Speyside Whiskey

DRINKING OUR WAY THROUGH THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

It’s the sixth shot in a row at the second Whiskey establishment we visited that day. My memory starts to betray me. Was the first 15-year-old Scotch better than the third 12-year-old Chery-barrel shot we had at the first distillery… or was it the other way around? And how do you spell “Kask”? (or was it “Cask”?) And where is the nirest batrum? end Y’s me f&#$Ing heD sO   sp iNi n G?

A few months earlier

I always had Scotland somewhere vague on my wish list. Not low enough to forget nor high enough to execute. Just one of those middle-ground annoying to-do tasks that keep on hanging there forever. Maybe it was “Trainspotting” or “Local Hero,” or perhaps “Braveheart”? who knows. So, when the opportunity arose to join a band of alcohol-friendly group of “mates” for a distillery tour of Scotland, I immediately said, “Yay!”

Those who have been following my blog will know by now that I am not a person to be shy about challenges. I climbed Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru and dived into the depths of Tubbataha Reef and the dark Cenotes of Tulum. I hiked through the deepest canyons and drove on top of the world’s highest paved road. This one, however, would be a different affair – a regal excursion worthy of the true pampered connoisseurs. Organized as a birthday celebration of one of my San Francisco-based friends, our journey to Scotland would be all gains with no pains. A middle-aged booze cruise in the Scottish Northeastern Highlands.

Scottish welcome

Not having to organize anything but myself (I honestly didn’t even bother reading the itinerary), I delayed my packing to the very last minute. Reading about the Scottish weather and having gone myself through a summer of cold and rain in Ireland, I crammed a coat, an umbrella, and lots of warm clothing into my little trolly. I also took two T-shirts, just in case. Global warming, you know.

I knew something was off when I landed into a surprisingly sunny and very warm Edinburgh evening. Taking off my coat, I wished I didn’t pack those damn T-shirts so deep inside my luggage. Missing one stop and having to backtrack a kilometer by foot to our city-center hotel, I arrived at the esteemed five-star check-in facility drenched in sweat and devoid of any demeanor of respectableness.

After a nice shower and a passable Indian dinner, I hit bed and immediately fall into sweet dreams of gray cloudy skies and country roads covered in mist, where fine Scottish distilleries hide behind a curtain of fog and drizzle.

Hello, I am Mackenzie Dalrymple

I have no idea how a person who had to grow up being called that name can harbor any affection for family and country. Nevertheless, Mackenzie Dalrymple (Mac for short) is very vocal about his love for Bonny Scotland. He also despises his immediate southern neighbors, which really go hand in hand with these parts of northern Great Britain. Mac and his pals (most Scotsmen, if you ask him) have continuously tried to part ways from the UK mothership, but the “English establishment” has always managed to foil the “will of the Scotts.” I don’t buy into the conspiracy theories, but Mac tells them with such oratory brilliance I don’t mind listening to his rants. You can hear about some of them yourself in his well-delivered TED talk.

Never-minding the bollocks, we are all fortunate to have Mac doubling up as both Whiskey tour guide and designated driver. No, we didn’t dare drive ourselves. Though I did ride India on a motorcycle, driving 100% sh**-faced on narrow Scottish roads is something even a stupid guy like me instinctively understood to be a bad idea. As we go out of Edinburgh, crossing the wide Firth of Forth on our way north, I look left to observe the mighty Forth Bridge – a gleaming red masterpiece of Victorian engineering. I notice that, indeed, it’s shining and not just metaphorically. The full rays of the sun are upon it. You guessed it. It’s 55⁰ North, and the sky is blue with no clouds in sight. We ask Mac to turn on the AC.

Highland is a relative term

We stop a couple of hours’ drive later at the Dalwhinnie Distillery, which prides itself on being the world’s highest Scotch Whiskey distillery. Small specks of unmelted June snow still cover parts of the surrounding hills as we approach the brimming, squeaky-clean white building. The Dalwhinnie tour guide is as serene as the landscape around us, fitting the height and title. She explains the elevated location was selected for the purity of the waters of a nearby spring whose name sounds in her Scottish accent like “Lochan-Doire-Uaine” or something like that. The other reason for the location is the peat soil, which the locals use to dry the barley during the whiskey production process, giving it a slightly smokey taste.

All in all, locals around here don’t call their national drink Scotch. This they leave to foreigners (English and Welsh ARE foreigners). In Scotland, Scotch is called Whiskey, or as the local accent would have it – Whheeeshkeeey. As we enter the main hall, I look at the plaque left of the main entrance. It says: “Founded in 1894, elevation 1,154ft (352m)”. Oh well, I guess “Highland” is a relative term.

Making Whiskey

In short:

1. Get Barley, get good water.
2. Mix both in a warm bath for about 48 hours until the barley starts to sprout.
3. Dry the barley to stop the sprouting process. Use warm air or burn peat for an extra smokey flavor.
4. Grind the barley into grist, and move the flour-like substance into another container. Add water. Add yeast.
5. Warm to 70⁰ Centigrade, and let the muck ferment for about 72 hours.

Great! You now have a 6-8% alcohol, unfiltered beer, which the locals call “wash”

6. Move the wash into a cool-looking giant copper beaker.
7. Heat the beaker, bringing its content close to boiling. The shape of the container allows the vapor to pass over the neck of the still into a condenser made of a large copper coil immersed in cold running water.
8. Discard both the volatile compounds of the resulting liquid, which distill off first, as well as the final oily residues.

Congrats! You just made a Low Wine containing 20% alcohol.

9. Repeat the distillation process.
10. Take the center part of the transparent twice-distilled liquor, containing about 63-70% alcohol. This one is called “Spirit”.
11. Pour into large Oak Barrels, preferably ones that have been used to age Bourbon in the US.
12. Wait a few minutes to absorb the irony of Scotch making process being dependent on Tennessee moonshining.

9. Wait for anything between 3 to 21 years. Use that time to invent a marketing story about tradition, pure water springs, and other blah, blah. Build a visitors center.
10. Pour into numbered bottles.
11. Sell at ridiculous prices.

Short, short version:

1. Make beer
2. Distil beer
3. Invent a cool story, and market the hell out of it

Time for a drink

We sit down at a nice oak table. In front of each one of us lies an arrangement of six whiskey glasses that don’t look like Whiskey glasses at all, a small pipet, a jug of water, and six carefully laid down pieces of chocolate. Chocolate and Whiskey?! Yes. apparently, the two go like whine and cheese. Who knew?

We get a brief on each of the whiskies we are about to empty and a recommendation to add a drop of water or two to intensify the scent and flavor. We’re quite surprised to find out that a single drop of water can make such a difference. It does. I ain’t kidding.

The whole thing feels a bit like a Burgundy Grand Cru wine testing, only this time, I can’t remember which one of the glasses I liked best. We wobble out and climb laboriously back into our minibus, where Mac awaits us with yet another tale of Highland Bravehearts.

We continue our north journey along a fast-flowing river called Spey. While important for Atlantic Salmon, what makes Spey famous is Whiskey. The area, known as Speyside, has the greatest number of distilleries of any of the whisky-producing areas of Scotland, roughly around 50 distilleries, including the two best-selling single malts in the world, Glenlivet and Glenfiddich. Is it the pure water of the Spey River? The mild northern climate? proximity to Atlantic ports? Who knows. What is certain is that close to half of all Scottish Whiskey is made here, and we’re about to taste quite a lot of it in the next three days.

Granytown

We reach our Bed and Breakfast destination at Grantown-on-Spey at around 8 p.m. The sun is still high in the middle of the blue cloudless skies, but time is running out. Places here close early. We reach our dinner destination just before the “last call” at the kitchen. I look at the menu and can’t help chuckling when I see “Chicken Whiskey” on the menu. Reminded of that famous recipe (attached here in Hebrew, couldn’t find the English original), I order it immediately. Scotland is not famous for its food, and my Chicken Whiskey did nothing to change that. We get back to our B&B at around 10 p.m. and walk around to get the dinner down the pipes for another hour until it gets dark around 11.

We all meet up for breakfast the following morning. One of our team members complains about a headache. At least the B&B place is nice, full of old charm, and covered with flowers in full bloom. Mac is urging us into the minibus. We have two distilleries to cover today, and time is running out.

We start our day at the Speyside Cooperage, where a team of well-built lads are busy fixing old Whiskey barrels for reuse. They break down old Oak cassettes, replace wooden elements, fix whatever can be fixed, and pull everything back together again. This is a laborious job done with 19th-century tools and machinery. None of the employees has a gram of overweight, and no wonder. This menial job is not for the couch potatoes. What is surprising, though, is the pace. The team buzzes around like a beehive on amphetamines. The reason is textbook Capitalism – each one of the employees is compensated by the number of barrels they fix.

Time for another drink

Coming out of the cooperage feeling a little exhausted, we head to the nearest distillery, Cardhu. We get the obvious tour and can’t help but notice that it is exactly the same as the one we had the day before. Next, we down a six-pack of Whiskey shots (don’t ask me which one was better) and head to the next Distillery. We dismount at Strathisla, one person short. Our friend with the headache took a pass as we headed to the tour.

We listened to the usual explanations and understood that all the distilleries use the same barley, the same water, and the same industrial process, regardless of their regal names and titles. The only real difference between one Whiskey and another all boils down to aging. Different tastes and colors are all (or almost all) the result of the chosen barrels and the aging time. Some types go through one barrel. Others through two or even three different casks of different materials and treatments.

So, there you have it. The variance between $50 Single Malt and $1,500 Scotch is $3 worth of a barrel. Knowing that you can now enjoy your “unique,” “rare,” “special,” “one of a kind,” hideously expensive bottle at ease.

When we arrive back at our nightly location, all woozy and hungover, I discover a bottle of fine Scotch for which I paid a handsome fee of 100 Pounds Sterling. I have no idea where I bought it, as the name isn’t Cardhu or Strathisla. Needless to say, I know nothing about its taste or characteristics. I can only hope I wasn’t too drunk when I picked it up. It still stands sealed inside my liquor cabinet. One day I might give it a try.

The following morning

The skies are lightened in pitch-perfect blue, and the sun shines warmly as we wake the following morning in surprisingly great shape. That is, nine of us do. Our friend with a headache just tested positive for Corona. We do the friendly thing and, without further ado, abandon him right there on the spot. True, he has been part of the gang for the better part of 40 years, but that was before COVID.

Today we’re going extra royal as we visit the Lochnagar (Pronounced Loch-nagarrrr with loud and rolling Scottish Rrrr) distillery. Given its location right next to The Royal Family’s Highland retreat at Balmoral Palace, it should not come as a shock if I told you the place produced Her late Majesty’s preferred Scotch. Not that Lochnagar does anything special to merit the title. The process is indeed exactly the same as all the other Speyside distilleries we visited so far. However, I should point out that their tour guide (whose name I can’t remember having gone through six Whiskey tastings) invests extra energy and passion in the delivery of the tired old spiel. One can only imagine him “Going Postal” every 100 of exactly the same tours.

Following the customary six glasses, we slowly zigzag our way to the palace nearby for a tour of the esteemed establishment and its extensive gardens. I can sum it up in the immortal words of Mel Brooks’ King Louis XVI – “It’s good to be the king!”. I take lots of photos to WhatsApp to my family back home as well as to remind myself of the place when I sober up.

Time for a summary (and a detox)

We’ve been to Scotland for the better part of five days now and have seen no cloud, no fog, so slit, rain, shower, drizzle, spray, torrent, deluge, downpour, or any other weather pattern that has made this place famous around the world for depression and emigration. Mac says we’re lucky, as such a dry spell happens only once every couple of years. As a Levantine used to sun and heat, I’m kind of disappointed. In the bright sunlight, the monotonous scenery of rolling green hills (which euphemistically are called “mountains”) looks bland and uninteresting. Nothing like the dramatic, mysterious, and full of malice scenes from countless detective TV series and movies (Skyfall, anyone?).

Not feeling too lucky about the weather, we head back south. Mac on the wheel of the minibus, and the rest of us huddled in the back, minding our own business. As I mentioned before, our guide has TED credentials which he now puts into full use delivering story after story with panache and flamboyance that turns even the most moronic folk tales into stories of drama and suspense. What can we say? The guy’s got talent, which makes us all wonder why on earth he put up with chauffeuring a bunch of annoying drunkards. Oh well, I guess being a TED celebrity doesn’t help you pay the bills.

As we drive up Britain’s highest public road (don’t get all worked up now. It’s only 670 meters above sea level), I can’t help but wonder:

1. What’s the big deal with Whiskey?
2. What’s the big deal with Scottland?
3. What should my next to-do line item be?

My head still spins slightly as I dive into a sweet midday slumber while our vehicle rocks its way downwards toward Edinburgh.