Hello, it’s Gordon Thomson from Whisky Rocks. Thank you for allowing me into your inbox, and for reading this, a new guide to whisky, written by me and the Barley magazine team.
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Previously, on Whisky Rocks….
Displaced monks take their distillation expertise out into the farms and rural areas of Scotland and Ireland after the dissolution of the monasteries. Production rockets but it’s a potent brew: wild, rough and unregulated, drunk straight from the still.
Whisky production is driven underground by the tax on malt, and moonshiners make hay - and a lot of illicit whisky.
The Excise Act of 1823 legalises whisky and smuggling is slowly snuffed out. It’s boom time….
By 1824 there are approximately 167 licenced distilleries registered in Scotland, and by 1826 this has risen sharply to 264.
A revolutionary column still invented in the 1830s by Irishman Aeneas Coffey transforms whisky production, making it possible to produce lighter, smoother whiskies such as Irish whiskey and American bourbon.
A small black beetle lays waste to the vineyards of France in the 1860s, decimating the wine and brandy industry.
By the time it recovers, drinkers have ditched brandy and taken up whisky, now matured in sherry casks, in their droves…
A masterful mix - the age of the blender
Let’s talk about blending. It changed everything. And tellingly it came at exactly the right time, just as bereft brandy drinkers were looking to whisky to provide a smooth and palatable alternative to their drink of choice, the one that marauding beetle snatched away. Andrew Usher, whose family ran its own spirits merchant business in Edinburgh, is regarded as the Godfather of Blending. He was unquestionably a pioneer. In the mid 19th century Usher worked out that by mixing rough-tasting single malt whiskies, with the relatively new grain whiskies, he was able to create a more accessible ‘polite’ whisky that was lighter and sweeter in character; and emphatically more sellable to a wider mainstream audience.
Usher was a disruptor but other trailblazers were on the scene at the time too, including a Perth shopkeeper called Arthur Bell (yes, of the very same Bell’s) and John ‘Johnnie’ Walker, who started out selling whisky from his grocery shop in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, in the 1830s. In those days, most shops offered a line
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