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Deciphering Your Older Spirits…
On my recent trip to Norway, I was graciously hosted by our importer, a new friend of mine, Jon Bertelsen.
Jon has an absolutely astounding knowledge for beverages, and an unbelievable palate. A true Whisky adventurer! During one of out many conversations regarding spirits and our industry, Jon passed on an amazing piece of knowledge which so succinctly made sense.
Whilst on one of his many trips to France to sample Cognac, he had sparked up a conversation about oak and it’s significance in maturing spirits. He was told about the difference between using new oak, and old oak and in particular the effect they have on the final product. With an amazing cognac flight before us, we investigated the claims.
This is extremely relevant in the Whisky industry, and can give us an insight into how old a cask has been and whether it was re-racked.
As Whisky is put into a fresh cask, vanillin from the toasting or charting processes give an immediate hit of vanilla sweetness. As the cask mellows the tannin drawn from the wood and other flavours oxidise to leave a distinct aroma of almonds. (Benzaldehyde) This is the interactive stage of maturation people talk about. This can only be achieved over time through oxidation.
So if you pick up an old Whisky and a distinct aroma of almonds hits the nose, then there is a good chance the Whisky has mellowed in one cask it’s whole life. Expect these aromas to be accompanied by floral aromas and delicate top notes caused by the tannins creating acetals. If however there are dominant notes of vanilla, with almonds behind, assume the cask was re-racked to add some spiciness and youth. If there is no vanilla, then you may be drinking something from a very old cask indeed. If there is neither vanilla nor almonds, then unfortunately your cask is knackered and has given very little to your final spirit.
Tannin can be beautiful…
There is no rule regarding which of these flavour profiles is better, but it’s a really nice way to gather insight into your favourite glass of older Whisky!
Let me know what you think.
Cheers,Craig -
A Bodega’s Trash is a Distillery’s Treasure (Quercus Robur)
For whisk(e)y to legally be called whisk(e)y in the UK, it has to spend a minimum of 3 years and a day in an oak cask within the country of production. In our first post in the All About Oak series we looked at how this ageing came about and explores the relatively late introduction of this law to the UK.Now we ask the question, why oak?This is an extremely easy question to answer. It is a question that was described so succinctly in a presentation by John Glaser of Compass Box fame that I feel I cannot improve on it. We use oak for three main reasons:1) it is an extremely strong wood
2) it is pure in that it contains no resin canals unlike rubber for example
3) it delivers flavours that are pleasing to the human palateAdd to this the chemicals it naturally releases into our spirits and it’s watertight yet porous nature and there is no argument that it is the perfect wood for maturation.Historically though, it would have been used because it was abundant and inexpensive second hand. The wine producers would have known about the virtues of oak, but the Whisky industry only cared about the reliability and the cost, something that has changed over time, and something they began to realise quickly, and nowadays spend very close attention to.
Remember that wines were shipped in cask, and the greengrocers of the late 19th an early 20th century were bottling this wine, particularly the fortified wines from Europe. A typical Whisky list of the time would have included whiskies from port pipes, claret casks, burgundy barriques and perhaps most importantly, sherry butts.The sherry butt delivers what most of us Scots would describe as a stereotypical Whisky. The Whisky our grandparents smell of. Big, rich and sweet. Drams for in front of the log fire. The distillers and blenders knew this and decided that these were the flavours they wanted. Simply put, they were maturing Whisky in sherry casks to try and win over the brandy market.And it worked! Today the French drink more Scotch Whisky in a month, than Cognac in a year. We must have been doing something right. However the origins of these sherry casks might surprise a few of you.And so we come to Quercus Robur. Here’s the story I picked up from my coopering expedition to Jerez in 2008.
When fermenting and ageing sherry, the Spanish hate Spanish Oak. It’s thick, tannic nature sees their wine become astringent and woody very quickly. It lacks balance and delicacy. Therefore, to age and ferment sherry they like to use American oak. They will either use Quercus Petrea from Europe or Quercus Alba from the states. (We’ll cover these in later posts).Therefore, simply saying that we buy second hand sherry casks from Spain is a bit wide if the mark, and here at Whisky Adventures I like to deliver as much of the story as I can.If we bought second hand sherry casks from bodegas in Spain, we would end up with vessels that are watertight but are also around 100 years old. This is due to the Solera aging system employed by the sherry industry. These would be exhausted and useless for Whisky. Traditionally we bought second hand casks, but we bought them from the greengrocers in the UK. And that is an important distinction.The casks sent to greengrocers were not made from Quercus Alba or Quercus Petrea, these woods were far too valuable for shipping purposes. The casks used to ship sherry were manufactured using the abundant and very tannic Spanish Oak, Quercus Robur.These Spanish Oak casks were watertight and coopered to the highest quality, yet they did not deliver great sherry so were relegated to shipping vessels.On the journey up to the UK, the astringent tannins were leeched out into the wine (which would be blended in the UK to deliver a creaminess anyway) therefore seasoning and mellowing the oak. This meant that when our Whisky was introduced, the oak was less active and delivered a rich, full bodied Whisky with the distillery character still recognisable.An accidental discovery which some distilleries still insist on today. To give you an idea of exactly how important this oak is to these distilleries, we need only look at one of the most expensive wood policies in our industry: that of the Edrington Group.
Producing The Macallan, Highland Park and Glenrothes today is impossible without good European Oak sherry casks. However, sherry is no longer shipped to the UK in cask making these European Oak vessels very hard to come by. If you want a European oak sherry butt in the Whisky industry, you can forget that term second hand unless you want poor quality, exhausted oak. To get a European oak cask from Spain you must follow a complicated and expensive process:
First you must strike up a deal with saw mill in the north of Spain where the Quercus Robur grows. Staves will be cut from sustainable forests and shipped to Jerez de la Frontera in the south.
Secondly you must leave your staves to dry for 4 years in the Spanish sun. This will remove some of the tannin in the wood and also reduce the possibility of the casks shrinking if dry.
Thirdly two Spanish coopers will fashion your staves into 500 litre sherry butts, tested for watertightness and pressure.
Fourthly fill your casks with Oloroso sherry, the older the better and leave to season for a minimum of 2 years.
Finally empty the rented sherry back into a Solera system and ship 500 litres of Spanish fresh air up to Scotland to fill with your new make spirit.
Each of these vessels is a 6 year and £900 investment. But they do deliver some incredible whiskies.
Cheers,
Craig
In the next few posts we will look at sherry and the importance of tannic wood in certain circumstances.
In my glass: Harvey’s Rich Old Oloroso, just doing my bit for the sherry industry! -
Maturing Whisky: A Graphical View
As an astrophysicist, I have a great love for graphs. I’d go so far as to say I have a favourite graph. My favourite graph has nothing to do with physics. It does however have everything to do with maturing Whisky.6 years ago when I was well into my tenure as distillery tour guide at Glenkinchie, I was shown a graph explaining maturation. This is something that I have referenced throughout my career and something I’d like to share as I publish info regarding oak and it’s uses.As with all good scientific graphs it has two axes, and time travels along the bottom. Up the side we have character. Heaviness of character rates from light breakfast whiskies (Glenkinchie and Glenmorangie for example) up to big heavy whiskies (Mortlach and Macallan) all the way through to the peaty monsters (Lagvulin and Ardbeg).On the graph we have 3 lines. First of we have distillery character. This is the constant horizontal line. This never changes. The characters given to the spirit by the shape of the still and the other distillery nuances in process are always there. Casks will not remove this character, but they can mask it and balance it, but it does stay constant.You also have certain aroma and flavour compounds in spirit that we as humans do not enjoy. Solvent notes, for example nail varnish remover as well as sulphur. These are removed over time, this is the dissipation of immaturity though evaporation and reaction within a cask.Finally we factor in the additive influence of oak. Colour, wood sugars, tannin and vanillin all influence the final product. If left in contact for too long though we can create a pretty woody and over balanced dram.
These three lines give a distiller a window of opportunity. Bottle too early and immaturity can take hold, wait too long and a woody Whisky emerges. Balance is key and can be delivered with the right wood policy for the right Whisky.Super peaty drams take longer to reach balance. Lagavulin at 16 years is as balanced as Glenkinchie at 12. Lagavulin’s distillery line is higher than Glenkinchie’s.First fill casks will have steeper maturity lines than refill casks. Maturity lines get shallower as casks are refilled over and over to the point that they flat line and become exhausted.Basically, no matter what cask is used, a master blender wants to bottle when immaturity is undetectable in a whisky, and before the Maturity line encompasses the distillery line rendering the distillery character unrecognisable. This is the reason that many older whiskies are racked in refill casks. It also explains the recent trend for non age-statement whiskies being full of flavour as they are matured in first fill and even virgin casks.The trick is to bottle before the brown line overtakes the blue one. At this point, everything tastes like oak.Hope this sheds some light on the situation. Older is not always better, it’s all about wood policy and final objectives.
Cheers,
Craig
In my glass: Talisker 10 A whisky that was bottled young despite it’s massive distillery character. Perfect balance is not and should not always be the end goal. Talisker is unbalanced towards the distillery so the peat punches you in the face! The antithesis of this would be an older Macallan, overbalanced towards the oak, but even at 60+ years old, the distillery character is detectable. -
Definitions: Cask Sizes
In the last post we looked at how the Scotch Whisky Industry formed without oak and how this style was available legally as Whisky until as late as 1915. Now we are going to delve into the depths of maturation, focussing on the cask’s previous contents (this will give you a new outlook on where the flavours come from) as well as the different types of oak and even different cask sizes and their effects. Not to mention the unquestionable skill and craftsmanship of the cooper.I’d like to draw on all of my experiences over the last 8 years and finally give an explanation of what is happening in a cask as far as we can tell at the moment. It’s a complicated business, one that most people pay lip service to, but one that is brushed over despite it’s vital importance, especially when you realise that without it we would not have Whisky as it exists today. Hold on to your hats, and jump into casks!The first topics I’d like to tackle are the different cask sizes, where they come from and the effect of maturation on each, regardless of the previous contents that were seasoning the casks. Scotch Whisky must mature in Oak in Scotland for a minimum of 3 years and a day, and it must be matured in a cask no greater than 700 litres in size to ensure sufficient wood contact.
Cask Sizes in use today:Gorda 700 litres: A cask used for marrying American whiskies, legally the largest capacity cask we can use for maturationMadeira Drum 650 litres: Very uncommon in the Scotch Industry but used from time to time, mainly for aceing and finishing.Sherry Butt 500 litres: A cask traditionally used for maturing and fermenting SherryPort Pipe 500 litres: A cask traditionally used for ageing Port, taller and thinner than a ButtPuncheon 500 litres: A cask constructed from spare staves, shorter and fatter than a buttHogshead 250 litres: A cask size introduced to make warehouse mathematics easierFrench barrique 225 litres: A cask used for maturing wineQuarter Cask 80 litres: A small cask recently re-introduced into the industry to age whisky ‘quicker’Bloodtub 50 litres: A tiny cask rarely used these days used(All cask sizes are approximate. Remember that these are hand crafted vessels and can vary from cooperage to cooperage. This is why all casks are weighed before and after filling to ensure exact content knowledge)The first casks used in Scotland would have undoubtedly been small. Bloodtubs and Quarter Casks would have been kept in the cellars of the wealthy and filled with the local Whisky. These casks would be tapped half way up and refilled with new spirit (legally Whisky at the time remember) in a crude solera ageing system. The rich would have been amongst the first to experience the effect of oak on spirit and would have been extremely proud of the unique product ageing in each of their cellars. This was not done on a grand scale though, as people filled only what they could afford and cooperage was expensive.The first cask sizes used on any great scale, would have been standards in the European wine industry. The first people to have wood policies as such in Scotland would have been the blenders. Distilleries would have been storing Whisky before the first blends in the 1850s, but even these products were stored to be sold at the greengrocers. These are the greengrocers who would eventually go on to become the blenders. A perfect circle and a fact that allows us insight into how the industry at the time was shaping up and exactly where the roots of today’s business were planted. These gentlemen were extremely important, many of them went on to become barons and landowners due to their entrepreneurship and innovation!
Sherry Butt in construction They learned the art of blending from the tea trade, and were in an extremely privileged position when it came to ageing Whisky, as they were also the bottler’s of the time. This meant they imported casks of French wine, ports, Madeiras and Sherries which they blended and bottled themselves. It was only natural then that they sold these empty casks to the whisky industry for storing Whisky that they would then buy back.So the first casks used on an industrial scale would have been Sherry butts, Port Pipes and French barriques. When the law changed in 1915 outlawing unaged whiskies, the distilleries jumped at the chance of buying second hand casks from the blenders and greengrocers probably without realising the importance or indeed the legacy laid down which still emanates through the Industry today.French barriques however threw up an unusual problem. One which continued as we went on to source barrels fron the Bourbon Industry in the USA. The warehousemen of the late 19th and early 20th century were not the most literate of workforces and the guagers were rarely sober. To switch between 180 or 195 litre casks and 500 litre casks was not the easiest mathematical task in the world for either profession. Something had to be done.
French Barriques being disgorged at Bruichladdich This was the reason that the industry introduced a Hogshead (a traditional 15th century measurement) into the mix. It simply made the mathematics of the day easier. Coopers would bring in three or four barriques or barrels and build two 250 litre hogsheads to make stock-take easier.Today the most common size of cask in the Whisky industry is undoubtedly the American Standard Barrel. These can only be used once by law to mature Bourbon and therefore offer an extremely cheap source of oak for our industry.
American Standard Barrel Today distilleries are rarely building hogsheads, (a process making even more sense when casks were shipped in flat pack form) as it is now cheaper to ship casks whole. Factor in that the smaller a cask, the larger the percentage of the Whisky inside is in contact with the wood at any giving time, therefore the quicker the Whisky picks up the characteristics from the oak as well a the introduction of computers into the stock system and it makes perfect sense to use American standard barrels.The final thing I should point out about casks is their finite lifespan. Casks contain lot of compounds and goodness that we look for in our Whisky (more on the specifics later) however they will lose these benefits as they get older and the Whisky leeches them out.
I like to think of a cask like a teabag. If I made myself a cup of tea and then you used the same teabag for your cup of tea, yours would be lighter in colour and less pungent in taste and aroma unless you left the teabag in longer. Casks work the same. Each fill will remove more from the wood eventually rendering it exhausted. Subsequent fills will require longer and longer periods to gain significant flavours and most refills will never match up to the colour or aroma of a previous incumbent. The life of a cask looks like this:
A trail of tannins from European Oak stacks Virgin oak is filled with Sherry/Bourbon/Wine for 1-8 years. These products remove lots of colour and woody aromas from the cask.These casks are then filled with Scotch. What we now call a first fill cask. The Scotch removes more aromas and flavours during it’s life in here. Around 12 years.The cask then becomes a refill where we put another batch of Scotch in. This batch will be lighter and less woody in flavour but can stay in the cask much longer if need be. Up to 40 or 50 years in special cases.If the wood still has more to give a third fill may take place, but this is less common these days.The cask can then become a marrying tun for resting blends and marriages of single malts, or if no longer watertight we can make garden furniture or woodchips out of the casks.Some companies today still use casks up to 6 or 8 times. However, gladly the industry is realising that after 3 fill maximum a cask will have very little left to give and we are seeing more and more Whisky makers refuse to use casks more than three times. These casks will still be in our industry for over 60 years, Oak really is the most important part of our final product and the more us drinkers know about it the better our Whisky Adventures will become.Next time we will focus on types of oak and their special properties.
Cheers,
Craig
In my glass: PC9 a perfect marriage of different wine casked whiskies from Bruichladdich to give a superbly married and well balanced peaty monster. -
All About Oak: 1. How The Scotch Whisky Industry Matured
Just this week I have hosted a couple of Whisky tastings focussing on the importance of maturation. Oak is something that I have become incredibly fascinated with and a subject that is somewhat still shrouded in mystery. Therefore I plan to compose a few posts regarding this gargantuan subject.However, to really understand oak, it’s make up and importance, we need to take a wee trip down memory lane and realise why we use it and how it came to pass that all Whisk(e)y from the British Isles had to be matured in oak for a minimum of 3 years and a day.Let me take you on a trip down memory lane…The first ever written record of making Malt Whisky in Scotland dates back to 1494. Friar John Corr was provided with 8 bolls of malt wit which to make Aqua Vitae…8 bolls of malt is enough to make over 1000 bottles of Scotch Whisky. This suggests that we knew what we were doing as early as 1494. Therefore the best guess for the start of distilling in Scotland is around 800 years ago. However, the industry looked nothing like it does today.
It would have very much been a cottage industry. Men of the cloth would have been distilling, as well as the humble farmer. Now imagine you were that farmer. Not an easy job. Probably struggling to make ends meet and looking for any excuse to forget the hard life that you have been born into. Every harvest you bring in the grain. Your first priority is to grind it into flour so that you can make bread and feed your family. Then you would take a proportion and turn it into beer. This was consumed by every family member as the water back then was deemed unsafe. If, by a turn of good fortune, you had enough beer that some of it was in danger of deteriorating, you knew that you had had a good harvest. This excess beer would have been distilled into Uisgebaugh (later shortened to Uisge and eventually becoming whisky). This clear spirit would have been between 60 and 80%abv and inconsistent from batch to batch. It was tested not for flavour profile but for effect! Basically the distiller would also be the tester (I’m sure this was a source of much of the inconsistency) and he would test to make sure that no drinker of his whisky would go blind.
Aside: I found out from a chemistry graduate last night that Methyl alcohol when combined with oxygen in the bloodstream creates formaldehyde causing this blindness, whereas Ethyl alcohol when combined with alcohol creates acetaldehyde which gives of the smell of bread baking and is entirely processable in the human body. It is also an extremely prominent reaction in the maturation of whiskies, particularly in Sherry Casks. We’ll come back to this in a later post!
This harsh whisky did have it’s uses though. First off it fetched a handsome price at the local market and could be traded easily. It also had its medicinal uses in that it kept you warm or knocked you out and of course it was extremely good at keeping the local ceilidh going a bit longer or stopping it short depending on what you were serving and how much you were serving of it.It wasn’t until the 18th century that the whisky industry as we know it started to take form. As distillers became more skilled the consistency and quality of their product improved. As it was enjoyed by more and more of the landed gentry holidaying in Scotland, whisky’s reputation grew and distillers strived to recapture the quality of earlier batches. They will also have realised, probably during transportation, that casks mellow a spirit and magically change it’s colour and dramatically change it’s flavour profile, a consequence that the blenders of the 19th century would take full advantage of.However, this old style spirit of Uisgebaugh did not die as the virtues of oak were discovered. It hung on and existed as a legal product. An affordable spirit for the working class, not unlike vodka in Russia. While the landed gentry ad casks in their cellars at home, and the blenders had stocks of aged spirit sleeping in warehouses, the local pub was still selling this white whisky to ensure it truly was a national drink. It actually lasted well into the modern industrial revolutionised Whisky Industry and was only banned from the title of “Whisky” in 1915. A step which by all accounts was not only necessary, but also responsible for the high standing Scotch Whisky holds today around the world.If you had gone into a bar before 1915 and ordered a glass of house whisky, you would be given the local white spirit at 60-80%abv and you would have been served a dram of it. (A dram is NOWHERE near what you think it is. Definition here.) This heavy drinking practice was leading to antisocial behaviour, and much of it was caused by whisky. Something had to be done.
The lobbyists had been calling for action, and coupled with the onslaught of World War I the Government finally acted and stated that mellowing a Whisky in a cask will mellow the drinker when they drink it. As well as keeping stocks until after the War, which will be over by Christmas. Whisky from the British Isles had to be matured for a minimum of 2 years from 1915 onwards. In 1918 this was upped to a minimum 3 years and it still stands at this figure today, but we generally don’t see anything younger than 10.
Cheers,
Craig
Next time we will have a look at the casks which were to help the distillers tackle this huge increase in their route to market.
In my glass: Auchentoshan New Make Spirit for nostalgic purposes obviously…
Here you will find all interesting things I come across in the world of Scotch Whisky as I travel and spread the wit and wisdom over a dram or two...
