Ian Lowe is a brand ambassador and Master Blender for Johnnie Walker, part of the UDL Group. A cheerful, straight-shooting guy, he says he’s hopeless at golf and has confessed to a taste for Australian wine. He’s still to open a mixed case of Dalwhinnie wines from the Victorian Pyrenees which he swapped with winemaker David Jones for a stash of the Dalwhinnie malt, another UDL brand. Ian Lowe’s occasional visits to Australia present an ideal opportunity to discuss what the Scots are doing to further and protect their greatest export, single malt whisky. In this interview, Ian Lowe discusses several key factors behind the quality of single malt whisky, from the water, to the grain, the modern use of peat and the regeneration of oak casks now considered standard in whisky production. We’ve heard that the Japanese have used it for their own whisky and we’ve heard about its unique quality. But what’s so special about Scottish water? The most famous water for Scotch whisky comes from one river, the River Spey, which provides the water for around thirty distilleries. To be allowed to put the name of the famous Speyside on your label is a strong indication of quality, recognised over 100 years ago. It’s quite a claim, but the environmentalists say the Spey has the purest water in the whole of Europe. It’s a fast-flowing river with the softest water of all. It also has a high mineral quality and its softness is greatly influenced by snowfalls. How well is the Speyside appellation protected? Sometimes the distilleries stretch the boundaries of the River Spey to an unbelievable level. At UDL we’re quite open with this, especially for a famous single malt of ours, the Dalwhinnie, which we refer to as a ‘nominal Speyside malt’. The spring, named the ‘whinnie’ leads into the mouth of the Spey, is around 70-80 miles down water from most of the distilleries, which is pushing the bottle a bit. For the real McCoy, you’re looking at the Cardhus of this world, which feed directly off the Spey; but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the Dalwhinnie. I agree. But how do you protect the rivers from the waste materials of whisky production? It’s not a good idea to release the wastes from distillation into the river system, but the temptation to do it is literally on your doorstep. We have a very complicated and expensive system of piping the effluent well away from the water catchments where it is literally released straight into the ground. Even then they make sure there are no toxic effects on the ground. Nothing gets back into the rivers. What are you doing to police the water quality? We will stop at nothing to ensure the purity of our water; it is absolutely essential. Our river waters are protected by private environmental managers who do nothing else than analyse water and also by a River Purification Board of civil servants, who do exactly the same thing. How do the waters from different parts of Scotland influence the taste of malt whisky? The best example of that is to take the water supply of the Isle of Islay. The entire island is more or less situated on a peat bog, so all of the spring waters that flow into its river supplies travel across peat. The water we use for whisky is not treated in any way and is actually coloured brown, with a strong smoky influence from the bog itself. They’ve now done something to the water used for domestic supplies, for although it was okay for the local inhabitants, sophisticated American travelers were always jumping up and down and asking if there was something wrong with it. It’s a strange and very cold place, Islay, and the vast majority of the local population are very fond of their home product. UDL had a mini riot on the island when we decided not to continue bottling the single malt from the village of Caol Ila. Our ‘Classic Six’ malts from different parts of Scotland could only include one from Islay and we correctly chose Lagavulin. It was like the uprising of the clans all over again when the inhabitants of Caol Ila put together a petition signed by every inhabitant of the village – no matter how young or how old – and sent it to the company chairman. So today Caol Ila is now bottled on the island and is still sold to the happy citizens of the village from their tourist information centre. How does your cold, wet climate affect grain quality? We don’t have good and bad years as with grapes and we don’t need to be in a hot climate. The misconception is that grain is affected by our climate. The barley we buy is still quite damp and heavy and the yields are the same every year. Our crops are unaffected by heavy rains and if we have really excessive rainfalls in summer, the crop would simply be more moist and heavier and therefore more expensive to buy. This factor greatly helps the Scotch industry maintain the consistency of our product from year to year. As far as whisky is concerned, barley is barley is barley, in terms of taste and flavour. There’s no shortage of quality grain for malt whisky in Scotland. How is peat used more precisely today in the malting process? It’s worth mentioning that the whisky industry isn’t about to exhaust Scotland’s peat supplies. Scotland has extensive peat bogs, particularly in the islands and we only use about 10% of the peat dug from the ground. The other 90% is used by gardening people. Today the influence of peat smoke on whisky is dealt with in a very modern and efficient way, since most of drying of barley uses a modern fuel in tandem with peat. These days there are two burners under the floors of the malting kilns. One is the main drying burner which uses oil or electricity, depending on whatever is available in area. The other is the peat burner, whose use is monitored to provide precisely the correct level of peat influence on the malt. Nowadays we have the technology to measure the influence of smoke phenolics, so we can make the influence of smoke more consistent and specify the amount of smoke each batch receives with precise tonnages of peat. An interesting place to see this in operation is Islay, because all the malting for all the distillers, including our rivals, is done by us. If you look at the taste spectrums of the Islay malts, Laphroig is the lightest and Lagavulin the heaviest. On a Monday morning the guy operating the malting kiln will begin firing up the malts with his week’s work in front of him. On Monday he might be working on malt for Laphroaig, using the peat burner sparingly in the drying process. But by Wednesday he might be on Lagavulin and firing the burner more often. Either way, he has total control. It’s not as romantic as the old-fashioned approach, but it’s producing the same result and controlling it. How faithfully are the makers of single malt adhering to their traditional methods of distillation? Nothing will change with distillation and quite rightly so. There’s a lot of romanticism involved in the making of Scotch whisky, but although it’s been scientifically proven that differently shaped stills produce different spirits, it’s not something we can measure. It’s really a combination of traditions and superstition that leads people to replace stills exactly, even with the same patches and indentations. They’re terror-stricken about not getting them precisely the same in case they alter the outcome. It’s easier to follow if we consider the neck of a still. If it’s wide, the vapours will pass straight through the neck, but if it has a tight angle there will be a lot of entrapment and reflux, whereby the vapour doesn’t flow through, but goes back into a strongly alcoholic liquid form and runs back down the neck into the still. That sort of thing can’t be measured, but we’ve known from the beginning that it happens. Think about the Speyside, which has the highest concentration of distilleries and where you can spit from one to another and wherethey all use the same barley, the same water and essentially the same process, they still provide us with different single malts because the shapes of their stills are very different. Thank God for that, for it allows the single malt industry to be individual and acts as a tremendous plus for master blenders to create blends which are far more complex than for any other spirit. Clearly it’s crucial to mature single malt in quality oak casks. Have there been any developments in the way oak is handled by the whisky industry? There’s been something of a revolution in our use of oak over the last ten years, thanks to a group of guys referred to in our company as ‘cask doctors’, headed by the recently retired Dr John Philp. He’s obsessed by oak and he’s credited with the invention of the rejuvenation of wooden casks, a process now used throughout the industry. We now fire the inside of the casks to remove the crust-like char content that builds up inside of the staves of any cask containing spirit, then burn the inside of the cask down precisely to the optimal age and char content for each spirit. Provided we look after the outside of the staves of the cask, they will last to infinity with consistent results. In the old days coopers had to examine the cask, not only for the external wear and tear on the staves, but also to ensure that this char had not built up to a level at which it impairs the nose of the spirit. Many times I’ve seen examples of what it’s like – a very unpleasant, foreign kind of charry wood taste. At our Glasgow plant we have in excess of 150,000 casks, but now we don’t really need much new wood at all. So we’ve also one eye on the financial matters and another eye very much these days on environmental issues, since nobody wants to be the guy responsible for cutting down forests. We buy Spanish sherry and American bourbon casks in all sizes up to 600 litres, but only use around 5% of sherry wood for its taste, usually to sweeten and mellow blends and to take out some of the fire. Are you still trying to create new blends for different markets? We recently developed Johnnie Walker Gold Label, an interesting blend created to appeal directly to the Japanese palate. Our Japanese colleagues came up with two things: the Japanese are kind of sweet-toothed but not in a sugary way, more in a kind of bittersweet manner. So we doubled the sherry cask content. They also decided the Japanese liked their whisky decidedly spicy, so they increased the percentage from Speyside, reducing a fraction of the Islay. Gold Label has since become so popular it’s sold all over the place.
