Whisky by Aeneas MacDonald

Author:Aeneas MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

One of a set of six contemporary postcards satirising the work of the experts of the Royal Commission on Whiskey. Thomson’s mother was a staunch temperance advocate but, more than one hundred years on, the image bears a striking resemblance to a well-known whisky writer!

As the century progressed, however, it became obvious that these definitions could not be adhered to. By the ’70s it could no longer be concealed that much of the barley used in making Scotch whisky was grown abroad. This was a grave breach with tradition, for as early as 1703 the bailies of Strath Spey decreed that aqua vitae was to be brewed only from malt grown in the locality.

The introduction of patent-still distilling had an even more disturbing effect in the art of whisky-making. For if a patent-still spirit was a whisky, then where was the line to be drawn? Only by wresting the name ‘whisky’ violently from its earlier, well-established meaning could it be applied to the neutral, ‘silent’, flavourless product of the patent-still. Adam Young in his Distillery Instructions18 refuses the name whisky to patent-still spirits; as late as 1890 it was widely and authoritatively denied.

But the Royal Commission on Whiskey of 1908–1909 opened the dykes to the invading floods of patent-still spirit by defining whisky as ‘a spirit obtained by distillation from a mash of cereal grain, saccarified by the diastase of malt.’ This was comprehensive enough, and sweeping enough. It made no distinction between Scotch and Irish whiskies; it did not stipulate that the grain or malt should be home grown; it did not specify that pot-stills alone were to be used; it did not mention Scotch whisky’s true character as a distillate of a wort made from malt. As one commentator19 has sardonically observed, it was at least something that beetroot, potatoes, and sawdust were eliminated. They may have been by the sagacious Commission but at least one of them, potatoes, is mentioned in an exhibit at the Science Museum, South Kensington, as a source from which whisky can be obtained!

The reckless extension of the term ‘whisky’ has had the gravest consequences for the prestige of the industry. It has tended to deprive whisky of the special character it had built up during centuries of careful and pious labour and research. The tasteless distillate of grain, made at one process in a patent-still, is equally entitled to call itself whisky as the exquisite, pot-still, malt whisky, dried above a peat fire. It is only right to say that the definition was made in defiance of the best opinion of the distilling industry. The Duke of Richmond and Gordon, landlord of the most famous of all whisky districts, gave expression to this opinion in a speech in 1909: ‘Quite recently, a public inquiry has taken upon itself to decide, What is Whisky? And I regret to say that apparently anything made in Scotland, whatever its combination, is to be called Scotch whisky. But for my part, I should prefer, and I

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