The KOTQ

Brother Bop was kind enough to assign me to select 5 active distilleries that the KOTQ has never tasted that I would like future fir en tighes (hosts) to consider for an upcoming meeting in 2o10.  One of the things I found is this appearance of debate within Scotland of bringing single malts to more people with fancy drink recipes and slick websites that would appeal to a younger audience vs. the classic “here’s your single malt, open it, drink it neat, seal it… repeat”.

Here is my 5 (with some slight edits from the temporary list I had at the meeting – didn’t finish because our site was down…)

1 –Glenglassaugh – Speyside – This distillery closed for 22 years 1986 – 2008 but has reopened and still has an impressive, albeit limited availability, vertical lineup as well as an exciting new spirit dubbed “The Spirit Drink that dare not speak its name”.  The Spirit Drink cannot be called scotch whisky because it was bottled before it had aged the requisite 3 years… something for us to consider… a single malt < 3 yrs old… what is it like?  Should we drink it with a mixer (blasphemy?)

2 – Isle of Jura – Jura – By far my favorite site with one of the best embedded videos of a Scotch purist facing off with a French mixologist debating the merits of true scotch whisky drinking vs. making it more “accessible” to the masses (mixing / etc.)  I had failed to recognize Brother Tao’s prior posting of this phenomenal short but if you haven’t seen it, check out  – http://www.isleofjura.com/richardandcolin/detail.cfm?contentid=349   Also, interesting fact – Jura has roughly 30x more deer than people on the island… The 16yr expression is their bread and butter but they have some nice differentiation/variation as well…. check them out!

3 –  Tomatin – Northern Highland – Huge producer – >5MM litres per year… and yet we’ve never had their spirit flow down our collective palates or uttered a kind description of the body of this fine whisky.  Additionally, they’ve been owned by the Japanese since 1985 and I’m curious to know if they’ve influenced the process at all, whether it be from an economic / political / or process point of view.  Additionally, given their size, they have nice vertical potential from an expression perspective.

4 – Arran – Isle of Arran (Lochranza) – Distillery opened in 1995 and has done some rather interesting things… including some traditional and avant garde finishings to their main expression – 10yr.   I really debated adding this one because they do promote recipes on their site that would involve mixing the 10yr with other liquids, but they have a nice lineup and we have some finishing fans (see Tao, Balgum, etc.)

5 – Tomintoul – Speyside – Another very large producer – > 3MM liters / year and a nice product mix.  Also, their claim to fame is the World’s Largest Whisky Bottle (per Guiness  Book of Records) – 5 ft tall and the equivalent of 150 std bottles (750ml),…. Quite a number of their products are available locally, which was a key factor as I started to get further down the list.  There were a number of others that were like 5b – 5n but I picked this distillery because it could be easily rotated in and has a nice history we could research further.

Slainte!  I’m getting parched just writing this….

One of the missions of our KOTQ website is to not only facilitate knowledge about single malt scotch but to make it personal and facilitate decision making around single malt purchases for group or individual enjoyment. Availability may be the ultimate factor in whether or not most of us even have a dram of certain single malts. Therefore, I have found it important to be able to identify rarer single malts using our distillery filter so that, throughout our walks of life, we might better sieze opportunities to sample rare single malts; be it from a retail shelf or a fine restaurant’s spirits menu.

The flip side of the coin is true as well. Our distillery filter should also be able to highlight those distilleries which are active and commonly available vs. active and with a small capacity thereby making those bottlings potentially harder to come by. Rarity can also be a factor in whether or not you opportunisticly buy an independent bottling or patiently wait for the “official” distillery bottling to show up at your local Binny’s.

So, in order to best understand the data, I thought you would need to know what the industry definitions were for the operational statuses in our database. These operating statuses often correlate to rarity or at least would be a component in a distillery filter setting you specify in trying to understand if that bottle you saw/see at Binny’s is rare enough to invest in. These operational statuses are written in my words but follow closely the statuses used by the annual Malt Whisky Yearbook. There are essentially two categories of operations: “Active” and “Not Active”. I have provided three classes of status within each of these two categories:

1. Active: fully operational distillery producing malt for its various bottling and blending purposes
2. Building Stock: new distillery which has commenced a continuous production of spirit but is too new to have matured any whisky for active status
3. Mothballed: temporary stoppage of production. Can recommence production quickly, if needed, to match demand. Relatively common practice in the industry, however, some mothballed distilleries never make it “off the mat” and do end up dismantled.

1. Stills Removed: refers to sets of stills, that created their own brand of single malt, that existed entirely inside of another’s distillery. Distilleries with this status, despite having their own distillery brand name, never had their “own distillery” or distillery building
2. Dismantled: distillation equipment removed, but the exterior building remains; somehow re-purposed. Although sometimes continuing to be used within the scope of the whisky industry (warehouse, maltings, visitor center, museum) usually it’s to be used outside the scope of the whisky industry entirely (condo, restaurant, studio, live music venue, etc.)
3. Demolished: entire building, and all of its contents, are destroyed and are no more

For those of you who missed it here’s the Forge Club menu that was enjoyed at our 09Q4 meeting. For those who were there enjoy the reminder!

Here is our lineup for 10Q1:

Port Charlotte 7
Glencadam 15
Fettercairn 26
The Macallan 17 Private Edition
Linkwood 17 1990 Cask Strength

If you’ve played with the new Distillery Filter much you will have noticed that one of the “Operational Statuses” for the distilleries is “Building Stock”. As I look out on the single malt landscape over the last 10 years and then turn and look into the next 10 years, one of the exciting things that I see is the onset of brand new distilleries producing single malts. As you know, however, one of the requirements for a spirit to be scotch is that it must age a minimum of 3 years. Yet, as you also know, standard single malts, which are mature enough for discriminating palattes, are typically aged 10 or 12 years. So, these new distilleries have a challenge of establishing a brand yet telling their customers not to show up with their money for 10 years. This is why I have included the “building stock” operational status. Until they’ve released that first standard distillery bottling at around 10 or 12 years I will not be updating their status to “Active” as they are literally building up their stocks for bottlings far down the road. Little did we know that single malts were such a “young man’s game”!

Since there are quite a few of them I wanted to provide a summary to perhaps picque your interest some in these new arrivals on the single malt scene. Here are the ones that I believe are, in fact, building stocks and are real, serious, and viable distilleries that will be showing up on our radars in 5-10 years, you can take a look at these new operations as well as some less-firm distillery projects here:

– Kilchoman an Islay
Owned by the Kilchoman Distillery Co Ltd, the distillery was built and started producing spirits in 2005. As seen in my previous post, Kilchoman is an “artisan” distillery using locally grown ingredients from their own farmland. They are striving to produce the new signature taste of Islay by delivering a highly charactered single malt. You can see more about them here.

– Port Charlotte an Islay
Owned by the Bruichladdich Distillery Co, who is introducing their new brand with the heavily-peated PCx series of bottlings, the distillery is in the process of becoming much more than a brand extension of Bruichladdich. The new Port Charlotte distillery is sometimes referred to as the “Phoenix distillery” as it is currently in the rebuilding process using the old Lochindaal distillery building and the stills from the Inverleven distillery.

– Abhainn Dearg a Highlands Island
Owned by Mark Tayburn, the distillery was built and started producing spirits in 2009. This distillery, located on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, is particularly exciting I think because it is a brand new “Island malt” from a new isle. The Isle of Lewis and Harris is west of Skye and Abhainn Dearg will be the westernmost distillery in Scotland. You can see more about them here.

– Daftmill an Eastern Highland
Owned by Francis and Ian Cuthbert, the distillery was built and started producting spirit in 2005. Daftmill will easily be the smallest distillery in Scotland, producing a mere 20,000 litres/yr, and is practically a “micro-brewery”. I think the Eastern Highlands are an interesting region and one that the KOTQ should really know more about than our collective “Glen Garioch experience” so it is exciting to see a brand new Eastern Highland on the scene. You can see more about them here.

– Glengyle / Kilkerran a Campbeltown
Owned by J & A Mitchell, the distillery was revived and started producing spirits in 2004. Glengyle is part of the Springbank family of distilleries but is its own operation and enterprise. I believe it will be producing a single malt under the brand name of Kilkerran. You can see more about them here.

– Roseisle a Speyside
Owned by Diageo, Roseisle is a huge distillery and the first large one built in Scotland since the 1970s. The distillery was built and started producing spirits in 2009 and, I believe, will mostly be used to supply Diageo’s blended scotch whiskies.

One last thing before I leave this topic, some of you may remember some news or talk about a new distillery opening on Shetland, an island north of the Orkney Islands, called Blackwood. Unfortunately, the news is not as good on this front as it appears that the Blackwood distillery is no more and there are no known plans to revive it.