when
• 1:18:44
  you look into it. And then companies that start to
• 1:18:48
  be successful who weren't farmers, that's another myth.
• 1:18:52
  This whole coal farmer using a bit leftover barley may have
• 1:18:56
  happened sometimes, but rarely. And certainly when you start
• 1:18:59
  getting to the names that we recognize, they weren't farmers,
• 1:19:05
  you start to get whiskey being mature rum.
• 1:19:07
  You could buy 20 year old rum for a long time before that.
• 1:19:13
  Rum was miles ahead as an industry in terms of aging of
• 1:19:17
  their spirits and technical understanding of how rum was
• 1:19:20
  distilled. Cognac was the same as well.
• 1:19:23
  Yeah, miles, miles ahead. And I actually find that really
• 1:19:27
  interesting point in the rather than going with this mists of
• 1:19:30
  time analogy. And it's all developed up in the
• 1:19:33
  Highlands. And then slowly it graduate and
• 1:19:35
  then finally they let them, the farmers start distilling and
• 1:19:38
  then it took off. No, no, no, no.
• 1:19:40
  It was a mess before that violent world.
• 1:19:44
  Smuggling was brutal, people died, people were burnt alive in
• 1:19:48
  cottages. You know that we shouldn't
• 1:19:50
  really romanticize that too much.
• 1:19:52
  Then 1823, with a really firm hand, the government had a
• 1:19:56
  really big impact on the Scotch whiskey industry.
• 1:20:00
  The Scotch whiskey industry might not have happened.
• 1:20:02
  That's another thing to bear in mind.
• 1:20:03
  We always have this kind of perception that single malt
• 1:20:07
  would always rise to this iconic whiskey, would always rise to
• 1:20:09
  this iconic status. That's not true either.
• 1:20:12
  It took a lot of. Where it might never have
• 1:20:15
  happened, but the key point is it happened late and it happened
• 1:20:20
  hard and it happened fast. You know, there is an
• 1:20:22
  extraordinary explosion from like 18401850 up to 1898.
• 1:20:28
  Yeah, that's a really narrow. Time frame and again this may be
• 1:20:31
  a myth but my my understanding was always it was the crash of
• 1:20:34
  the cognac industry, the the the the kind of vine disease and
• 1:20:39
  France. The logs.
• 1:20:40
  LED in the 1860s that led to the rise of whiskey as a.
• 1:20:44
  Yeah, that that that wasn't my work.
• 1:20:48
  I wanted to get onto it. And I'd always suspected the
• 1:20:50
  same. That's overblown.
• 1:20:51
  But they don't talk about it much.
• 1:20:54
  Like if I read a lot of this stuff and you start to see what
• 1:20:58
  people are talking about and it's not like woo Hoo, the, you
• 1:21:02
  know, brand is gone and you look at the prices and yes, points
• 1:21:06
  Brandy gets a bit more exciting. Sorry, expensive, but no, I, I
• 1:21:10
  don't see that. I think it was Nick Morgan who
• 1:21:13
  who, who did a bit of work on that.
• 1:21:14
  Maybe he and Russell, but that's exciting because you give credit
• 1:21:20
  to these amazing people who built this industry.
• 1:21:22
  We didn't need that. It wasn't a happy accident.
• 1:21:25
  It was something that genuinely, yeah, it was.
• 1:21:28
  Yeah, there were lots of things coming together.
• 1:21:32
  One of them was philoxera. That didn't do any harm, I'm
• 1:21:35
  sure, but but it wasn't the reason.
• 1:21:39
  The reason was this incredible set of businesses linked to the
• 1:21:45
  Empire. People don't like that much
• 1:21:47
  either, but it's true. We've got this network of
• 1:21:50
  distribution. Yeah.
• 1:21:52
  Link to the Empire Railways, movement of people to to
• 1:21:57
  centres, huge population movement to to cities.
• 1:22:02
  All these things started to come come together.
• 1:22:04
  But people built amazing businesses really quickly.
• 1:22:07
  Yeah, the blenders actually, of course, you know, they played a
• 1:22:09
  part, but in in a generation, a generation and a bit like
• 1:22:14
  amazing how quickly it happened from almost nothing.
• 1:22:17
  From almost nothing. The other thing Ross said was
• 1:22:21
  don't mention Fife as a region. Now he said Graham's planted the
• 1:22:26
  flag. He's he's banging the drum.
• 1:22:29
  He says why no make Fife a region?
• 1:22:32
  Ross saying don't whatever you did don't mention that is
• 1:22:35
  obviously like a built a red flag for me.
• 1:22:37
  So right after, you've obviously got strong opinions on not
• 1:22:41
  letting the Kingdom of Fife have its way in whiskey.
• 1:22:47
  Why should it have a region? I'll ask a question.
• 1:22:50
  About you first. OK, right.
• 1:22:51
  I'm gonna. I'm gonna.
• 1:22:52
  Apart from there are some distilleries.
• 1:22:54
  No, right, right. OK.
• 1:22:55
  So what could you explain to me the the fundamentals to be a
• 1:23:00
  recognized region in Scotland for whiskey?
• 1:23:02
  Is it not just whiskey heritage, whiskey history over 3, three or
• 1:23:08
  more distilleries in the area and what's that contributing to
• 1:23:12
  the the history of whiskey or maybe or something like that?
• 1:23:17
  I'd rather look at the reasons why we have regions, okay.
• 1:23:21
  And when that came about, when do you think that came about?
• 1:23:24
  In the 90s it was actually. I think it was actually
• 1:23:26
  legislating. Possibly it was late 2009 or?
• 1:23:29
  Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:30
  Yeah. So, but why did they put them
• 1:23:33
  in? I mean, apart from just saying
• 1:23:35
  there are places in Scotland and these distilleries are there,
• 1:23:38
  they, they put them in to provide a framework for people
• 1:23:41
  to understand whiskey probably based on looking at the wine
• 1:23:45
  industry where regionality does play a bigger part.
• 1:23:50
  That balance between it tastes like that because it comes like
• 1:23:54
  that because it comes from there, IE the grapes are grown
• 1:23:57
  there versus how the people make the thing to make that style.
• 1:24:02
  That balance is more tipped over to that way over in wine
• 1:24:06
  production. So they provided this framework
• 1:24:09
  because distilleries existing in those certain areas and it's
• 1:24:14
  helpful to the degree, but you very, nearly, very quickly need
• 1:24:18
  to unlearn it as soon as you learn.
• 1:24:20
  Of course, yeah. I mean, The thing is, you know,
• 1:24:22
  a Ben Romack is a peated space side whiskey.
• 1:24:26
  So anyone that says that, well, I'lla of the West of Scotland is
• 1:24:30
  where you get beated whiskey from, etcetera, is is bollocks
• 1:24:33
  because you know, anyone can do beated whiskey just like King
• 1:24:37
  Lassie and fight the the the the five beated whiskey.
• 1:24:43
  But I mean, is it No, I would say from a marketing point of
• 1:24:48
  view, if I was to put now you're rummaging through the box that
• 1:24:50
  you brought with you, I would say from a marketing point, it's
• 1:24:53
  marketing, right? It's the storytelling, it's
• 1:24:56
  being able to encourage people. And I would say that in
• 1:24:58
  Campbeltown has three distilleries, has a huge history
• 1:25:02
  in whiskey. It was the capital of whiskey
• 1:25:04
  for a long time with some, you know, with the amount of
• 1:25:06
  distilleries that were in Campbelltown at one point.
• 1:25:10
  But it has three distilleries. It has a history to it.
• 1:25:13
  But at the same time, Campbelltown probably benefits,
• 1:25:16
  number one, from having the distilleries.
• 1:25:18
  They are fair enough, you know, the distilleries in in
• 1:25:21
  Campbeltown. But secondly, because it is a
• 1:25:24
  region, it probably gets more on it because of that.
• 1:25:28
  Whereas actually you could fly into Edinburgh Airport and
• 1:25:30
  within 40 minutes, half an hour, an hour, you could be, you could
• 1:25:35
  sample 3 comfortably very, very good distilleries within Fife.
• 1:25:40
  Fife has a its own whiskey history in terms of the barley
• 1:25:43
  that was produced, that was, that was grown to, that was
• 1:25:46
  played a heavily part in the production.
• 1:25:48
  And you know, I had one of the biggest maltings in Scotland at
• 1:25:51
  one point as well. It's got, it's got more than
• 1:25:55
  three distilleries, which is what's required for the
• 1:25:58
  regionality framework. And also when you look at the
• 1:26:01
  storage of whiskey and Fife, when you look at the Azure
• 1:26:05
  storage facilities that you've got that I would argue that
• 1:26:09
  probably at least 1/3 of Scotch whiskey is stored in Fife.
• 1:26:18
  Now that's ball. I've made that number up.
• 1:26:19
  But I would, I would right? But I would say.
• 1:26:24
  If it's not a third, it's an awful.
• 1:26:25
  Lot, when you look at the Azure has two major bonds in Fife.
• 1:26:30
  OK, you've got the Azure Bond and leave it on.
• 1:26:32
  Your bond, like I think what you're saying is go 5 five, good
• 1:26:38
  for five, but all you're saying is 5 is a place and there's some
• 1:26:42
  distilleries in it and warehouses.
• 1:26:45
  You want to include that. And by all means 5 put the name
• 1:26:49
  on the bottle, put, you know, proudly say you are a 5W and and
• 1:26:54
  create your own block of collaborative marketing
• 1:26:58
  together. But it doesn't it just doesn't
• 1:27:01
  mean anything to me. I think.
• 1:27:03
  I think it's interesting that actually the five distilleries,
• 1:27:06
  Kings Barns, Darf Mill leave entertaining to the side because
• 1:27:09
  it doesn't fit your plan. Eden Mill, Eden Mill.
• 1:27:13
  We don't know what's going to happen there next, but it's
• 1:27:15
  interesting that Kings Barns and and Darf Mill both decided to
• 1:27:20
  make a lowland style whiskey to fit in with that category.
• 1:27:23
  But they could have done anything.
• 1:27:24
  What about Lindo's Abbey, you know, Oh, didn't they?
• 1:27:26
  As Mike Jackson said, you know it's a homage for it's a
• 1:27:30
  pilgrimage every whiskey enthusiast should make to wear
• 1:27:34
  first distillation of of recognised whiskey in Scotland
• 1:27:37
  happened. Possibly, yeah, possibly, but no
• 1:27:42
  disrespect to Michael, he was a wonderful man.
• 1:27:43
  But and and Lindor's is a is a lovely place to visit.
• 1:27:48
  They've done a superb job. But with that as a visitor
• 1:27:50
  attraction, but it just doesn't mean anything to me.
• 1:27:53
  And, and, and, you know, the regions were kind of created in
• 1:27:57
  that way. Campbelltown didn't really make
• 1:27:59
  it up. I was looking rummaging around
• 1:28:01
  in my box because I had an old 1992 SMWS guide.
• 1:28:05
  OK, how do you like the sound of this?
• 1:28:07
  They said they had. They said there are three
• 1:28:10
  regions. OK, OK.
• 1:28:12
  Space side? Yeah, Lowland and Ireland.
• 1:28:18
  Ireland. I think it was Ireland, yeah,
• 1:28:20
  yeah. So Highland was the subdivision
• 1:28:22
  of space side. Then they said that Campbelltown
• 1:28:26
  Whiskey was its own class. No idea what that meant, right?
• 1:28:29
  They subdivided Highlands into four regions, OK, East, West,
• 1:28:34
  north or something like that. And space side was subdivided
• 1:28:38
  according to the rivers, the lossy, the fentil and all that
• 1:28:41
  kind of stuff. So this is kind of what I don't
• 1:28:44
  like about regionality and that's a bad example of it.
• 1:28:48
  But it it's showing that we were still working out what whiskey
• 1:28:52
  was. That's the kind of document I
• 1:28:54
  really like that shows you're, you're thinking about that and
• 1:28:58
  think about the future, what it could be.
• 1:29:00
  But if you actually look at it, it's all kind of built on pretty
• 1:29:02
  shaky ground to begin with. And a document like that, for
• 1:29:05
  example, what I really don't like about the regionality thing
• 1:29:09
  is it it it puts too much accent on geography for the new people
• 1:29:13
  coming into the whiskey. They're thinking, all right, OK,
• 1:29:16
  so 5's got its own region. It must be something to do with
• 1:29:18
  the slightly drier summers. They get over that way and and
• 1:29:21
  all that type of stuff. And dah dah dah, Campbelltown
• 1:29:23
  tastes like it does because it tastes like it does because
• 1:29:25
  that's how they make whiskey And, and he's.
• 1:29:29
  Just misleading. I couldn't say he's a
• 1:29:30
  distinctive flavour profile. Campbelltown there they say the
• 1:29:33
  Campbelltown funk Isla you could see association with it, but
• 1:29:37
  even but. You have to see, Yeah,
• 1:29:39
  exceptions, exceptions, exceptions, exceptions.
• 1:29:41
  And actually really, I'll put it back to you.
• 1:29:43
  I think the East nuke should declare independence from 5:00
• 1:29:50
  because the rest of it's a dumb. Well, I I I guess my next, well,
• 1:29:59
  I guess, I guess the kind of counterpoint to that whole
• 1:30:02
  argument is is. No, the podcast.
• 1:30:04
  No, no, no. Well, no.
• 1:30:05
  Well, no, no. No stop from that.
• 1:30:07
  Naked. There's a Kirkaldi born boy.
• 1:30:10
  That's it, We're finished. Well, no, no, no, no, to bring
• 1:30:12
  it to a kind of final finality is are whiskey regions still
• 1:30:16
  relevant then? Is, is there still a good reason
• 1:30:19
  to have them or is actually they are they, they're kind of
• 1:30:21
  pointless and you know, Scotch whiskey as Scotch whiskey and
• 1:30:24
  that, that that's it. I think it would be bewildering
• 1:30:28
  if we took them away. But like my interest is I always
• 1:30:33
  want new people to appreciate this drink that I love and
• 1:30:37
  that's given me in my career and and all that stuff.
• 1:30:40
  And I do think there is a usefulness to it to just get
• 1:30:45
  some navigation somewhere along the lines.
• 1:30:47
  But yeah, I mean, we didn't organize the shop by regions.
• 1:30:52
  Royal Mile Whiskers used to but don't anymore.
• 1:30:54
  We just do it by alphabet like that way.
• 1:30:57
  And and it'd be interesting to see where they are in 20-30
• 1:31:01
  years. But I think the last thing we
• 1:31:03
  should do now is subdivide by geography.
• 1:31:06
  Further. You're basically just giving P.
• 1:31:08
  Otherwise you're basically just giving people a map of Scotland
• 1:31:11
  with the various. It goes back to your point about
• 1:31:13
  and back to your point about saying things like you, you
• 1:31:17
  know, peated whiskey is a challenging whiskey to start
• 1:31:19
  with. Yeah, because effectively, if
• 1:31:20
  you're suddenly saying, oh, no, no, you're new to whiskey, you
• 1:31:23
  should probably try a nice shared space site, which is, or
• 1:31:26
  a low one, which is lighter. But actually it's nonsense
• 1:31:29
  because what we know is that you can mainland peat.
• 1:31:32
  I put it down in the newsletter earlier on that I've started to
• 1:31:36
  like peated whiskey, but actually mainland peated whiskey
• 1:31:39
  is, is more enjoyable. But there'll be people who would
• 1:31:42
  sit there and go, no, no, that's nonsense because the only place
• 1:31:44
  you can get peeked whiskey or Smokey whiskey is Isla because
• 1:31:47
  that's what's the district, the region.
• 1:31:48
  Anyway, we are fast approaching. Otherwise this could end up
• 1:31:51
  being A2 parter. We are getting to the point,
• 1:31:54
  Arthur, where we will ask, we ask our guest for your what, 3
• 1:31:58
  drums or 3W's that have a sort of meaning, association or a
• 1:32:01
  story to them. So you've been in the industry
• 1:32:03
  for a long time, only two jobs, right?
• 1:32:05
  Enough. Three jobs.
• 1:32:08
  Three jobs now. Yes, you're you're the older
• 1:32:10
  version of Ross Barr actually started so started so young.
• 1:32:13
  Except he's worked his way through 101 jobs in a short
• 1:32:17
  period of time. But three whiskeys that have an
• 1:32:19
  association story are meaning to you.
• 1:32:21
  OK, cool. So I'm not very good with this.
• 1:32:25
  Never have a favorite whiskey, all that type of stuff.
• 1:32:27
  And I've, you know, I kind of say, oh, I could give you a top
• 1:32:30
  ten favorite distilleries, but I never quite know what they are.
• 1:32:33
  So, but I gave it a little bit of thought and I am going for
• 1:32:39
  something that doesn't quite exist yet, but I've tried a pre
• 1:32:43
  sample of it. Does that count?
• 1:32:44
  That counts, absolutely. Something that definitely exists
• 1:32:48
  and we should be proud that it still exists.
• 1:32:51
  And then something that I only smelt and licked and didn't get
• 1:32:56
  to taste. Oh.
• 1:32:59
  Excellent. I didn't mean to look you in the
• 1:33:03
  eyes. That's.
• 1:33:04
  Quite alright. I'm worried.
• 1:33:05
  I was like, oh sorry. I didn't mean I didn't mean to
• 1:33:08
  leave you out of that sexy moment.
• 1:33:10
  There's no offense taken. So if you want, if I know, join
• 1:33:13
  the Patriots so. Something that doesn't yet
• 1:33:20
  exist. I tried a pre batch sample of
• 1:33:24
  Arden American at 10 years old and it was great.
• 1:33:29
  I didn't know what it was because I happened to be staying
• 1:33:31
  in a place where somebody who works in the distillery was also
• 1:33:36
  staying there. We'd heard a cottage.
• 1:33:39
  We got there late. He'd gone to bed, he'd left the
• 1:33:41
  table, a bottle on the table. I had a drum before bed and I
• 1:33:45
  was like, wow, that's a good one, That's a good one.
• 1:33:48
  And the next one he told me it was like, I think a pre, pre
• 1:33:51
  batting version of Arden Mercken.
• 1:33:54
  Yeah, well, I don't know if he's coming out as a 10, but anyway,
• 1:33:57
  it was, it was 10 year old Arden Mercken.
• 1:33:58
  Stop. So it's not because because
• 1:34:01
  Arden Mercken have released a 10 year old whiskey.
• 1:34:04
  Yeah. But look, I I'm nervous.
• 1:34:07
  I am saying something, but my going to the I don't know what
• 1:34:11
  it's going to turn into. But I suppose the point of it
• 1:34:13
  was it was a large scale bottling now that Arden Merkans
• 1:34:17
  really come of age. I mean, it's been mature for a
• 1:34:19
  while now, and it was kind of like tasted like the future of
• 1:34:23
  Arnold Merkin. And I love everything those guys
• 1:34:26
  do. Worked with all these companies
• 1:34:29
  for a really long time and I've almost never done anything to
• 1:34:32
  piss me off, which is rare. I can be quite grumpy.
• 1:34:36
  And you know, I've liked so many of their bottlings.
• 1:34:40
  They're so drinkable, they're so accessible, the price is so fair
• 1:34:43
  and it's just really good. Wholesome in terms of the people
• 1:34:48
  and like wholesome in the way they were described in the 19th
• 1:34:51
  century whiskey that just makes you feel good.
• 1:34:53
  And this stuff, once it's got a bit of time now it's getting
• 1:34:57
  minerality, it's got some fruit coming through.
• 1:35:01
  It's just getting better and better.
• 1:35:03
  And one of the things I've been most proud of are all my
• 1:35:05
  whiskeys is working with new distilleries.
• 1:35:08
  And that has been one of the most successful ones we were
• 1:35:10
  with, with such a great, great relationship all the way coming
• 1:35:14
  out with some great ideas and and really collaborating.
• 1:35:18
  So that's definitely there. But it's really just a vote for
• 1:35:21
  like Ardour Merkin is that distillery.
• 1:35:23
  But that, that DRAM on Isla late at night or after a hard day's
• 1:35:27
  travel was fantastic. So that's something that hasn't
• 1:35:29
  yet been released. Yeah, and I think it's going to
• 1:35:31
  turn into something, but I'm not quite sure what.
• 1:35:33
  And you're not quite sure when. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:36
  I think I know what it is, but I don't.
• 1:35:38
  Don't. You don't.
• 1:35:39
  Have to preach too hard to us, I know.
• 1:35:41
  Listeners for ardour Merkin it should technically be the you
• 1:35:46
  know the whiskey stories podcast in association with art in the
• 1:35:49
  market and if anyone in the marketing department Adele VRT
• 1:35:53
  market are listening sponsorship opportunities are still very
• 1:35:57
  much available but. They pay for nothing.
• 1:36:00
  It's a, it's a, it's, it's just a crack in what they produce is
• 1:36:03
  absolutely fantastic, so. That's one.
• 1:36:06
  Number two, was that tasting with Mark Davidson?
• 1:36:09
  I think you mentioned him earlier on.
• 1:36:10
  Yeah, we did, yeah. Yeah, and he did this some brawa
• 1:36:13
  slash Clyde leash tasting with the guy who'd written the book
• 1:36:17
  on on brawa and actually the whiskey, the, I mean, there was
• 1:36:23
  some real Unicorn things in there.
• 1:36:26
  The really old Brawa that was really young.
• 1:36:28
  The 72 Brawa both tasted like silage and wet hay in a good
• 1:36:34
  way, I think, but like in a good way.
• 1:36:37
  He had a really dramatic crazy whiskeys, but actually Kleinage
• 1:36:40
  14, they put in the lineup blind.
• 1:36:42
  Done it again. It's done it again.
• 1:36:46
  Yeah, Fantastic. It's had a few mentions.
• 1:36:49
  Fantastic. And I am not a basher of big
• 1:36:53
  companies. And yeah, they've spoke about
• 1:36:56
  people pissing me off. They actually have done that
• 1:36:58
  plenty of times over the years, but also done a lot of amazing,
• 1:37:01
  great things in the industry. What, what, what?
• 1:37:04
  Yeah. And what is it about Client
• 1:37:05
  Leash 14 specifically? Because we've heard so many
• 1:37:08
  other people have mentioned well, it and talked about it and
• 1:37:11
  but what is it for you that you know?
• 1:37:13
  Well, it's, it's, it's the spirit and and you know, that
• 1:37:17
  pineapple fruitiness that is there and just as clarity of
• 1:37:21
  crowd pleasing fruitiness, but with an intensity that is just
• 1:37:25
  so bright and Moorish and delicious.
• 1:37:27
  Absolutely great. I mean, it's, it's the spirit.
• 1:37:29
  There was also an incredible 9 year old Adelphi bottling that
• 1:37:32
  they had that was just fantastic as well.
• 1:37:34
  But I, I absolutely love it when because I get texts all the time
• 1:37:40
  from people who, you know, aunties and I need to buy a
• 1:37:43
  bottle of whiskey quickly. What can you recommend something
• 1:37:46
  maybe in Waitrose or wherever? Yeah.
• 1:37:48
  And to be able to recommend something cool and freely
• 1:37:50
  available, you can drink time after time.
• 1:37:52
  And so important. Yeah.
• 1:37:53
  So. What?
• 1:37:54
  What? What?
• 1:37:54
  I mean, there's a bottle. I claim you.
• 1:37:55
  You bought a bottle recently? Yeah, bottle on Amazon, 45 lbs
• 1:38:00
  Yeah. I had that in here on Friday
• 1:38:01
  afternoon. Yeah, I had that in here on
• 1:38:03
  Friday because I'm, I'll be honest, it's three people now.
• 1:38:08
  You're the third person that's made this year that's put in
• 1:38:10
  there what, 3 drams, Ally Reynolds, Jake Ad Cook and
• 1:38:21
  you're not yourself. And I, I want to try it and like
• 1:38:25
  it and really, really like it. And I wonder maybe it'd just be
• 1:38:28
  built up so much in my head that I'd put this drum in front of me
• 1:38:30
  and it maybe I'm building up too much.
• 1:38:33
  I sat down on Friday and it's probably the most enjoyable
• 1:38:35
  drama that I've had where I just sat there.
• 1:38:37
  So I'm just going to try and really understand what makes
• 1:38:41
  people because, well, there's a waxiness to it as well.
• 1:38:43
  Oh yeah, there is. Yeah.
• 1:38:44
  I should have. Waxiness is a thing that yeah,
• 1:38:47
  we can, yeah. Right, brilliant and drama #3.
• 1:38:52
  So I can't say the name of the distillery.
• 1:38:56
  Can you say the region? It was a Campbell town.
• 1:39:00
  Ministry, Campbelltown. Ministry Campbelltown, but I was
• 1:39:02
  involved in this quite protracted deal, private deal of
• 1:39:08
  this case of really rare Campbelltown whiskey.
• 1:39:12
  It was a closed distillery right from Campbelltown, so that dates
• 1:39:16
  are going back a long way and. We because the ones that are
• 1:39:20
  open have been open for a while. Yeah, We use a specialist
• 1:39:23
  shipper to get this case of whiskey to the end buyer
• 1:39:28
  somewhere far away. And I got this phone call or
• 1:39:33
  yeah, yeah, it was a phone call when I was in Morocco of all
• 1:39:35
  places. And there was a problem.
• 1:39:39
  And basically they put this case of whiskey on one pallet and
• 1:39:43
  then someone had knocked the case of whiskey over.
• 1:39:46
  It's a case of 6 and and one of the bottles leaked.
• 1:39:51
  But you're talking about a lot of value per bottle and you've
• 1:39:55
  gone from a fill level that's good to a fill level that's down
• 1:39:58
  here. And I can't in good face just
• 1:40:00
  carry on with that shipment. And it was horrible and
• 1:40:04
  stressful and there was a lot of compromise that had to happen in
• 1:40:08
  terms of the price. But I actually went down to this
• 1:40:12
  Muppets warehouse down in London and and there was all like it.
• 1:40:17
  They were specialist shipper of rare stuff, rare booze.
• 1:40:21
  And there, there was like this cockney geezer it was, I was
• 1:40:24
  going to London. And he was like, you see where
• 1:40:27
  that case of Don Perignon 1958 is.
• 1:40:31
  And like, it was like just this ridiculously rare stuff all
• 1:40:35
  around with people who just like didn't know what it was like.
• 1:40:40
  Hence this utterly replaceable case of whiskey went over.
• 1:40:44
  So anyway, I had to inspect it, take some photos so we could
• 1:40:48
  sort out the, the compromise on price, but the bottle had leaked
• 1:40:52
  to the extent that the outside of it was wet and I could run my
• 1:40:58
  finger up it and lick it and kind of and it was sick.
• 1:41:04
  You know, the the character of those closed Campbelltown
• 1:41:07
  distilleries is extremely interesting point because the
• 1:41:10
  reason for the Campbelltown crash is debated about.
• 1:41:13
  And and one of the reasons they say is that they weren't making
• 1:41:16
  particularly good whiskey. And certainly the prices of
• 1:41:19
  people were paid for Kemble Town whiskey were way lower than
• 1:41:22
  other places. So it had that reputation that
• 1:41:25
  is real. But this stuff tastes good,
• 1:41:30
  smell tastes really good, heavy Sherry cast, you know, like
• 1:41:32
  obviously a piece of whiskey, you know, quite briny, all that
• 1:41:35
  type of stuff. And it was just so so so
• 1:41:39
  tantalizing to try that. So what, 3 drams?
• 1:41:42
  I suppose that's the one I would I would like to taste properly.
• 1:41:45
  Wow. Thank you.
• 1:41:46
  So much. That's the story.
• 1:41:47
  Thank you. I'm going to say one last myth.
• 1:41:50
  Campbelltown crash. They're not special.
• 1:41:54
  Like this is how history, the history that we're taught is
• 1:41:58
  what we end up with when we, when the single malt whiskey
• 1:42:02
  explosion happened, the Campbelltown crash was like the
• 1:42:06
  last crash, you could say, but they're not special.
• 1:42:10
  And it wasn't unusual. And that happened to other
• 1:42:12
  places and all the time. So immediately after 1823, the
• 1:42:15
  number of distilleries do that and then they go down to that
• 1:42:18
  again. Perthshire had more distilleries
• 1:42:22
  in Campbelltown that disappeared.
• 1:42:24
  Aberdeen had a lot, well, not lots of distilleries, but all
• 1:42:27
  their distilleries disappeared. So it it's, it's multi
• 1:42:32
  factorial. I want to do more research on
• 1:42:34
  it, but this kind of big mystery of the Campbelltown crash, it
• 1:42:39
  happens all the IT doesn't happen all the time, but it's.
• 1:42:41
  And it was exclusive. As well but yeah, but you know
• 1:42:45
  there's been plenty of whiskey regions, but there's never been
• 1:42:48
  a whiskey Kingdom like 5 right. But anyway, Arthur, how can how
• 1:42:52
  can people how can people find out about the motley spirit
• 1:42:55
  agency? How can people keep a keep up to
• 1:42:57
  date keep up the speed of what you're doing?
• 1:42:59
  What's your socials? What people are?
• 1:43:00
  Want to reach out? Well, I, I put stuff out on
• 1:43:05
  Instagram and I I suppose my worky updates are a bit more on
• 1:43:09
  LinkedIn, but honestly, that side of my business, you kind of
• 1:43:12
  have to work in the shadows a bit like some Batman or
• 1:43:15
  something. You know, it's, it's, you know,
• 1:43:17
  the clients are it's all confidential and stuff that
• 1:43:21
  brands would have talked to me. Delighted to have initial chats
• 1:43:23
  that don't cost you anything. But yeah, feel free to get in
• 1:43:25
  touch. But maybe for this audience, if
• 1:43:28
  you want to go a bit deeper into history and things like that and
• 1:43:31
  hear from Dave Broome, like who is just an amazing minded, like
• 1:43:34
  what a pleasure to work with him as a friend, then Liquid and
• 1:43:38
  Aquarian on YouTube. On YouTube.
• 1:43:39
  Brilliant. You need to get on it.
• 1:43:41
  You need to get. On it.
• 1:43:42
  No, definitely. Well, listen, Arthur, thank you
• 1:43:44
  so much for coming on. Thank you so much for everyone
• 1:43:46
  for staying tuned. Thank you so much for Arthur for
• 1:43:48
  coming in. Absolutely fascinating,
• 1:43:49
  brilliant, great whiskey stories.
• 1:43:51
  Thank you so much for coming out Absolutely a pleasure.
• 1:43:53
  Keep an eye on the socials, keep an eye on what's going on.
• 1:43:55
  We've sold out our our whiskey. Big birthday bash hanging, sell
• 1:43:59
  out Uno man. Sold out.
• 1:44:00
  Loads and loads of fun things going on, so if you have got
• 1:44:04
  tickets for that, it's going to be a great night.
• 1:44:05
  Look forward to seeing you all there.
• 1:44:07
  Thank you very much. All the very best and thank you
• 1:44:09
  to Arthur once again for coming on Slunge Bar Cheers Slunge,
• 1:44:11
  cheers.