Spring 2025 Banquet

Learning from the past

  • Roddy Martine
  • January 13 2025

Distillation

Nick Morgan delves deep into a new book that holds the secrets of whisky distillation in the 19th century.

The Distillation of Whisky is the 471-page heavyweight follow-up to The Distilleries of Great Britain and Ireland, which was published in 2022. The tome is beautifully produced, with thoughtful introductory essays by Keepers Dave Broom and Angus Winchester. This time though, the meat in the hefty sandwich is a series of reproductions of ‘how to’ articles from The Wine and Spirit Trade Record (WSTR) and Ridley’s Wine and Spirit Trade Circular (Ridley’s), two of the most influential and widely read drinks trade journals of the 19th and early 20th century.

From the WSTR we have ‘The Distillation of Whisky, Notes and Observations on its Historical and Practical Aspects’, and from Ridley’s ‘Practical Notes on Whisky Manufacture’, all published in late 1927 and 1931, so almost contemporaneous with the distillery profiles in Distilleries of Great Britain.

Normally residing in the British Library’s cavernous remote storage facility at Boston Spa in England, journals like these are rarely seen because few people have the time or inclination to spend months page turning through decades of editions in search of hidden historical gems. So, publisher James Eadie, and in particular Leon Kuebler, have to be congratulated once more for making material like this more widely available.

One hundred years ago this type of content was far from unique; trade journals were always publishing ‘how tos’ and technical pieces to capture the interests (and subscriptions) of manufacturers of a range of alcoholic beverages. Similar didactic articles can be found in the British Newspaper Archive from the turn of the nineteenth century; in the Distiller’s, Brewers’ and Spirit Merchants’ Magazine for instance, but if you don’t want to spend months and months in hushed reading rooms poring over trade journals, the content of the material will be as surprising as the breadth of its coverage and the degree of technical detail.

It was in the last decades of the 19th century that scientists began to turn their attention to the production of whisky. Getting the attention and engagement of the industry was not an easy thing in a craft that was (then, and now) guarded by the double-edged sword of tradition. Distillers were behind the times. “In regard to the application of science,” said Dr Philip Shidrowitz in a lecture to the Scottish Section of the Institute of Brewing in January 1907, “the whisky distiller more or less occupies the position which was taken up by the brewer 30 or 40 years ago”. The “distilleries which avail themselves to the fullest degree of science” were, he concluded, “few and far between”. Things began to change when a growing industry of international proportions with massive investment in new plants, as well as two parliamentary enquiries in 20 years, and the need for blenders to deliver a consistent product to thirsty consumers, brought scientists like Schidrowitz, and industry experts, into the spotlight, and into print.

One frequent contributor of instructive technical articles was the eminence grise J A Nettleton. His book, The Manufacture of Whisky and Plain Spirit, first published in 1893, with a revised edition in 1913, became the handbook for many a 20th century distiller. The well-thumbed copy in my library was owned by the chief-engineer at Cameronbridge Distillery in the 1970s. Nettleton was also a frequent contributor of instructive technical articles to The Wine Trade Review and The Distillers Magazine, like those published here. Meanwhile Excise officers like Joseph Scarisbrick (once stationed on Islay) and W H Nithsdale (once stationed in Glasgow) were also known to put pen to paper. Few people knew the industry more intimately than they and their colleagues. Scarisbrick wrote The Beer Manual in 1890, followed by Hydrometry and Spirit Values in 1893, and The Spirit Manual, historical and technical in 1897 (when he was living in Port Ellen). Nithsdale jointly authored Practical Brewing, an elementary treatise which first appeared in 1913. First published in The Wine and Spirit Trade Record in 1922 his An Alphabet of Spirit Terms remains one of the most comprehensive guides to every technical and legal aspect of distilling. Could he have been the unknown author of the intensely detailed articles in The Distillation of Whisky in the WSTR?

How was it made? What did it taste like? The current fascination with ‘old fashioned whisky’ was no doubt one of the drivers behind compiling this weighty publication. For many enthusiasts who muse and opine on this existential question, the very oldest ‘old fashioned whiskies’ they have tasted will have been distilled after the second world war, and the most readily available (and affordable) of these are blends like Johnnie Walker and White Horse, rather than single malts. Technically however, these are all modern whiskies. Anything made after 1946, when distilleries were allowed to brew and distil concurrently, is of a very different character to what went before. Then, distilleries were expanded and rebuilt, and production ramped up in the 1950s and early 1960s at the behest of a government that saw Scotch as ‘an invaluable export and dollar producer’, so these modern whiskies only got more modern.

 

Watchwords

Even in these post-modern days of helter-skelter ‘innovations’ most distillers don’t talk easily about change. Tradition and authenticity, rooted mostly in a deep misunderstanding of whisky’s past, are the watchwords of the industry. Yet ever since the Excise Act of 1823 the history of whisky making has been one of continual change in the size and scale of production, in the raw materials being used, and in the plant and technology applied to produce and mature it. When Nettleton published the revised edition of The Manufacture of Whisky 20 years after the first, it was because, as he explained, so much had changed in the intervening 20 years ‘both in brewing and distilling processes’ and with yeast making. The ’old fashioned whiskies’ of the 1880s and 1890s were very different from those of the early 20th century, and from those of the late 1920s described in this book. They were certainly as different from the whiskies of the 1960s as the whiskies we make today are from them. So, when we talk about ‘old fashioned whisky’ the question should be, which ‘old fashioned whisky’ do you want? There are so many to choose from.

What this book provides is a high-resolution snapshot of one version of ‘old fashioned whisky’, or rather what the unknown authors thought that particular ‘old fashioned whisky’ should be. For all the painfully detailed information presented here, along with the equally detailed technical drawings of stills and other pieces of equipment (things of beauty in themselves) there is no guarantee that these practices were actually followed in the way described. If the photographs reproduced in Distilleries of Great Britain and Ireland are anything to go by, the distillers and distillery operators of the 1920s were long in the tooth and no doubt deeply attached to traditional craft practices that may well have been passed down to them by father, uncle and grandfather. The anonymous authors of the pieces produced here were whisky pundits, giving their readers what they believed to be the history of whisky making, and what they believed to be the best practice of the moment, and opinionated pundits don’t always know best.

To really know how whisky was made in the late 1920s, these articles would be just one piece of the puzzle. You would also need to turn to distillery barley and malt books, compare books, and warehouse ledgers. If they survived, you’d want detailed distillery drawings which reveal the size of the various vessels in use, to allow a fairly accurate reconstruction of how the process worked on a particular site. Sadly, the industry has been too careless of its allegedly cherished history. So much so that few complete, or even partial, collections of distillery records have survived. Many were destroyed by the white heat of technology in the 1960s. So we have to fall back on sources such as those published here, and the scientific books and articles by Nettleton, Shidrowitz and Stuart Hastie (who ran Peter Mackie’s laboratory at Hazelburn and eventually became head of Scottish Malt Distillers in 1930) to give us snapshots of what might have been done at any particular point in time.

Snapshots, like random photographs in a forgotten family album, come without context. The introductory essays express surprise that foreign barley was being used by distillers in the 1920s, but this had increasingly been the case since the growing demands of the distilling industry outpaced the ability of Scottish farmers – hindered by a short growing season, poor weather and uncertain harvests – to meet the needs for high quality malting barley in the nineteenth century. “It is very noticeable” wrote Ridley’s in September 1881 “that a great deal of foreign barley is now used by Highland distillers. Men who a few years ago would have turned, with something akin to sorrow, from anything but the home grown, now mash Danish, French, Chilean, Algerian and other growths, with positive advantages to the whisky.” The distillers who Alfred Barnard spoke with on distillery tours in the 1880s may have told him that they used only home-grown barley (as they do today), but the reality was different. “The variable nature of our climate” continued Ridley’s, “is apt to give us one year very fine, the next very inferior barley, and it is a great advantage to our distillers that they are now being supplied by foreign countries, where a more equitable climate causes grain to be produced, which, if not equal to our best year’s growths, yet runs more uniform in quality.”

It might also be observed that the relative absence of comment on blending, and the influence that blenders had on distilling practices in these articles from the 1920s might be because the subject dominated whisky content in most trade journals between the 1880s and the Royal Commission on Whisky of 1908. Those 30 years witnessed a battle between ‘highland distillers’ on the one hand, and grain whisky distillers and blenders on the other. By the time the Commission started hearing evidence it was patently obvious to all but the backwoodsmen from Banff and Moray that the battle was lost. The blenders had been driving much change in distilling practices, aimed at producing lighter styles of spirits, since at least the 1890s. Blending houses and brewers were the principal customers of Scotland’s distillers. Increasingly they owned, or invested in, distilleries. They called the shots.

 

Look to the past

For all the detail in this fascinating collection of articles, how can we really know what ‘old fashioned’ whisky from the late 1920s tasted like? The answer for the team behind the publication was to follow the whisky pundits’ instructions and make it. “How do you go about recreating the whisky of the past?” asks the book: “turn to the distilleries of the future.” Ardnamurchan, Dornoch, Holyrood, InchDairnie, and Lochlea distilleries, along with ‘an unnamed farm distillery in the heart of the Kingdom of Fife’ are all participating in Project 1927. Yeasts, barley varieties, floor maltings, fermentation times and distillation rates are all being experimented with, each distillery taking inspiration from the pages of these two trade journals to produce specific distillates. A seventh spirit will be produced by blending new make from each of the six stills, ‘blending at birth’ as the book describes it, a technique common from the late 19th century.

The subject of maturation was not greatly covered in this treatise on distilling, so it was decided that the spirits will be matured in ‘ex-virgin’ American oak and ex-Oloroso quarter casks and hogsheads, sadly not representative of maturation regimes in the 1920s.

Samples of the new make spirits will be available in the autumn of this year from Royal Miles Whiskies, and further mature sets will be released in 2027, 2030 and 2032. It’s rather like a whisky version of the ‘7 Up’ series of television documentaries about children growing up in the second half of the 20th century, and it offers enthusiasts a chance to taste at least one interpretation of one particular moment in whisky distilling’s past.

 

Find out more about The Distillation of Whisky book and Project 1927 here: bit.ly/Keep_Project1927

 

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