Integrating the Party: tasting The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 6 (plus Batches 2-5), with David Stewart

I got a couple extra samples of The Balvenie's Tun 1509 on the occasion of the release of Batch 6 of this series. It wasn't really supposed to happen that way, but fun things sometimes come along. I'll quote from the release:

The Balvenie has announced the release of Tun 1509 Batch 6, the latest expression in the highly acclaimed Tun 1509 series. Produced by revered Malt Master David Stewart, The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 6 was married in 21 rare and precious casks from The Balvenie’s aged whisky stocks and comprised in several different butts, for a remarkable flavor profile and finish.
A marriage of 21 casks which have spent 3 months in a traditional marrying tun. The batch is comprised of whiskies from sherry refill butts, doublewood refill sherry butts and ex bourbon American oak barrels - all aged 21 years and older. Only 3480 bottles released in the U.S. Non chill filtered, ABV of 50.4% (MSRP $399.99)

When I read that, I thought...wait a sec, I think I saw some early Tun 1509 samples when I was shifting bottles about in the Bryson Whiske/y Cellar (i.e., trying to make some room in my basement office). I went down and dug around a bit, and sure enough, there were samples of Batch 2 and Batch 3. So I replied to the press release, telling them I'd like to have a sample of the 6 to taste beside my earlier samples. And didn't the good folks at William Grant & Sons send me samples of Batches 4, 5, and 6! (Samples: 50 ml airline bottles. Unlabeled. Hand-filled. Not for re-sale. Which is fine with me, I don't do that shit.)

Better, they sent responses from Malt Master David Stewart to a couple questions I had posed. Let's have a look at those first.

What's going on in the Tun over the course of weeks and months that doesn't take place as soon as Tun is pouring in the barrels? Physically, how is the liquid added to the barrels? Gently? With a lot of splashing? One at a time? Does that also make a difference in flavor and profile?

David Stewart: We generally fill the Tun with the next expression around December each year so that we are in a position to bottle the following spring. Once we have emptied the Tun we will then fill with young Balvenie so that the Tun doesn't dry out. The Tun contents, as you mentioned, is filled into barrels to be taken to our bottling hall. From there, we carefully fill these barrels one at a time so that we don't lose any of this precious liquid; so that filling the barrels doesn't influence the flavour.

How does the character of the whisky change, and – if it's known – why does it change? Does the marrying process add to the cost of producing the whisky, or is it just another step? When you choose the barrels for Tun 1509, are you looking for consistency with previous editions, or a difference? How much of a range of ages in barrels are we looking at this time?

David Stewart: We are the only Scotch whisky company that has these marrying casks called Tuns. Most of our single malts are left to marry in for a period of three months prior to bottling. This marrying period allows the various constituents to mix and settle together. We have many thousands of these casks in our marrying warehouse at the distillery and we feel that this process is valuable; even with the extra labour and double handling involved.
The selection of each Tun expression is created initially in our sample room. We will request many samples to be drawn from individual casks from our warehouses at the distillery. We will sample each individually and then decide on the combination of ages and American and European oak casks. Once we made up the vatting in the sample room, we compare it with previous Tun expressions as we want each one to have its own individual character. Once we are happy, we give the distillery the cask numbers and ages so that they can physically fill the Tun. Generally there could be around ten years or so between the youngest whisky and the oldest.

Is there something that makes this particular batch of marriage special?

David Stewart: Yes, Tun Batch 6 was created by exploring the Speyside distillery’s aged and precious stocks to find 21 unique casks to marry the batch in. The liquid was left to marry for three months before being bottled at the distillery. This rare technique created the perfect environment for the different casks to weave together – allowing each of their composite qualities to mix and create a unique single malt Scotch whisky.


To be honest, not quite the in-depth responses I was hoping for, but that's what I get for sending questions by email! Let's move on to tasting these whiskies.

The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 2 (50.3%): A nose of orange slice candy, some oaky spice, a whiff of pine needles, and warm wildflower honey. The whisky on the palate reminds me of the Parker Beam quote I always use ("I make it with corn and age it in oak, and when I taste it, I taste corn and oak!"): I taste malt, and I taste oak. Open the mouth and breathe, though, and the whisky lights up with a cooling touch of menthol, dark brown sugar, more orange honey, and a hint of dried fruit. The finish is more oaky, touched with vanilla and spice.

The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 3 (52.2%): Noticeably softer, sweeter nose. Malty, pastry shop (German pastry shop, to be annoyingly specific), sweet dough, light wood (balsa? Maple?), and a hint of cough drop. Don't be lulled by that. Quite spicy on the tongue, but sweet, warm, herbal, and tall, very tall in the space. The finish is quite warm, a touch tannic/grippy, and more of that oaky spice. A dram that delivers a lot more than that relatively unassuming nose promises.

The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 4 (51.7%): Fruity nose, with a sugar wafer cookie crunch to it. Dried fruit, light aromas of potpourri, and some light preserves, like quince, or pear. Sparkly on the palate, like little pops of warmth going off. More of the potpourri, deeply dried fruits, some milk chocolate and honeycomb, with drying oak spice lightly present. Like polyphonic music, there's a lot going on here that seems at first to be going in different directions. But on third or fourth sip, you realize it's integrated and aimed. Indeed, this has the most focused finish of the three I've had so far: oak, vanilla, and a touch of dried flower.

The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 5 (52.6%): Nose hearkens back to Batch 3, but with more insistence. Honey-soaked phyllo, almost like baklava but not as overtly nutty. There are fruits, but so light that they're almost floral, and with just a slight acidity. Oh, beautifully light on the tongue! Honey, and honeysuckle nectar, and bright sun-warmed spring flowers, and ichor! Makes me think of a line from a favorite poem from my childhood, "The Fish," by Elizabeth Bishop:

"...everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! 

And I let the fish go." 

And as I let this fish go, it rewards me with a finish that flashes sunshine and glory from my teeth down my gullet all the way to the pylorus. Sorry to be so non-specific about exactly what I tasted here, but damn, it was just so experiential.

The Balvenie Tun 1509 Batch 6 (50.4%): Finally, the reason for all of this. Warm cereal nose, with fruit; almost like breakfast, only with the booze heat turned on, and some oak in there. There's a welcoming malt wave that pours across the tongue, then as the heat of your mouth takes hold it ignites like an oven burner coming on. You can almost feel the whoosh! It wasn't just the first time, either, it keeps doing it every time. Guy could get to like that. What's in the whoosh? Reconstituted dry fruit, lively, but still with that concentrated character. The warm cereal, only in a ladle instead of a spoon. Needling oak shoots through it like a strafing run, but the cereal cushions it. The finish rolls on and on, with the oak finally getting a real say, wrapped in vanilla and more fruit, and some solid heat there on the end.

Interesting, varied whiskies. As I like to point out to people who are obsessed about the exact percentages of a bourbon mashbill (hint hint: this is a Whiskey Master Class reference); Scotch whisky has a very simple mashbill -- 100% malt -- and the distillers manage to make quite different whiskies with it!

What does the Tun bring to that, what's the common thread here? Upon reflection, I believe Batch 4 is the key to that: integration. The Tun, and the marrying, brings integration to what could have been an out of control mess of flavor. Things aren't hammered into lockstep, overpowered by a huge first-fill character. They're introduced to each other, given a chance to cooperate, without losing their personality. It's like Richard Paterson's characterization of blending whiskies as putting together an invitation list to a good cocktail party; some authors, some actors, some bikers, some doctors, a few blue-collar poets, and a supermodel or two.

Marrying is a process that adds cost to a whisky. But it also adds strength, union, roundness, integration. It's a decision, and a powerfully subtle tool in the blender's kit.

That was a lovely two hours. My thanks to David Stewart for the work on this project over the years.

Michter's 20 Year Old Bourbon (Bottle 329 of 440, Batch 19H1439)

I have a long connection to Michter's. The original Michter's in Pennsylvania was the first distillery I ever visited, way back in late December of 1982. I've also visited both of the "new Michter's" distilleries in Kentucky, making me a member of a pretty small club of folks who've been to all three while they were operating. We should get a challenge coin made. Or maybe just a hat.

Anyway, I've lost any resentment toward the new Michter's and its driving force, Joe Magliocco. That's largely due to two things: the passion Joe and his team have for simply finding, blending, aging, distilling (and, importantly, filtering; more on that later) the very best whiskey possible; and, well, the whiskey they produce is simply phenomenal.

When the news came out that they were releasing another batch of 20 year old, I asked Joe if I could get a sample. Suggested retail is $700; I asked for 50 ml. Joe wasn't having that, and sent me a full bottle. So yes, I got a free bottle. I get a lot of those. I also am not a huge fan of really old, woody whiskey, so I was going to give this the treatment.

But I also told Joe that if I was going to review the whiskey, I wanted to talk to Andrea Wilson about it. Andrea is Michter's Master of Maturation, the person who oversees the aging process, does the blending, the person who takes the sourced barrels Michter's bought (prior to 2015) and what master distiller Dan McKee makes and turns it into whiskey. I did a presentation on American whiskey history and production with Andrea at the Smithsonian last October, and we worked well together. I was looking forward to talking whiskey with her again.

After getting healthy, we finally set a date and talked this past Wednesday: Andrea, Joe, and myself. I had a pour of the 20 year old handy, as did Andrea; Joe was chagrined to find there was no 20 year old available at his New York office!
(As is usually the case, I talked to Andrea and Joe on the phone and took down what they were saying as fast as I could...but some of this is direct quote, some of it is paraphrase. When I had problems, I asked them to repeat things. I did the best I could, but it is not a direct transcript.)

Is there anything you can tell me about where this came from? It's all Kentucky, and it's all at least 20 years old. Anything else? 

Joe Magliocco: We talk about the three phases*; obviously, this is Phase I whiskey, before we were cooking in someone else's kitchen. This is whiskey from a long time ago, when we were going around Kentucky buying things. We had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The environment in those days was much different. People were just happy to unload stuff.

The Phase I sourcing was me going around with Dick Newman*...and Steve Ziegel (Joe's long-time head of sales). Like me, Steve's not a production person, he just likes whiskey. We wanted to pick something we liked. This was in the late 1990s, and there was plenty of good stuff available. We didn't know we'd ever get to the point where we could produce by ourselves, but we wanted to pick a style we liked and could emulate. It's rich, a lot of flavor, and also interesting: a flavor experience, on the front, different on the palate, and different again in the finish. Steve said, we want it to warm, but not burn. This fit that bill.

(We talked here about how a 20 year old gets picked, and when they decide to do one.)

JM: A lot of people visit us and ask why do you have steel drums [for storing whiskey]? It's one of the things we do that makes our older stuff special. Andrea?

Andrea Wilson: We have a Quality Control system, and part of it is the drums, like mini-tanks. If we taste something, a barrel, that's at peak, and we don't think it's going to get better, we'll take it out and put it in the drums. (Transferring to stainless steel drums halts aging, preserving the whiskey.) We'll use that as a tool. Not every barrel goes through that process, but we use it so we have a uniform, delicious final product. Everything we're doing here is to produce the best American whiskey. We've had to look after these barrels for many years, and we're known for that, for not letting them get over-oaked. [This was news to me; I didn't realize Michter's was buying new make and aging it in their barrels. Makes sense, in retrospect.] 

JM: If Andrea feels that a barrel is good, and not going to get better, even if it's 19 years old, we'll take it out and that stops the clock. But we don't want these whiskeys to be wood bombs. When it gets to our older offerings, we don't really know what we'll have, because we don't know what's going to fit our protocol. Some years we don't offer 20 year old, we don't offer a 25 year old, because we don't have it every year. When people get a 20+ year old from Michter's, it's going to be really good, not just 20 years old and maybe it's good or not.

You have a barrel-by-barrel approach all through the process. 

JM: It was [former Michter's master distiller] Willie [Pratt]'s idea to maximize the size of the tanks to the contents of 24 barrels: maximum. Even our small batch products, like the US-1, they're very small batch. And if you have one bad barrel out of 15 or 20, it's going to taste terrible. If every barrel isn't just right, they can't use it. And if we have a bad one, it gets sent to a company that re-purposes it as fuel alcohol. We don't blend it off, or sell it as whiskey, it gets rejected.

How do you select the barrels to do a 20 year old? Who's involved, and when? Is it just you, Andrea?

AW: We have a tremendously skilled team. We don't make decisions in isolation. The collective experience of the team is leveraged to make those decisions. Joe always has focused on the importance of having a great team around you. That's a critical factor of the success of Michter's. We've tried to encourage a culture here. You don't leave things to chance, there's a control. We have people in our department who have the mentality of a chef. They test everything, they have a discipline and an artistry. We talk a lot about chefs here.  

The bottle you sent was #329 of 440, Batch 19H1439. What does all that tell me? 

AW: 19 is the year of the bottling, 2019. H is the month, August. And 1439 is a proprietary bottling code for us.

Is the code a tracking code?

JM: You could say that's what it is.

How many barrels went into this batch? 

JM: We don't talk about things like that. When you get stuff that's really old like this, you may get a barrel that's almost empty. I know from experience, you can have a barrel with very, very little left.

AW: That's why we evaluate every barrel individually to get the ones that are going to work well together. It's part of the artistry of blending. It's about creating a beautiful product. We talk about the art and science of what we do; this falls into artistry. It's like making perfume. You can have a lot of beautiful floral scents, but they won't necessarily come together to make something beautiful. It's about assembling a symphony of flavor.

What kind of bourbon do we have here? Wheat, rye, a combination? 

JM: We're not going into the mashbill. Some people will tell you every detail. Willy always felt that some things should be secrets. 

Andrea and I after wowing the Smithsonian.

AndreI know you're very particular about filtration.** What do we have here in those terms? And why? 

AW: They do get their own custom filtration. They're very old whiskeys, with a tremendous amount of complexity, but they're very delicate. So we use a looser grade of filter, and add very little water. It's a very careful set of decisions.

Is that why 57.1%? Is that barrel proof? 

AW: The complexity of the bonding of the flavors is much more... [long pause here]

What do you mean by bonding of the flavors? 

AW: When you are working with older whiskeys, the complexity of the chemical bonding of the whiskey is much tighter. When you add water, you risk breaking the bonds that took years to develop in the aging process, and it's something to be mindful of.  

How long is it going to be before we see a Phase III 20 year old? I hope I'm still allowed to drink by then!

JM: Let's think about this. 2035, right Andrea?

AW: That's right, we started distilling in 2015.

JM: You want to buy a few bottle futures?! [general laughter ensues]


Tasting --

I gotta say, the color is just gorgeous. 

AW: We had samples lined up on a table, and the color...it was just stunning.

It smells sweet. Can a thing smell sweet? That's a taste, isn't it? 

AW: Sweet is a taste more than an aromatic, but there are scents that come forward from sugar, from butter, from cream, that make you smell sweetness.

It's lush, sweet, caramel, creamy on the palate. There's a berry brightness, too. Some nice nut aromas.  

AW: I don't get berries in bourbon. I get cherries. Everyone's different. Reminds me of being in Savannah and having pecans; roasted, candied pecans. 

Not a lot of heat for the proof. Soothing on the tongue. 

AW: It does have a really long finish, like a syrup experience, where it coats a bit.

I've really only had a few whiskeys at this proof that were this smooth, not hot. That's special. 

[That was all we had to say. I thanked them for their time, and got to work on this. And then today, I revisited the whiskey.]

Clearly an older whiskey with the spires of oak soaring through the nose, but the spires don't overshadow the hall packed with a full array of bourbon aromas below. This has maintained its youth well: roasted sweet corn, vanilla, that buttery creaminess, and okay, berry and cherry, and roasted nuts. That is a treasure chest full of delight, that nose.
The palate is easily recognized from the aroma, but to my surprise, there's actually some fresh grassy character there! How does that happen with a 20 year old? The finish rolls on after, a runaway freight car rolling down a seven-mile incline that just cannot be stopped, only receding into the distance.
This is going to be a hard bottle to save and savor. I want to have more later tonight, let alone tomorrow. Well done, Andrea; well done, Joe, Dick, and Steve. Well done, Phase II.

Oh, and by the way, my Dry(-ish) January is over. 


*Michter's is following a plan of whiskey production. Phase I, the earliest bottles they put out, were whiskeys that Joe, Dick Newman (former CEO of Austin, Nichols (which owned Wild Turkey) and the head of the Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, and Old Taylor brands when he was at the old National Distilling), and Steve Ziegler (Joe's head of sales) selected barrels for bottling. As Joe said, things were different then, and whiskey was easily found and purchased. 
Phase II involved Joe and his distillers going out to distillers with excess capacity and having them make distillate to their specifications (which they'd honed in those years of buying Phase I barrels). Again...back then there were places that were happy to make some money making spirit for someone else. 
Phase III came about when the market heated up, and it was clear that the line moving up labeled "Does it make sense to build our own distillery?" and the line moving down labeled "Does it still make sense to stake our future on buying spirit from others?" were going to cross pretty soon. So Joe and his brothers (silent partners) built a distillery just outside of Louisville (an historic distilling area, near Stitzel-Weller and Early Times), and since 2015, they've been making their own spirit...which is going to be ready fairly soon. No 20 year old Phase III for a while, though!

**Willy Pratt experimented with different types of filtration, and found that not only did they result in different flavor/aroma effects on the whiskey, but they affected whiskeys differently based on how old they were. It sounds like bullshit, frankly, but I've blind-tasted it at Michter's and it's pretty clear. 

Sierra Nevada is 40 -- an interview with Ken Grossman

Sierra Nevada Brewing is 40 years old this year. They've released a 40th anniversary beer (6.0%, 65 IBU), I suspect there will be much hoopla later in the year, even for a company such as this that is still using labels that look almost exactly the way they did 40 years ago.

Ken Grossman has been at the helm from the beginning, and running things solo for over half that time. He's starting to step back now (more about that below), but make no mistake: Ken made Sierra Nevada what it is, what it became, and what it's been. There have been huge contributions from other folks, but Ken's hand is on the tiller.

I got an opportunity to interview him today, and I wanted to get that right up. I also sampled the 40th, and tasting notes are at the end of the interview. (As is usually the case, I talked to Ken on the phone and took down what he was saying as fast as I could...but some of this is direct quote, some of it is paraphrase. When I had problems, I asked him to repeat himself. Generally, though, he was pretty thoughtful and slow.)

I'm in italics, Ken is in plain type. I didn't do my usual bolding except for the first few words to make it easier to pick out when things stop and start, and a few things I found exceptionally interesting, like the statement on Sierra Nevada hard seltzer, and one of the "argued over" issues, and the Sierra Nevada whiskey that never happened.

Ladies and gentlemen: Ken Grossman, founder and owner of Sierra Nevada. 

Congratulations on 40 years! I've been drinking Sierra Nevada on the regular since 1987, and enjoying the hell out of the ride. But my favorite Sierra Nevada beer is still the Pale Ale, which I never tire of (my wife splits her fave: Celebration when it's in season, Torpedo when it's not). Do you have a favorite year-round or annual from the line-up?

I drink Pale, but I don't stick with one style. I drink through the portfolio pretty regularly. In the past few weeks, I had Porter, 40th, Bigfoot, Pale, and some of our new Kombucha. I went over to [the Sierra Nevada Torpedo Room in] Berkeley and tried some of the small batch beers there. I try to always keep tasting and enjoying everything. I'll rotate through the seasonals when they first come out. I really enjoyed the Bigfoot this year. You know, I get that question a lot, and I usually tell them it's like trying to pick your favorite child.

Yeah, sorry, people ask me my favorite whiskey all the time. But it brings up a sadder question: which Sierra Nevada beer that didn't make year-round or regular annual status do you miss the most? For me: Glissade, a wonderful lager we still talk about. How about you?

Glissade, that was a great beer. There are plenty of them, but the realities of the market, the support you need from wholesale and retail involves a certain velocity. So even if the beer's fantastic, if the volume's not enough, the retailers will pull it, the wholesalers see that, and we're supporting something that, for whatever reason, isn't making it. Do we want a brand that's not in a good growth mode, or something that's more where the consumers' tastes are? And it might be tastes, might be the branding, or it might be something else. Hazy Little Thing took off more than we expected last year, it was 98% growth. It caught us a bit off guard. We'd predicted 40,000 bbls. First year doubled that, and then doubled that again.

The 40th seems to be a very Sierra Nevada beer: a 3C (Cluster, Cascade, Centennial hops) IPA, relatively dry, and a very drinkable 6%. But what about the oats and acidulated malt? Is that a regular thing that I just don't know about, or is it something different for this beer?

We do oats in quite a few beers for the mouthfeel; in intentionally hazy beers we use a lot of them. We do use levels of acidulated malt in a number of beers, just for balance of acid. It's a malt that goes through a lactic step before kilning, it helps with pH balance, gives a softness in the flavor.

The hops...we were trying to go back to 1980. Cluster was the American hop, Cascade wasn't quite as popular then as it would be, and then Centennial would come later, the super-Cascade.

You know, Cluster never really got a fair shake in America. It's been around for years in variants. This aromatic hop, it was so different from what the German brewers were used to using, those subtle Noble hops. The American brewers were mostly German trained, so they weren't used to that in-your-face aroma. But it was considered an acceptable source of bittering, not as an aroma hop. As more aggressive, higher-alpha (acid) hops were bred, the Clusters fell to the wayside. It has a unique character, and we've played with it in various formulations. It's about 6% Alpha, and you've got bittering hops with triple that now. It doesn't yield that well (per acre), and doesn't have a competitive place as a bittering hop. We've grown some Cluster, and we've gone out and picked wild Clusters outside of Chico [in the area of an old hop farm]. It adapted to the climate down here and does well for what it is. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Cascade we used in a lot of our early beers, and Centennial is just a great all-round hop. You've probably heard of beers that are focused on Centennial that are in the top few beers in the country.

It's hard being an established and large craft brewer these days. It hardly seems fair, to have done the hard pioneer work, to be making some of the best beers you've ever made, and see attention and sales go to new, small, "cool kid" brewers. Is there a path to continued success as a large craft brewer? Do you just keep making good beer?

That's table stakes. The majority of the small brewers are now making good beer. To be considered in the competitive set when people pick a beer to buy, we have to make great beer. We've been innovating, spreading our wings. We're looking at other alcohol beverages than beer. We just put on our first hard kombucha. We've got a great team put together for using bacteria and other yeasts.

We're about to release Wild Little Thing, a lactic, somewhat tart beer, should be out in a few months. Just tasted the latest batch. We want to appeal to a wider band of beer drinker. Hazy Little Thing appeals to people who are not necessarily core Sierra Nevada drinkers, may not even be aware of the traditional Sierra Nevada beers.

And we're working in alternatives: Kombucha is one, and we're looking at others. I don't know that we'll do an alcoholic spritzer. We'll want it to have some more meaning and soul, more in line with what we are than just fermenting sugar and putting flavor in it. The Kombucha we hope will appeal to a similar consumer. We worked really hard at making it, the cultures are ones we intentionally put together. Most of them are combinations of yeast and bacteria that just happened, passed on from a friend's uncle. We've been purposeful about that: a little funky but not a lot, lower alcohol, organic. I think it has a lot more to offer a drinker that wants something that's better for them. We wouldn't call it a health beverage, but the things people are concerned about: carbs, alcohol, it meets those needs in an organic package.

But to get back to your question? Just make great beer and keep up with the changing drinker. We have to, you know. The younger folks drink more than us as we age.

Looking back on all that you've done -- starting a successful family-owned business, creating the American pale ale and American barleywine styles, pioneering estate brewing and wet hop brewing, going solar, creating 100s of jobs -- what things are you the most proud of having accomplished?

There is a lot. The industry is nothing like what I thought it was going to be 40 years ago, more than 40 years ago, when I was trying to raise money. (Brewing industry pundit) Bob Weinberg was predicting the beer industry would be down to 2 or 3 breweries in 1990.

I'm proud we were part of the revolution that changed the face of beer in America, and set the stage for a change of beer on a global scale. The breweries here weren't innovating, didn't have the cachet of countries like Czech, Germany, UK. And now it's come full circle, we're known for beer more than those people. I played a part in that transformation, and I'm proud of that. Some of our early labels and tools are in the Smithsonian, from our fledgling industry. And with Boulder (Brewing) closing, we're the last man standing, and haven't been sold, so we're the oldest of the pioneers. 

Any regrets? Anything you wish you'd done, or Sierra Nevada could have made happen, or in the way craft brewing has turned out?

I wouldn't say regrets. I talked to Fritz Maytag about this when I saw him at the Smithsonian. One of the things I wanted to do in 1980, and I still have the copper pot I was going to do it with: I was going to make an American scotch whisky in 1980. We did supply some wash for St. George back in the late 1980s. One of the guys was just saying a couple months ago, 'If you'd done that when you first got here, you'd have 30 year old whiskey now!'  (Would you, though? Would you have kept some that long?!) I like to think we'd have kept at least one bottle!

You've always seemed like a very 'no drama' kind of guy, and Sierra Nevada reflects that: solid, continuing brands, packaging that rarely changes, beers that clearly pay homage to classics, but often make solid advances. Why has Sierra Nevada been so steady all these years, still the same beers at the core, still the same colors and graphics? Is it because of your company culture and your personality, or is it something you could do because you were in this very, very early? Is that a strategy you've followed because it worked, or because it's the way you know? 

Several times over the years we've hired firms to do a major refresh of the pale ale. It ended up being the artwork for the XXX package. That's one of the versions that was done for refreshing Pale Ale. There was internal angst about such a big shift – and I love that label – but our family argued over that. That statement on the sixpack; that's one of the things we argued about! 

We see other brewers – what's the industry saying, every time you do a package refresh you get a 5% sales bump? But I've seen some brewers go through a half dozen or more in ten years and I think it can do damage to brand equity. I don't think it's all upside. Some brands need a refresh, but every year or two seems like a lot. A homebrewer friend did the original labels, he was in the Maltose Falcons club. Chuck Bennett.

You've got 40 years in, more than that, counting start-up. That's a career for most people. Are you looking to hang up your boots any time soon? Is there an exit strategy for Ken Grossman, and what does the company look like on the other side of it?

We hired a CEO, promoted the COO Jeff White into that last year. I've been slowly unloading stuff that I'd rather not be doing. I'm working less, trying to work myself out of the job. I like the technical stuff, so I still play a role in that. I've got two children involved in the business out here. Brian oversees the customer experience side at all three places. Sierra is on the people side and in the leadership group.

I'm just trying to stay out of people's way, and I stick my fingers in where it makes sense. My wife is always after me to work less, so I took a bike ride this morning, I only have one meeting after this, and then I'll head home. I have a woodshop and a metalshop at home. I bought a welder and a lathe, first pieces of equipment I bought, and I've still got 'em both. 

Thanks, Ken. For everything. 

Tasting Notes on Sierra Nevada 40th Hoppy Anniversary Ale -- Oh, that beautiful fresh yeast smell. Nothing like a Sierra Nevada ale. Beer's a little bit hazy, with an apricot nectar color and a crunchy white head. Noses pine and pith, with a bit of orange candy. It plays slick but sharp on the tongue, with firm hop flavor -- that pine and citrus again -- but not the gripping bitterness of a Celebration.

In fact, this is a beautiful feat of brewing: they've taken the basic building blocks of their brewing, a brewing tradition (you can certainly say that after 40 years of it) that includes Pale Ale, Bigfoot, Celebration, Torpedo, Tropical Torpedo, and Hazy Little Thing...and once again they've taken those basic ingredients and created a beer that slides into that formation without infringing on any of the others, and yet clearly belongs in that formation. These are all beers that are individuals, and only Bigfoot does that by being hugely different. 40th does it almost all with mouthfeel. Well done!

Jumping On the Netwaves with Joe Sixpack

Yesterday I stopped over to New Jersey, and it wasn't to get cheap, wonderful booze without dealing with the evil PLCB: it was to do the Bar Talk podcast with sports radio star Glen Macnow and Philly beer writer Joe Sixpack. Joe (Don Russell) shot me an email earlier this week and said welcome back to beer, why not join them at the studio Thursday for the podcast; bring a beer.

Well, that was a nice invite, and I couldn't resist. I tooled on over after picking out my beer...and a whiskey, since I knew I'd be catching hell for 'abandoning' beer for whiskey! Good call: turned out Glen enjoyed whiskey, so we were all good, especially when he started telling me about this tasting Scotch video he'd seen...it was Richard Paterson! Oh, yeah, I said, I got him to teach my son how to taste Scotch! So here's that link...

And here's the link to my appearance on Bar Talk. My part starts at 19:26, but listen to the whole thing: it's really good! They've got a good loose relationship, the fun keeps coming, and it's not dopey 'duh, beer!' and it's not overly geeky either. I had a lot of fun: thanks, guys!

Session Beer Project posts this week

I know there's some reader overlap here with my other blog, The Session Beer Project, but in case you don't usually keep an eye on it, I've got two new posts up there that might interest you.

First, there's one about how brewers are jumping on the "session beer train" by using the word sessionable. Well, as of yesterday, I'm not using that word anymore, and I give my reasons why.

Second, and maybe more relevant here, I did an interview with Notch Brewing Company founder/brewer/everything Chris Lohring on the occasion of this all-session beer contract brewer's second anniversary. It's a good thoughtful interview, and I think you'll find it revealing about just how viable sub-4.5% craft beer is.

I'm on the TeeVee again...

Pennsylvania Breweries 4th edition is the topic on PCN's "PA Books" this Sunday night at 9 PM! I did an hour interview with host Brian Lockman yesterday, our third over the years, and he beat me up a little this time: why so friendly to all the breweries, do you ever pan beers, all that stuff folks ask me to needle me. No sweat, it's good to clear the air on that (you wanna know the answers, watch the show). He also pinned me with his now-traditional final question: pick a desert island sixpack of Pennsylvania beers...oof! I should have known that one was coming and been ready! Check it out, we had a great time.

Graham Mackay on the global beer industry

SABMiller head Graham Mackay had a major interview in The Times yesterday. This is the man who told us the craft beer surge would fade: "It's inevitable." And after almost every beer blogger and beer website forum denizen had at him, he passed from their consciousness. He's big beer, after all.

Mackay is one of the brightest people in the business, a business that is filled with very bright people, especially at the top. I found the interview -- including a casually tossed-off T.S. Eliot quote -- fascinating.

Especially this, about the global consolidation of the beer market. I've marked the parts I find particularly interesting.

Two decades later the globalised market now looks like a two-horse race, with Anheuser-Busch Inbev leading SAB Miller, and Heineken and Carlsberg trailing behind. Many have made fortunes - the only real doubt is whether consumers have benefited.
Mackay is adamant they have. "It's resulted in better-quality products and more choice. People talk about the dead hand of globalised brand uniformity, but I don't think that's true in beer. Stonking great global brands haven't worked. Heineken is the most global brand and that's under 25% of its owner's volumes." [Bear in mind: despite having a number of large brands, neither SABMiller nor ABIB have a single dominant brand.]
And now, he predicts, consolidation will slow as the key players circle each other. "What stops the biggest groups consolidating is the desire of their owners. Most are in family hands. We are unusual in having an open share register."

That said, Mackay politely refused significant comment on whether SABMiller was interested in buying FEMSA, which is clearly up for acquisition. A guy's got to keep his hand in, after all.

What's it mean? Is Mackay right, is global consolidation about over? Not quite, with substantial pieces like FEMSA and Grupo Modelo still on the board and likely available, but close. As he says, major players like Carlsberg and Heineken are not very likely to be bought because of their ownership. Where to go from here?

That long day, Part I

As I said, long day. I woke up at 4:40 AM yesterday and woke Thomas. We got out the door about 5:15, no breakfast, no coffee (I did have a big glass of unsweetened iced tea), and hit the Turnpike. Look, I told him; we can hit a Wawa and get...something for breakfast, or we can drive farther and get breakfast. Smart lad; we kept driving. About 6:50, we got to the White Haven Family Diner, a random choice from Minerva. But I saw a Roadfood-approved sticker on the door as we went in, I knew we were OK. Great breakfast -- Thomas's chili omelet had cheese melted right into the chili, my scrapple was great -- and we were ready for the morning.

We took the tour at Bucknell University, then Thomas went to hang out in the library (really) while I interviewed Harold Kerlin of Copper Kettle Brewery. Harold and his brewery partner Russ Eisenhuth both work at the university, and worked together before that; they know each other well, and as Harold said, they know that they work together well, too. They are brewing CK on a one barrel 'system,' with one barrel food-grade plastic fermenters; all their beer is bottled, hand-bottled, and bottle-conditioned. They figure to make about 40 barrels this year. They started the brewery mainly because they had so many friends asking for homebrew that they couldn't afford to give it away any more! There are plans for an expansion, but not any time soon; not a lot of money in brewing one barrel at a time. You can find the beers at the Scarlet D Tavern in Mifflinburg and the Bull Run Inn in Lewisburg. Harold gave me a six-pack of samples I plan to get into soon.

We walked through rain to the car, and headed down Rt. 45 to Millheim and Elk Creek Cafe. I'll write more on that after I've played with the Corgis for a bit.

Me, blathering about Philadelphia/Main Line beer

Forgot all about this interview I did with Main Line Today, but it's up on the Web. Pretty much sums up my thoughts on beer around here; pay particular attention to the closer. Interesting times coming.

Pittsburgh Hofbräuhaus: the latest

The Pittsburgh Hofbräuhaus opening continues to be the most common search term that leads people to STAG, after my own name, and I've been trying to keep up to date on it. That led me to call Nick Ellison, managing member of the franchise team at Pittsbugh HB, and talk to him today. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice of schedule: Today marked the first brew at Pittsburgh HB! (That's brewer Eckhart Kurbjuhn starting things up.)

I did a short interview with him, but I'll tell you the important thing right now: Nick said they're now setting March 3rd as the soft opening date. Here's the rest of what we talked about.

When are you opening?

We’re doing our soft opening on March 3rd, unless something bad happens. Last week we had a control box burn out on the boiler, or as the Germans put it, the steam generator. That soft opening’s just opening the doors, turning on the lights. We’ll have an invitational grand opening celebration, which will also be the keg-tapping of our Maibock, on April 29th.

Why all the delays?

It took a long time for the developer to work out arrangements with the City of Pittsburgh. We also had problems with the ability of HB to issue us a franchise – the franchise rules had changed, that kind of stuff, paperwork. I tend to forget that kind of stuff happened, now I’m worried about control boxes burning out!

Why did you decide to build there?

It’s got a lot going on around it. It’s a first-class development, great tenants: Cheesecake Factory, McCormick & Schmick's, Ann Taylor. That’s where we wanted to be. We’re in walking distance of eight universities, too, and we sell beer, you know.

When does brewing actually start?

We started today, our first beer. We’re brewing the Lager. (See more about the beers here.) That won’t be finished for the opening, of course, we’re bringing in beer from Germany.

How much of the beer will be brewed on-site?

Most of the beer will be brewed on site. We will have four beers all the time: Lager, Hefeweizen, Light, and Dunkel. We will import the Maibock and Oktoberfest. The Oktoberfest will be the same beer served in the Hofbräuhaus tent at Oktoberfest. There are regulations that the Oktoberfest can only be brewed in Munich. Of course, the rules don’t really apply here, but we wanted to do it right, so we’re bringing that in. We’ll have twelve seasonals all together.

I saw you’re going to do a tapping of the seasonal on the first Wednesday of every month, is that right?

Yes, and the Oktoberfest won’t be in October. You tap Oktoberfest in September.

Outstanding! I’ve heard a number of different numbers on seating: how many can you seat?

About 1,100 seating, about half of it inside. The beer garden seats 376, and a vorgarten that seats 46. That’s where you go for vorplay!

It’s all very much outside, the gartens, if it rains you get wet?

Oh, yeah! An indoor beer garden wouldn’t be right.

Your menu’s online, right?

Menu’s up online (PDF warning), there may be a few changes. We’ll have pretzels served tableside by pretzel girls, the rest of the food will be waitress-order. It’s pretty traditional Bavarian. We’ve strived to make about a third of the menu traditional Bavarian food: schweinshaxe, sauerbraten, those kind of things. One-third German-American stuff: bratwurst, mettwurst, schnitzel. And about one-third is right out of Applebee’s, American food. You can get what you want; just because it’s German, you don’t have to eat German. We want everyone to feel comfortable.


Thanks to Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for graciously providing Nick's contact info. First beer's on me, Bob...I think I owe you a couple!

Jameson Revealed: the David Quinn interview...finally

Did it again...got a great interview with a major figure in Irish whiskey -- David Quinn, head of Quality Control at Midleton Distillery, where they make Jameson, and the previous master distiller at Bushmills back when Pernod Ricard owned both distilleries (Bushmills is now owned by Diageo) -- and didn't get to transcribing it until months later. For which I apologize, to you and to David, who was charming and informative, a dream interview.

But here we are, with the first installment, finally. The interview begins as I get my recorder going in the middle of talking about why we're doing the interview: because Irish whiskey is the fastest-growing segment of the alcohol beverage market in the U.S. (yes, really, faster than craft brewing: the craft brewers treated "whisky" as one category, but the Irish category has been flying at about 20% growth for the past five years).

David Quinn: The renaissance in Irish whiskey in the last ten years has been absolutely incredible.

Lew: What set that off?

I think what's happened, you know, there's been such a huge amount of new Irish whiskeys coming on the market, not just from ourselves but from all the Irish whiskey makers as well. People are becoming more aware of the styles of Irish whiskey, that it's not just sort of a tag-on to Scotch, or anything else, that it's an identifiable category all in itself.

Might they also be realizing for the first time that it's more than just one bottle of Jameson and one bottle of Bushmills?

Exactly. So what we have here today, when we have the premium lineup of Jameson, which is a very exciting lineup of whiskeys, all with their own different characteristics and different tastes, but still staying true to the Irish tradition. What I mean by that is you have traditional Irish pot still whiskey at the heart of those whiskeys, which is quite a unique style of whiskey.

We can talk a little bit about how that whiskey is put together and what makes it different from the other world whiskeys, the unique character that makes it readily identifiable from, say, a single malt scotch, or a bourbon, or whatever. From Canadian, for that matter.

That's high on my list.

That's what more and more people are recognizing. They're seeing the benefits of traditional Irish pot-stilled whiskey, where you have the contribution coming from the unmalted barley, which primarily affects the texture, the mouthfeel, that mouth-coating texture that you get from using barley in the mash. People are starting to become more aware of the benefits of triple distillation and what that third distillation actually does to the whiskey. We can talk a little bit about that later. It's a question that often is raised: what does that third distillation actually do in terms of its contribution to the character and flavor, the taste of the whiskey?

Well, since we've kicked it off, to answer that, what it essentially does is that in the third distillation -- if you go back to the second distillation, we would follow the same routine of taking a heads and tails cut, and only taking the heart, the center cut of the distillation. I guess if we were in Scotland, that would be it. But we take that center cut and distill it for a third time, and go through the same process of taking off a heads and tails cut, and again taking only the center cut. It's essentially a center cut, of a center cut, so you're getting into, really, the heart of the distillation.

What that does is that it removes some, not all, but a little bit more, of fusel oils and the higher alcohols from the body of the whiskey. By removing some of the additional fusel oils and, it's likely, some additional heaviness, you're allowing more of the fragrant, floral, fruity, and spicy characters to come to the fore, that would have been there anyway, but you're just allowing them to express themselves a bit more. That gives quite a different style of whiskey

So if you combine the fact that it's unpeated malted barley -- unpeated malt, I should say -- actually having barley in the mash, unmalted barley in the mash, combined then with triple distillation. If you bring all those factors together, you do end up with quite a unique style of pot stilled whiskey.

And the triple distillation -- it is a triple pot still distillation?

Triple pot stilled, yeah. So you end up with a style that is quite different to the other world styles of whiskey, unique in its own right, and I think that's what a lot of people are recognizing. You also get the added benefit of the third distillation giving you some additional smoothness on the palate. I suppose I haven't met a whiskey distiller yet who won't use 'smooth' as an attribute of their whiskey! But I do genuinely feel that there are degrees of smoothness, and that with Jameson, with that third distillation that you do get an additional degree of smoothness in the whiskey.

You combine all of that together, Lew, and you come up with a whiskey that's very approachable in style, smooth on the palate, easy-drinking, but still with lots of flavor and lots of character. It's a good combination, if you can combine all of those attributes and all of those characteristics together.

That's why we feel that we're seeing the Irish whiskey category as the fastest growing spirits category in the States, and that's being driven principally by Jameson, because it's by far and away, it has the lion's share of that market. So we're seeing Jameson, for example, growing in the States at over 20% per year, and we expect that to continue into the future.

Is that reflected in other world markets?

The global sales of Jameson are growing at about 13 or 14% per year, and have been for the last number of years. But one of the biggest individual growth markets is the United States.

Were we lagging that before?

No, it has always been up there, but for some reason -- maybe some of the reasons we've already talked about -- we've seen an additional increase in sales in the United States. It's a very important market for us. We're seeing Jameson pass half a million cases in the United States, and that's out of total global sales of 2.5 million cases. So you can see it's a sizeable proportion of the total global Jameson sales.

It's exciting times; we're all very excited about it. The distillery, back home, is working flat out, trying to keep up with demand. We're on seven days operation, and looking to expand the distillery in the near future. It's great, it's great to see it. It's great not just for Jameson, which obviously we're very happy about, but great for the category. That's equally important.

Just an aside, before we get into the questions I had planned; when you say you're looking to expand your facility...how do you do that?

Well, you put in extra grain-handling capability, you need to put in extra fermentation tanks, well, extra mashing equipment, first of all, so new mash tuns, new lauter tuns, extra fermentation vats, extra stills -- which is a fairly major step to take, when you start putting in extra stills. Obviously, the key thing when you're putting in extra stills is that they have to match the existing stills, so that you can be confident, and insure that the spirit coming off the new stills will match what came before. We're happy with that.

And then, of course, build new warehouses. That's a program that's been ongoing for the past few years. We've been building an extra two new warehouses per year for the past number of years, and we'll continue on that rate of progress for probably the next five or six years, at two per year. Each of those warehouses will hold about 35,000 barrels.

What style of construction would they be: stone, timber?

They would be block-built, that's the main style of construction. All our warehouses are palletized.

That's just to put things in context. Because as well as the regular Jameson, which is doing wonderfully for us --

How much is it of total sales? 80%?

Oh, yeah. Well, within the Jameson family, it would be more like 90%. But if we include our other brands like Powers, and Paddy, yeah, you'd be, 3/4 of our sales would be Jameson. So it's effectively our international flagship brand.

So, that's to put things in context and set the scene. Because in addition to our standard Jameson, which is doing wonderfully well, and we're all very excited for it, we also have our Reserve range. These whiskeys are there to allow people who would maybe want to trade up, or to try a little something different, maybe try whiskeys who have a bit more to offer in terms of character and flavor.

It's nice to be able to have a full Reserve portfolio to give people that opportunity, to have a whiskey on a special occasion, or something a little different. That's what we're doing today. Not only do we have the latest addition to that family, which is the Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve, but we're also re-introducing in the United States, Jameson Gold.

Is that actually in now?

Right now, yeah. Jameson Gold was in the States, up to about five, six years ago. It was taken out because a decision was made at the time to just have it as a duty free, Travel Retail exclusive. It was only decided last year that we needed to have the full Reserve Portfolio available in the main markets. So in addition to the introduction of the new Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve, we decided that we'd re-introduce the Gold as well, effectively to complete the Reserve family.

As you can see, they all got a nice new makeover. The Jameson Gold has been re-packaged, though the whiskey is exactly the same, it's been re-packaged in the Jameson premium bottle and label style, so they do look part of a family. Because the previous bottle, you can remember, was a kind of a squat, stubby bottle; it looked quite different to the 12 [year old] and the 18 [year old]. They all got a makeover, and we have a nice Reserve portfolio. It's almost like a combination event: the re-introduction of the Gold, and the launch of the Rarest Vintage Reserve. So we're excited about that.

Maybe we'd have a little taste?

Sure, if we have to!

I know it's a little early in the morning...but it's 5:00 somewhere. We'll start with the 12. (pouring noises)

While you're pouring...what are these made up of? What whiskeys? What kind of whiskeys do you make?

Right. The main part of all these distillates will be traditional Irish pot still whiskey, made from malted barley and unmalted barley.

The ratio, roughly?

Well, again, that depends. We don't make just one kind of pot still whiskey. One of the interesting features of Midleton Distillery is that it has the capability of making quite a range of individual pot still whiskeys, each with their own nuances and flavor characteristics. Depending on which one that we're making, that will determine the mix of malted barley and unmalted barley in the mash, and it also determines the type of triple distillation technique that we will use.

What I mean by that, is the cutting strengths, where you would cut from heads onto spirit, and then the cutting strength going from spirit to tails, for both the second and the third distillation. And it's one of the neat features of triple distillation: because you have heads and tails taken at both the second and the third, it gives you much wider opportunity to play tunes with your stills. You have lots of different intermediary feints, strong feints, weak feints, that can be used as part of the charge for subsequent distillation.

It gives you lots of opportunities to play with the style and the nature of your distillation technique. Every time you do that, you will produce a different style of distillate. We have to be able to do that, and we always have to be able to do that, because we have to rely on ourselves to be able to make a full range of different styles of whiskeys, and then mature those as individual whiskeys in their own right, because we never had the opportunity to trade whiskeys with other distilleries.

Like the scotch distillers do?

Right. We can't do that, so we have to rely on ourselves to be able to make a wide range of individual pot still whiskeys. The same applies to the grain whiskeys, and we can make a wide range of individual grain whiskeys as well. And then if each of those are matured in different types of casks, that increases the variability even further, and the diversity of character and taste even further, and it's that that allows us to produce a portfolio of whiskey brands that have their own individual character and individual tastes.

That's a key difference for us in terms of how we make whiskey, compared with, say, using Scotland as a comparison to how we make our whiskeys. [continued sounds of corks being pulled, whiskey being poured] It's something that John [Hansell] was very interested in when he visited Midleton. I think it was one of the reasons John gave Midleton [Malt Advocate's] Distillery of the Year a couple of years back; the flexibility.

The thing about that flexibility that impresses me is that you use it. There are a lot of places that have it that don't do anything with it.

Well, we have to use it. The other great learning experience of using that capability is that you very quickly get to learn what really influence taste and flavor in whiskey. You can get past some of the old wives' tales where some distillers are afraid to touch absolutely anything because they don't know what impact it's going to have. Whereas, because we're always trying to make new and different styles of whiskeys, you learn very quickly what is important and what does impact on the final taste and flavor...and what doesn't.

From that experience, Lew, we know the impact that the barley has in the mash, we know the impact that the relative split between barley and malted barley has, we know the impact that adjusting your cutting strengths, precisely the impact that will have on the character and flavor of the final spirit. And that's great, because it means that if we want to make a different distillate with a taste profile that's moving in a particular direction, we have a pretty good idea where to start. I'm sure, having read the citation that John gave Midleton Distillery at that time, that was a key decision-maker for him, in the sense that he was intrigued with Midleton's capability in that respect.

It means that we can have lots of fun, too! It's fair to say that while some of them have worked and we've had good fun, others haven't.

That's how you learn.

That's how you learn, yeah. It's very important.


(And that's about one quarter of what I've got for you. I'll be doing more in these quiet days, so hang tight; it was a very good interview.)

Me, talking about New Jersey Breweries

Video beerhound Jeff Linkous (who does the New Jersey beer-centered blog Beer-Stained Letter) interviewed me yesterday for a couple pieces he's doing, and then did a video spot on New Jersey Breweries. It came out pretty well: take a look.

And remember: we've got two launch events in New Jersey this Friday and Saturday! It's Friday evening at J.J. Bittings in Woodbridge, and Saturday afternoon at Tun Tavern in Atlantic City. Here's the details, come see us!

David Quinn: a great interview

Well, what a great time with David Quinn of the Midleton Distillery this morning. We sampled the four whiskeys in the Jameson Reserve 'family,' including the new Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve (which I made damned sure I finished my sample of, let me tell you). We were supposed to talk mostly about the Reserve family, but by the time we were done, we'd ranged far and wide.

I got in most of your questions, but not all. Here are answers to the shortest, most urgent ones: The Jameson 12 Year Old is not going away, Jameson Gold is going to be a regular issue, and it is unfortunately not very likely that they will be bringing any more "Irish only" whiskeys -- Paddy's, for instance -- to the U.S. market (mainly because they're doing so well with Jameson's that they don't want to dilute the market, sounds like).

I'll try to get some of the actual interview up, but there's a lot more of it than the Colum Egan one: we talked longer, and it was just the two of us in the bar, really, so we had a lot fewer interruptions (of course, the recording is a lot easier to understand, too!). Some good stuff, including a lot about barrels and casks, and a lot about all the different whiskeys they make at Midleton's and how they do it. Good stuff.

Oh, and by the way: we did the interview at For Pete's Sake in Queen's Village -- a favorite spot of mine, and it turns out, David's, too: his brother Peter owns it!

Jameson's Turn

Hey, if any Irish whiskey lovers are reading today... I've got an interview with Dave Quinn, the "Master of Whiskey Science" at the Midleton Distillery (where they make Jameson) tomorrow morning. Once again: anyone got any questions for him? You send 'em, I'll ask 'em...and I swear I'll get them up on the blog faster than I did with Colum Egan!

The Colum Egan Interview, Finale

The final installment, in which Sam's burning question on "what really happened in 1608?" is answered. Sorry this took so long. It's a New Year's resolution kept, though.

Part IV

How long have you been bottling the 16 and 21 Year Olds?

Part of being a distiller is that you're always looking ahead, thinking way ahead. Because if someone from marketing or from sales, or someone from a particular market comes to you and says, "Colum, we'd love for you to develop a 16 year old whiskey," I'll say, 'Yeah, okay, hang on, and I'll get you your 16 year old whiskey in 16 years time.' They're not going to be happy.

So as a distiller, you're always trying to innovate, and your innovation, I suppose, the only people privy to your innovation are the people in the distillery itself. We tend not to talk a lot about what's in the pipeline or what's ongoing. When the whiskey is launched, that's when we like to tell the consumers, to tell the public about it.

For the 16 Year Old, we did a lot of work with port casks. Historically, we've done a lot of work with port casks, and we felt it was time in about 1996. It was launched in 1996. It was a great day at the launch, we brought over -- Well, see, we're the distillers. But a key part of the whole distillation process is the maturation, aging the whiskey in the oak barrels. So we actually brought over guys from where we buy the bourbon casks, and we brought over the family from Jerez, in Spain, Antonio Paez, and we brought over Alex Burmester from Portugal.

We all did a little presentation, we talked about how we distill the whiskey, and the barrel suppliers talked about how they season the barrels for us. So it was like one big family, and I think Bushmills really represents a kind of family-friendly, easy-drinking, easy-sipping whiskey. That highlights the virtues that we see, bringing those people to the distillery at that time. Rather than taking all the credit for what was in the bottles, we were very much helped by our barrel suppliers.

Most whiskey drinkers don't realize how much of the flavor comes out of the barrel.

Yeah. And imagine: each year, we lose 2% volume, so at the end of 16 years, there's 32% of that whiskey is missing when you open it up, just gone, disappeared. It's a similar thing with the 21 Year Old. That was launched five years later, in 2001. Again, we'd done some work with Madeira casks. We felt the Madeira would only take six months to --

Let me backtrack a little. The 16 Year Old spends 16 years in either bourbon-seasoned barrels or sherry-seasoned casks. We take the whiskey out of both cask types, and marry them for six months in a port cask. So we thought, okay, 21 years in bourbon, 21 years in sherry, it'll be only 6 months in the Madeira. Wellll... we found out that with six months, we weren't getting the character and the taste that really was necessary for a Bushmills whiskey.

Let me make sure I have this straight. The 16 Year Old is aged in sherry and bourbon casks for 16 years...each.

Right, 16 years, 50/50. At the end of 16 years, take the whiskey out of both cask types, marry it together for six months in port [wood]. The 21 Year Old is 21 years in bourbon and 21 years in sherry.

Half and half, roughly?

Yeah, yeah. At the end of 21 years, we take it out. And when we were trying to develop the whiskey, after six months we said, let's take it out and see what it looks like. We just weren't getting enough contribution from the Madeira. It took 2 years to get the contribution right.

I'm very sorry that my wife and I weren't able to drink enough Bushmills Cream to keep the brand alive, because we did try. Is it really dead and gone?

Yeah. The decision we took was -- it was a nice drink, but demand was waning. We said, we've got no problem making it, but we need a minimum quantity to do a run, to make it consistent quality. We never really got that quantity, after six or nine months, so we're probably not going to. Plus now that we're part of Diageo, why drink anything else but Baileys, right? And Baileys has come out with the two new flavors, the creme caramel and the mint, and the reception has been fantastic.

Well, I thought I'd ask. There was one question I got from the blog: what actually happened in 1608? [Here you go, Sam...]

That's when we got our first license to distill.

From?

From King James I. It was issued to a local landlord, Sir Thomas Phillips.

He was the distiller?

No, at the time they were trying to get taxes in.

That's what it's always about, isn't it.

Yeah, it's all about taxes. He was issued a license to distill in April, 1608. He was allowed to distill whiskey in the region around Bushmills. It was called The Rowte. That was about a 7 mile radius around Bushmills. So 1608 is an important date for us, with 2008 coming up next year, that's 400 celebrations of making whiskey. We'll have celebrations all over. We got together and had a big brainstorming session with all the markets around the world, see what they all wanted. We put all the ideas into a big hat, and we're just trying to pick out the best. It's going to be an exciting time.

That's about all I have. Anything else I should ask?

Well, I've got some good toasts for you. Bushmills is a good toasting whiskey.

May you be poor in misfortune, but rich in blessings.
May you be quick to make friends, and slow to make enemies.
Poorer or richer, quicker or slower,
may you only drink Bushmills from this day forward.

Slainte!

The Colum Egan Interview, Part III

The third of four installments of the transcribed Colum Egan interview from last March. You'll note that there was a LOT less time elapsed between Part II and Part III than between Parts I and II! I made a bad break last time, so I'm going to repeat the question to get started. I'll have Part IV for you tomorrow; this was just too long to make one post.

Part III
It's not all sherry casks, right?

Right. It's a mix of first-fill and second-fill sherry casks, and some third-fill casks. Your attention has to very high when you use sherry casks, because there's a possibility that you could over-sherry the whiskey, and that's not what we're going for. We're trying to really hone in on the fruitiness, hone in on the light floral notes, the typical house style of Bushmills.

What the sherry casks also give is a lovely softness, and you get this lovely nutty-type sweetness. That's very typical of an oloroso-type sherry, and that's one of the main reasons we use an oloroso sherry cask, as opposed to a fino or any of the other kinds of sherry.

Is there grain whiskey in this? (I held up my glass of Black Bush, severely depleted by this time.)

Yeah, there is. Bushmills Original is a blended whiskey. There's probably a higher single malt content in Bushmills Original then there is in a lot of blends available in the world, from both Ireland and Scotland. But in terms of Black Bush, there's actually a special grain whiskey in it, that's really only made for Black Bush. We do put a small amount of it also into Original. Some of that grain's actually made in a copper pot still, which is a very unusual way to make grain whiskey. It's got a fantastic texture, fantastic mouthfeel, and it's got a character and a taste that, really, we could probably bottle it on its own.

That's what it sounds like...

Well, I don't want to give away too many secrets, but that could be coming down the road, you know?

Well, that's my next question: what's coming down the road?

We've been making whiskey longer than anyone else, we've been making whiskey in the Bushmills area for more than 400 years, and naturally, being Irish, we've been making whiskey a lot longer than that and my God, it just took them a few hundred years to catch up with us.

The history of whiskey-making in the Bushmills area dates all the way back to the 1100s, when King Henry II brought his troops to Ireland. The local spirit, they called it uisce beatha [he says something like "eesh-kee ba'a ha"], that means "water of life." They [the English] weren't able to pronounce the Gaelic, so they started to call it fuisce ["fwish-ke'h"]. That's the modern word "whiskey," just without the 'f'. What I'm claiming is that the 'e' at the end of "fuisce" is very important, because that's the right way to spell whiskey. [Both laugh.] I'm sticking with that story.
[That really was the answer he gave to that question. Later in the interview he specifically says they don't like to talk about what's in the pipeline: guess not!]

The 16 Year Old and the 21 Year Old are both "three wood" whiskeys, is that correct?

Yeah. We have a range. We have the Bushmills Original and Black Bush, obviously, and then we have three single malts --

Which of those is the best seller in the U.S. market, overall, the Original or the Black Bush?

The Bushmills Original. The Original outsells all four of the others combined, it's that popular. I think it's a lot because of its versatility.

Is that new packaging on the Original?

Yeah, yeah. That white label, you put it on a back bar and you'll just spot it right away. That was about 9 months ago [July, 2006], when we became part of the Diageo family. One of the first things Diageo wanted to do was to emphasize a lot of characteristics of Bushmills that were neglected for years under the previous owner. The Bushmills name is more prominent now; it's a name that's synonymous with quality. If you ask people in Ireland what's the best quality whiskey, they'll all say Bushmills. Unfortunately, they'll probably go away and buy something else! What they do is, they keep it for special occasions. Don't keep it for special occasions, treat yourself all the time!

We also have single malts. Single malts are 10, 16, and 21 [Years Old]. You notice the nice light gold color on the 10 Year Old, and if you look at the packaging, it's actually matured in two woods. The light color is a giveaway. Whiskey with a light color tends to be whiskey that's matured in bourbon barrels. You see whiskey from Scotland or Ireland that's a light color, you pretty much know it's either old casks or it was matured in bourbon barrels. Bourbon-seasoned casks don't give up much color to the whiskey, whereas, when you go on to the 16 and 21 year old, they're much deeper in color.

What we do with the 10 Year Old though, we mature, or age, a portion of it, just a small amount, in sherry-seasoned casks, just to give it a hint of that sweetness. But the overwhelming characteristic of the 10 Year Old is like vanilla and milk chocolate; it really is like a melted milk chocolate bar on your tongue, and you get a nice sweet, kind of dry aroma in the back of your mouth on the finish.

A lot of whiskeys are described as being malty, whiskeys from Ireland and Scotland. If you want to pick up what that malty character is like, and what it smells like, you really should nose a Bushmills 10 Year Old Original. It's unmasked by any smokiness, unmasked by any peat, it's distilled three times, so you're really getting back to the grain, the malted barley we use in the first place.

As you know, whiskey's very natural: we only use water, we only use malted barley. We get the extract and ferment it with yeast, and distill it to bring it up from 8%. In Ireland, we bring it all the way up to 85% on the third distillation, and then mature it.

[That's it for now...see you tomorrow...]

The Colum Egan Interview, Part II (Never too late, eh?)

One of the things you said back when I brought up the whole idea of New Year's resolutions, and what you wanted to see more or less of in the blog was, um, er...me actually following up on what I said I would do, and doing it. Okay, here you go: the next installment of my interview of Bushmills master distiller Colum Egan...from last March. Part II picks up right where we left off, with Colum explaining about the use of wood in maturing Bushmills Irish Whiskey.

Colum Egan: Maturation is very important at Bushmills. We'll use a cask about three times. As you can imagine, each time you use a cask, the contribution from the wood to the whiskey is declining. After three times, I feel that the contribution is not appropriate, not sufficient. Other distillers are different, they'll use it four, five, six times, but I just think, myself...well, I would say it, but we always say that our attention to detail is second to none at Bushmills.

It's not just me. I'd like to take all the credit, but I just can't. The people at Bushmills are just fantastic. I've worked a lot of places, New York, Dublin, London, and really, the best place I've ever worked is Bushmills. I think I'm enthusiastic and passionate about the whiskey, but these guys just blow me away. If my enthusiasm wanes a bit, I just have a chat with them.

There's six guys that make the whiskey, two per shift. One guy that mashes, actually takes the extract from the barley, and one guy that runs the stillhouse, separates alcohol from water. So over 24 hours, that's a six-man team. The least amount of experience you've got on them is 25 years, and the most is 40 years. So these guys know what they're doing. People ask me, what happens when you leave the distillery? I tell them, well, if they don't know how to make it after 25 years, we're in trouble.

There's some great stories. There's a guy there, Ronnie Brennan, one of the mashmen. He's very knowledgeable, knows every little intricacy that could possibly go wrong. Of course, your knowledge is only tested after perhaps a power cut, or something unusual. That's when you know. If the other two guys run into something on their shifts, they'll ring Ronnie at home. And Ronnie lives just across the road. He'll come in. Doesn't clock in, doesn't tell me he's come in, might spend an hour or two helping them fix the issue with the pump or whatever. He does that totally on his own time, just walks in.

That's the commitment that the guys have to Bushmills. As long as they can see some kind of development down the road, and that's what makes it so much fun to be part of Diageo. We finally have someone who believes in the whiskey, with that same passion that we have. We're very good at making whiskey, but Diageo's very good at actually telling the world about it.

I say, if I can just get people to taste Bushmills, I know they'll drink it. It's as simple as that, and I don't think you can say anything better about a whiskey. Over the years, I've got enough people tasting it, so now I've got people drinking it.

The grains that go in the whiskey: what are you using? Is it all malt?

There’s three types of whiskey made in Ireland. That's a very important point, I think, that a lot people miss, even whiskey writers who know a lot about whiskey. There's malt whiskey. Malt whiskey's what we make at Bushmills, it's made from 100% malted barley. There's a second type of whiskey called pure pot still whiskey. Pure pot still whiskey is made from mainly raw barley, with just a small amount of malted barley added to it.

That's added in the still or in the mash?

That's added in the mash, right in the mix. You need the malted barley for enzyme conversion of the raw barley. Then the third type of whiskey is grain whiskey. Grain whiskey is made through a continuous, column still, whereas malt whiskey and pure pot still whiskey are made in a copper pot still.

What's going into grain whiskey?

The grain [whiskey] in Ireland is actually made from corn -- we call it maize -- where in Scotland, they tend to use wheat. It depends what's available, it's really kind of traditional things. That's not to say that in Ireland we won't make grain whiskey from wheat, that's not to say that in Scotland they won't make grain whiskey from corn, that's just, at the moment, what they make it from.

What is grain whiskey? We're not talking about grain neutral spirits?

No, no. There's a very critical difference between grain whiskey and grain neutral spirits. In Irish whiskey, and Scotch whiskey, I think it's 94.7, I'd want to kinda look that up and confirm that to you, but I think it's 94.7% is the maximum strength that you're allowed to go to, of whiskey. Anything above that, it comes into grain neutral spirit, it comes into the whole vodka territory. Really 97% is about the highest you can go; the higher you go, the less color, the less flavor you get.

There's no room for it.

Yeah. Grain whiskey tends to be very bland, really. It's sweet, but it tends to be bland. It's not as complex, it doesn't have the different aromas you'd get from a whiskey made from barley, or whiskey made in a copper pot still. The copper really has a big influence on the whiskey, and the shape of the still has a big difference on the whiskey.

So you have the three whiskeys we make in Ireland. In a blended whiskey, like Bushmills Original, for instance, we take some of the malt whiskey -- because it's only made at Bushmills, it's a single malt whiskey -- and we'll blend it with some of the grain whiskey, the whiskey made in the column still from maize.

Is it blended in aged, or is it blended in straight off the still?

Again, for a whiskey to be called whiskey, it must be aged in the oak barrel. Always, always, always. At Bushmills, our malts are all a minimum of five years, and our grain is a minimum of four years, for the States. So we'll take some of the malt whiskey, and mix it with some of the grain whiskey -- we use the word 'blending' -- so we blend the two together, because we don't want any layering or anything in the vat. We blend the two together, and make a blended whiskey, and that's the Bushmills Original.

Now, you can get other whiskeys in Ireland, from the Midleton Distillery. Midleton just makes pure pot still whiskey. So you'll get brands like Jameson's, and Powers, they're two blended whiskeys, where they'll take the pure pot still and blend in some grain whiskey with it. It's a very big difference, obviously, because there's no malt whiskey in Jameson's, there's no malt whiskey in Powers, it's pure pot still, and it's a very different character.

Malt whiskey is seen the world over as the best whiskey (I suspect that this is not true in the states of Kentucky and Tennessee...), and I really think that holds true, and it's a big point of difference between Bushmills and other Irish whiskeys. Jameson's, you'll find, is a little bit oily in character, a little bit mouth-coating, and I find it a bit green, a little bit grassy. I'm not saying it's young, it's...

It's a flavor, a descriptor.

Yeah. I also think it's a bit unbalanced, but we leave that to everybody (? Did I mention that it was very noisy in the bar?). I always find that a good whiskey will always improve when you add some water to it. If you add water to Bushmills, what happens to it is, the aromas are released into the glass. Your nose is very sensitive: it can actually detect parts per billion, your nose, it's tremendously sensitive, whereas your palate goes nowhere near that level of sensitivity. That's why at the distillery I nose all the time, I rarely actually sip whiskey.

So if you add water to Bushmills, it releases the aromas into the glass and exacerbates, or extenuates the whole tasting experience. Whereas when you do it with Jameson's, it actually kills it flat, a very unusual phenomenon. It really knocks it back, it's a very clear difference.

With Bushmills, you get this nice, light, fruity, spiciness, you get that malty character coming through. With Black Bush, because it's matured in sherry casks --

It's not all sherry casks, right?

Right. It's a mix of first-fill and second-fill sherry casks, and some third-fill casks. Your attention has to very high when you use sherry casks, because there's a possibility that you could over-sherry the whiskey, and that's not what we're going for. We're trying to really hone in on the fruitiness, hone in on the light floral notes, the typical house style of Bushmills.

(Okay, it will not be 10 months before you get Part III!)

“I’m with the Bushmills party.” The Colum Egan Interview, Part I

As I mentioned a bit ago, I got an invitation to have lunch with Colum Egan, the master distiller for Bushmills Irish Whiskey. That's him, raising a glass of Bushmills Original at a corner table at Tír na nÓg in Philly (16th & Arch), where we met two weeks ago.

A quick background: Bushmills was recently bought from French booze company Pernod-Ricard by English booze giant Diageo as part of Pernod's hugely complex buy-out of booze company Allied Domecq. Pernod owned both Bushmills and Jameson/Midleton, and sold off Bushmills, much the smaller of the two, to their rival, Diageo.

If that all seems confusing...it pretty much is, and you need a constant newsfeed to keep up with who owns who in the booze field these days. But what it comes down to is that Diageo has decided that Bushmills is a valuable property, and they're revving it up for a serious tilt at the world market. Hence Colum's visit to the U.S. for St. Patrick's week.

It was a beautiful day, not at all presaging the horrible sleety disaster we'd be experiencing just two days later, and I was actually ahead of schedule, arriving in Center City at 11:45 for our noon lunch date. Half an hour later, I had to call my Diageo contact, Laura Peet, to let her know that after having driven fruitlessly through two parking garages only to find no open spaces (I despise this process in Center City; just one more thing Philly has to solve), I was still on the streets.

Yes, mass transit fans, I know that Suburban Station is 20 yards from Tír na nÓg; but if there had been parking available, it would have been 30 minutes from my door to the bar, compared to 80 minutes by choo-choo, and I was jamming on a tight deadline day already. There is no good solution.

Laura called me back in two minutes; the Phoenix Building, where Tír na nÓg is located, has valet parking. I rushed over, stepped down the sidewalk, and entered Tír na nÓg.

"Can I help you, sir?"

“Yes, I’m with the Bushmills party.” What a fine, fine thing to say in an Irish pub!

As mentioned above, Colum was sitting with Laura in the corner in a very busy, happily noisy part of the bar (truth to tell, it was all like that; busy place). I only had 30 minutes to do an hour interview, so we skipped lunch, ordered a round of whiskeys (“What will you have?” asked Colum – first test – and I laughed. “You’re the master distiller: you order, I’ll drink!” He ordered two glasses of Black Bush with a bit of ice), and got right into the interview.

What is it that makes Irish whiskey Irish whiskey?

It is quite different. The whole history of Irish whiskey is unique. If you go back even as recent as 120 years ago, there would have been as many as 140 distilleries open in Ireland, making whiskey. Today there are only three. [Since then, just last week, actually, the Kilbeggan distillery began production again…so four distilleries. ] A very short timespan in the history of whiskey-making.

One of the main reasons for that was actually Prohibition. A lot of distilleries in Ireland at the time were independently-owned and quite small, and their biggest market, or perhaps their only market, was the States. Almost overnight, that market was closed to them. Of course, when you’re making whiskey today, you’re putting it in an oak barrel to sell it in another three to five years. A lot of distilleries just stopped making whiskey. Then they were not able to sell, so they didn’t make any money, so they just simply had to close.

Coming up to today, one of my main jobs is to keep that tradition and that heritage going. There’s a little saying there that goes: Bushmills isn’t good because it’s old, it’s old because it’s good. It’s a nice simple way of putting it. We’ve come through a lot of adversity and hard times. Hopefully, at the moment, things seem to be prospering for us after all that time. I like to think that the quality of our whiskey, the taste of our whiskey is contributing a lot to that.

What makes Bushmills whiskey different from other whiskeys of the world is the smoothness of the character. We distill the whiskey three times. When you distill a whiskey three times, you get this lovely, light, fruity whiskey with nice spicy, flowery notes.

We pay very particular attention to how we age the whiskey. We age the whiskey in different types of barrels. By law, in Ireland, for whiskey to be called Irish whiskey, it must be distilled in Ireland, matured in an oak barrel for a minimum of three years – and Bushmills is actually a minimum of five years – and made from a cereal, like barley, or wheat, or corn.

So what gives Bushmills its great taste is the triple distillation, but we also put it into these very high-quality oak barrels. I can get a [bourbon] barrel from Kentucky delivered to us at the distillery for about $50 a barrel; if I have to go to Spain [for sherry barrels], it costs me $750 a barrel.

That was one of the questions I had: where are you getting all the sherry barrels? They’re not easy to come by any more, are they?

Some sherry barrels are easy to come by; they’re very low quality! When it comes to Bushmills, when it comes to me, actually, I demand something very different, something very high quality. The reason for that, we have a great relationship with a family in Jerez, in Spain, in the sherry producing region. They cooper the barrels for us, to our specifications. Then they will put our lots of sherry into our oak barrels for two years. The sherry actually seasons the wood. They’ll take our lots of sherry out, they’ll send the barrels back to the distillery, and we’ll actually fill them within two weeks of receiving them.

They’re your barrels?

We pay for the wood, we pay the cooper, so we know exactly where the wood’s from, we know exactly who’s coopered them, and we know exactly what kind of wine’s been in there. One of the really tough jobs at the distillery is actually going to Spain and tasting some of the wine that’s coming out of there…

Do you reject any because of the quality of the wine coming out?

Aaaa, no, we’ve got such a good relationship with the cooper that there are very, very few casks that end up being a problem. It’s just fascinating over there, really. I thought that my grammy was the only one still drinking sherry, but when you’re out there, you really get the degree of passion they have for sherry.

We do a similar thing in Portugal with Sandeman. They will put tawny port in our oak barrels. We go to Sandeman every year and inspect our barrels. We go to Madeira Island, a small Portuguese island in the Atlantic, where they make Madeira wine, and that’s how we finish the 21 Year Old.

Another key difference between Irish and other whiskeys, I suppose, is that we don’t smoke our barley. There’s a complete absence of any smoky, peaty aroma.

[An interjection: Note that the definition of Irish whiskey is quite muddled by now, which is hardly Colum’s fault! To wit: Cooley is definitely Irish whiskey – it’s whiskey made in Ireland, after all – but it’s only twice-distilled, and their Connemara whiskey is peated. The triple-distillation’s not unique anyway: both Auchentoshan (Scotch single malt whisky) and Woodford Reserve (bourbon) are also triple-distilled. Then there’s the “pure pot still” vs. “malt whiskey” issue: Midleton, where they distill Jameson’s – which is definitely Irish whiskey – makes “pure pot still whiskey” with a mashbill of barley malt and unmalted raw barley. Bushmills is an all-malt whiskey.

What does all this mean? Well, as John Hansell told me recently while we were discussing this issue: “Irish whiskey is whiskey that’s made in Ireland.” That’s as close as you’re going to get to a rock-solid definition that’s going to hold off challenges. Now…do I think that’s the whole story? No. I think Colum’s original statement is actually pretty damned close, in a subjective sense: “…lovely, light, fruity whiskey with nice spicy, flowery notes.” There are still exceptions, but if “Irish whiskey” has a character, that’s it. In My Humble Opinion, of course. On with the interview.]

Can we back up a bit? You said that once the sherry cask gets back to the distillery, it’s usually filled within two weeks?

Yeah. We get the casks over to the distillery. You need to fill them as soon as possible: wood dries out, and then if you were to put something in the cask, it would just pour out through the staves. We try to do it in two weeks; it can take longer.

[Our whiskeys arrived at this point.]

You find with Black Bush, I really do, the sensation that, it’s so soft, it just floats on my tongue, it never really touches my tongue, just floats down, it’s like velvet down the back of your throat.

It was the first Irish whiskey I had that I liked.

It’s a great introduction. You have to be very careful when you use sherry casks. You don’t want to overdo it. I’m not trying to make a sherry, I’m not trying to make a port, I’m not trying to make a bourbon, I’m trying to get some notes from each of those cask types that will contribute to the basic spirit I’m making at the distillery.

[That's the end of Part I. More to come soon, now that I've finally got the hang of transcribing from my new digital voice recorder!]