Episode 1 Scotch! The Story of Whisky

This is the story of whisky,

and I start it right here, in the heart of Tokyo.

Around these streets are bars crammed with people

imbibing the amber liquid.

It will be a fascinating journey,

so come with me as I tell the story of Scotland's gift to the world.

I'm going on a pilgrimage to find out why such a simple drink

has come to mean so much.

Hi, my name is Jim, I'm from Scotland.

From the makers to the marketeers,

and the chemists to the cocktail makers,

and from the Highlands to Hobart in Tasmania.

I'll be meeting the people and travelling to the places immersed

in Scottish whisky's world story.

This is the tale of an ancient craft that became a global colossus.

It is the tale of Scotch.

Isn't it grand that this stuff's made in Scotland?

Aye, but that's gey true.

The one country that has given its name unchallengeably to a product

that is known and accepted in every corner of the world, Scotch -

enjoyed by all peoples on all occasions.

For half a millennium,

Scotch whisky has been made by the fermenting and distilling

of water and barley.

The spirit these ingredients conjure up is then filtered into oak casks

and left to mature.

It is a raw, simple recipe,

and yet the result is a drink loved by millions of people

across the planet.

The nature of distillation is that distillers use what grow around them.

If you're in France, you use grapes to make brandy.

If you're in Mexico, you use agave to make mescal or tequila.

If you're in the Caribbean, you use cane to make rum.

In Scotland, Scotland's geology means we grow barley.

So immediately you're talking about distillers having a sense of place

and a sense of location.

And their spirits are embedded within the ground and soil,

and I would also argue the culture of that place.

In simple terms it is distilled beer.

And, you know, made from good Scottish barley, normally,

and nice, good water.

This is Scotland as seen through whisky.

Each light represents one of Scotland's 118 working distilleries.

Each twinkle is where the alchemy happens and whisky is born.

By tradition, there are five main whisky regions -

Highland, Speyside,

Islay, Campbeltown and Lowland.

Most of these distilleries produce malt whisky made from barley.

Some of it is drunk as single Scotch,

but most of it goes into blended whisky.

And just as vital for blends is grain whisky,

produced in seven distilleries across Scotland.

And when you view all of it together,

from this perspective it is truly breathtaking.

A tiny country on the fringes of north-western Europe

produces an amber liquid that spreads around the world.

No wonder Scotland regards itself as the home of whisky.

It can feel as if that status is under threat

from a number of pretenders to the throne.

Fellow whisky giants like Japan and America are chasing

Scotland's crown. Scottish distilleries are being bought up

by multinational companies.

And there is an energetic craft whisky movement,

with fresh methods of production.

Scotch is at a crossroads.

No pretender, though, will ever have Scotch whisky's greatest advantage -

the way it is interlaced with the identity of an entire nation.

The production of whisky is sort of woven into the texture and fabric

of the nation, from Lowlands to Highlands.

You don't go too far without being touched by whisky

in one respect or another. Its footprint covers the nation.

It's a bit like in Canada people talk about the Mounties are, you know,

part of Canadian fabric, and the maple leaf and things like that.

You have these symbols that represent a country,

and I have to say if ever there was a symbol that represented a country,

Scotch whisky has got to take the top honours.

Passion, I think, is the one word,

if somebody said, "How would you describe, define Scotch?"

Passion. And that's from the people who create it to the people

who drink it, to the people who market it and package it.

Passion is always at the heart of Scotch.

The writer Charlie MacLean described it as the blood of one small nation.

This is a drink of heartfelt sentiment,

and a character trait of Scotland itself.

Yet the dram reaches our lips via a colossal global industry.

In whisky there is money, vast amounts of it.

And down the years, multinational companies,

some from outside of Scotland and the UK,

have bought up Scotland's whisky distilleries.

The largest is Diageo, a British company, which owns 28.

Chivas Brothers, a French company, own 15,

largely concentrated around Speyside.

And in fact, France is still the largest consumer of Scotch whisky

in the world.

Bacardi has another five.

Beam Suntory, a Japanese company, has five,

as do Thai and Philippine corporations.

Large-scale Scottish ownership is sadly rare.

William Grant has five distilleries, Edrington four.

And right across Scotland you have the independents like Springbank

and Campbeltown, or the new craft distilleries

which are part of a burgeoning scene.

But there's also a sadness in the fact that whisky has moved so far

from its homely origins, and that only a fraction of the vast wealth

it creates stays within these shores.

This is so much more than a drink -

it's an industry, it's a brand.

This is Stirling, the ancient capital of Scotland,

and looking east from here towards Alloa,

lying between us is another capital.

It is the capital of the biggest manufacturer of spirits in the world.

And it's also the biggest manufacturer of Scotch whisky,

and it's owned by Diageo, and it is, in effect, an empire.

Diageo's Blackgrange warehouse site stretches out over 250 acres,

and has the capacity to store over 3 million casks of whisky.

There are ten miles of roadway here,

and Blackgrange even has its own fire brigade.

It is just one portion of this £50 billion drinks company.

When you think about the whisky industry, it's something

that had very humble origins,

in a little croft somewhere in a misty glen in the Highlands

or the islands of Scotland, hundreds of years ago.

When you cut to today, there is a massive,

multi-billion pound enterprise that spans the world.

And, even here in Diageo's warehouse and cooperage,

it's like a small town in its own right.

And Diageo is running an empire.

Well, I think empire is probably a key word,

because the growth of Scotch really went in parallel

with two or three things.

The first was the growth of the British Empire,

the colonial economy,

Scotsmen travelling all over the world taking a thirst and a love

for whisky with them,

which is really what promoted the earliest exports

in the 1850s and 1860s.

And then from the Empire you have the growth of global economies,

and Scotch whisky, whether people like it or not, is a global drink.

It's Scotland's gift of the world.

And it was...

-That's a lovely way of putting it.

-It is, isn't it?

-It is our gift of the world, yes.

It's absolutely true. And along with that went, I think, another gift

from Scotland, which was in the late 19th and early 20th century,

astonishing visionary entrepreneurship.

You know, the people like the Ballantines and the Chivas brothers,

and the Johnnie Walkers and the Dewars,

these guys who took this crofting thing, this wonderful drink,

and had the vision to turn it into something on an absolutely

global scale. Which meant inventing things like...

What you're seeing today was invented about 100 years ago -

the logistics on a huge scale that people never thought of doing.

The fundamentals are still the same.

-Absolutely the same.

-And the process has been refined.

Yeah. The process has been refined,

but the thing about these early entrepreneurs,

which actually is what you've been seeing as well today -

they were obsessed by quality.

They were obsessed by quality and obsessed by consistency.

So how you make your stills, how you make your barrels,

how you put your blends together,

is what's going to give you the drink that will conquer the world.

And that's what they wanted to do then, and that's what we do now,

we just do it at this huge scale.

I think that the big companies actually drive a lot of quality,

and I've got a lot of respect for that, actually.

I think it is a really good, powerful thing.

I mean, ultimately, these smaller distilleries wouldn't be starting up

here in Scotland if it wasn't for all the efforts that the big boys

have put into creating great products that go around the world

telling everybody about what we do in Scotland.

Working with smaller companies, family-owned companies,

the few that are left, they can typically make faster decisions,

they can make more decisive decisions.

They're not as committee-bound.

But they don't have the depth of resources that perhaps

the multinationals do, they don't have the global distribution reach,

they don't have the power of a bigger portfolio of spirits

that helps those multinationals in trade negotiations

with the trade right round the world.

Whether small distillery or industrial titan,

whisky is underpinned by traditional craft skills.

Whisky production will always need human hands.

Despite its own size, Diageo seem to know this homely truth,

as I found in visits to their coppersmiths and then cooperage.

Charlie, where are we going now?

So this is the copper shop where we fabricate all the copper stills.

We obviously have to keep it separate from the other metals

that we are fabricating in, so we don't get cross-contamination

of the different materials.

They're beautiful beasts, aren't they?

I love them. I love the way the light catches them,

you know, the burnished copper.

They actually look like sculptures in copper.

-They do.

-They are like works of art.

There are different shapes, different shapes for different distilleries.

Yes.

So these are made to order?

Yes, these are for Mannochmore.

And if we went back, I'll have the original engineering drawings for these.

So we don't have to design ourselves,

we just replicate exactly what they've got in the distillery.

You have to touch it, don't you?

It feels alive, it really does, and hear the echo.

Most of this is done by hand?

All of the important parts are done by hand, yes.

The shape of the still is probably the most critical part

in the whisky-making process.

What happens is,

as the spirit vapours run up,

more and more of them will condense on the side of the still.

They'll run back down into liquid, and be re-distilled.

And the more times that happens,

the lighter the character of the whisky you will get.

And that will ultimately affect the final flavour of the whisky?

The character of the whisky, yes.

Fittingly, for a drink steeped in mythology,

there seems to be little agreement about what exactly

makes whisky's flavour.

You cannot make whisky unless you use copper.

-You would say that.

-No, no, the scientists,

the clever people have tried, not me.

They have tried in the past - it's got to be copper.

Tell me, how much do you think the copper influences the final taste of the whisky?

Absolutely. You can put it in barrels to get flavour enhancement...

What do you mean you CAN put it in barrels? You have to put it in barrels.

You can do it in different types of barrels to get flavour enhancements.

But copper's the most important part of the whisky-making process.

That determines the character of your whisky.

You're a hard man to argue with, Charlie.

By law, all Scotch whiskies for the home market have to mature

for at least three years,

and the casks in which they are stored are all-important.

Used sherry casks made of stout Spanish oak have a special place

in the Scotch whisky industry.

Tom, what are these guys doing?

Well, what they are doing here, David... These are actually

ex-wine casks that have been broken down and palletised.

So basically they've been used in the wine industry.

What the guys are doing is taking them off the pallets and putting

them onto the barrows there. And typically we'll rise that cask.

So you can see from that stave there,

that's actually been a red wine cask.

So what we'll do with that is, through the process,

we will re-fire that cask and put a nice char on that cask.

That's exactly what we are looking for.

The cask is the most important thing for the whisky industry.

That's where the whisky is matured,

that's where it gets its flavour and its colour from.

It's very important to the whisky industry.

Now, you see, the copper workers where they make the stills

would disagree with you. I agree with you -

I think it's the cask that gives you the predominant taste in the whisky.

Yeah. I mean, the coppersmiths play a very important part, you know,

for distinctive distilleries in getting the flavour as well.

But, for me, the important part is really the cask and how it goes through

the maturation process in the warehouses, so it's very important for us.

What puts the flavour into whisky are a lot of things, sometimes you

easily say that it's around 60%, 70% of the flavour

comes from the barrel, from the maturation, from the oak.

It could very well be that the thing with producing malt whisky

is that we really don't know exactly where the flavour comes from.

It probably comes from the barley as well.

Least of all it comes from the water, I can probably say that.

We used to notice, when we were nosing the whisky,

that if a man came on shift

and he had a fight with his wife before he came on shift,

his attitude to distilling was very different if he'd just come out

having given her a nice kiss before he left.

It was a completely different approach -

a loving approach on the one hand, and a hateful approach on the other.

And the whisky definitely,

you know, reflected that kind of attitude.

You know, people who know their craft,

they know when the spirit is right.

They know when those casks are able to be reused or if they should

have a stave changed.

There's these little bits that are, you know...

Science is hugely important to it and we can't deny that,

but humans and our impact on it and how each person makes their whisky

in their own way, or each distillery does,

is still very important, I think.

And that adds the slight magic to it as well.

I'm an advocate of the magicry.

But behind all the magicry, there is a logic and a science.

But it is more about feeling and understanding the whisky,

and understanding the DNA of the whisky.

We actually... For almost every cask we have,

we have got a fingerprint of how it's been developing

over the last...whatever -

eight, nine, ten years.

Casks... Typically, a cask will last in excess of 100 years.

So casks will come in here, we'll rejuvenate the cask,

and we might not see it again for 25 or 30 years.

Then it will come back again and we can rejuvenate it again.

And it goes on like that.

OK, David, so this, as you can see,

this is a cask that's been through the charring process.

You can see the nice char we've got inside the cask -

that's exactly what we're looking for,

a good uniformed char.

The edge is really blackened, isn't it?

-Yes, it's really black.

-Do you scrape that?

That's it finished, that's it ready for filling now,

that's exactly what we're looking for.

So you'll put the liquor straight into that barrel now?

Yes, absolutely, yes.

Since this has been in the furnace there, the internal flames,

it hasn't been touched?

It's only been sprayed with water to cool it down, and that's it?

Yes, that's it.

What we'll do now is we'll put the cask ends back in the cask,

retighten the hoops and off it'll go and that will be filled

in the filling store today,

and be back in the warehouses, if not tonight, tomorrow.

And it will lie there for another five, six, whatever years.

And this all ends up in my single malt whisky?

That's it, yeah. That's how you can sit back and enjoy it.

No wonder I like burnt toast!

I'd like to introduce you to a couple of the guys here.

This is Paul.

Paul's a third year apprentice.

And this is John, John's his tutor.

This is David.

Coopering isn't for everyone.

Obviously, a laddie who's got a good bit of strength about him helps.

If you're a good build laddie it helps,

but when I started I was tiny, I was a wee skinny thing.

That's what your apprenticeship's all about, for the four years it helps build up your core,

your body strength to become... The end result is a cooper.

It's not something that happens overnight, as I say, four years.

That's it been cut back, it used to be a lot longer, five years, seven years.

When my grandfather was a cooper it was seven, sometimes nine.

So...

Surely that was just an excuse not to pay them a full wage?

-Maybe!

-Rather than taking seven or eight years to train.

A lot of the system was changed by machines,

so a lot of the hand work was taken out of it.

What we're left with now is just the core.

This is something that they really need to learn.

Basically, if they were wanting to go anywhere in the world

they would be employable anywhere.

They could make a barrel anywhere, not just in Diageo.

Like many whisky companies, Diageo is a member of

the Scotch Whisky Association, or SWA.

Based in Edinburgh, the SWA seeks to give the industry a unified,

global voice.

We do lots of things, but we do two things in particular.

First of all we try and chase down fake,

fraudulent Scotch whisky round the world,

we have a team of legal advisers who help us do that.

And second we help get Scotch whisky into markets overseas,

we work to influence other governments to take down barriers

so that there is fair competition for our product around the world.

According to the SWA,

each year the Scotch whisky industry adds £5 billion of value

to the UK economy.

Vital to Scotch whisky is the export market -

this drink now reaches 175 countries.

Over 1 billion bottles of Scotch whisky are exported annually,

at a value of around £4 billion.

It also contributes £1 billion to the UK Exchequer,

with an average bottle taxed at a rate of 76% in VAT and excise duty.

Whisky and tax have long gang thegither.

The mother of parliaments, its tentacles spread across the land,

ensnaring all in their wake.

They always have.

And in the century after the Act Of Union, this place

grappled hard with the whisky industry.

What Westminster wanted to do was to curb excessive drinking,

while at the same time reap the revenues from whisky sales.

Throughout the 18th century, Westminster churned out legislation

that entangled distilleries large and small.

Therefore, Islay, Campbeltown and Speyside...

The whisky making went underground

so the amber nectar became moonshine,

and Scotland's illicit stills flourished.

While the taxed industry ploughed on, the moonshiners thrived.

Hidden from view and hard to reach for the dreaded excise man,

illicit distillers perfected their craft.

Theirs became the whisky drunk not only by crofters,

peasants and the urban poor, but by the aristocracy too.

The illicit whisky was seen as the true quality.

So it was asked for

on King George IV's visit of Scotland,

1822.

Sir Walter Scott very carefully stage-managed,

the King asked for a drop of the real Glenlivet, long in the wood,

and long in uncorked bottles.

So, you know, street cred was pretty good -

he was asking for Glenlivet.

And from that, the reform of the distilling acts were speeded up

by the landed gentry who wanted to see an end to the illicit distilling,

but saw that there was a way of improving their estates, etc.

And controlling it, of course.

In the 1820s, law changes eased conditions and taxation

and turned the old centres of illicit distilling into booming,

legitimate whisky areas.

Among them, Campbeltown flourished.

This is Campbeltown. It was once Whisky Mecca,

for in its heyday it had 34 distilleries.

Sadly, today, there are only three.

Up every alleyway was a portal to another distillery.

The air must have hung like a strange perfume,

heady, intoxicating, delightful.

You can almost sense the ghosts of distilleries past.

"Campbeltown Loch, I wish you were whisky,"

were the words of an old music hall song,

and it might just as well have been,

because this bay would have swarmed with ships ready to take

the liquid delights from Campbeltown out across the oceans

to the rest of the world.

Campbeltown thrived thanks to its deep natural harbour,

rich raw materials and ready access to the ocean

and, therefore, export markets.

In Victorian times it was nicknamed the Whisky Metropolis.

Then after World War I, a dreadful combination of factors

all but ended whisky making here.

This is the shell of one of the 34 distilleries that used to exist

in Campbeltown.

The ghosts of whisky past.

The only spirits that are here now are the spirits of the whisky makers

of bygone days.

God, I bet these stones could tell a tale or two.

Campbeltown had produced too much whisky, much of it low in quality,

at a time when consumption levels were falling.

What's more, natural resources were running low,

and the railways that helped roll Highland and Speyside whisky

out to the markets never arrived here.

It's time to find an antidote to that tale of woe, a place where

the best of Campbeltown remains well and truly alive.

This is Springbank distillery in the heart of Campbeltown

and it's a very unique place I've always wanted to visit.

For a start it's been owned by the same whisky family

for over 200 years. And also, every single part

of the whisky making process,

from the malting, the distilling,

the maturing and the bottling is all done on site,

and I'm going to witness the whole process.

Springbank is at the centre of the community here

and employs more than 70 locals.

Today I'm joining them, having enrolled in one of

their whisky schools under the capable guidance of Kerry,

who has worked her way up from shop floor to distiller.

Kerry, how long has this been soaking?

This has been soaking for two days,

12 hours at a time.

So the first time we'll soak it for 12 hours,

we'll leave it to dry for 12 hours.

Leave it to dry in here in the tank?

Yeah. And then we'll re-fill it with water for 12 hours,

and then again dry for 12 before it's laid out onto the floor.

Tip it up.

Starch in the barley has been modified

so that later in the process, it will become sugar.

The new barley is wet and warm.

In three days, some whiskery roots appear.

After seven days it's almost ready for the drying.

As the barley dries, it is regularly turned to help its germination.

You'll see it actually lifting from the bottom and throwing it over,

so it's turning.

We've been making whiskies, most of us, for a long time.

So, yeah,

it's part of our rhythm of life.

The year goes round, a distilling year, very much like a farming year,

which we are connected to. The crops are being put in just now,

we'll be watching the progress of the barley throughout Scotland

for the next few months, we'll watch the harvest, etc,

and, yes, it's just...

I live in a village where there are ten distilleries so I can't help

but bump into folk that are involved in distilleries.

Being a student of whisky made me realise the amount of hard toil

that goes into distilling when it's undertaken traditionally,

as it is here at Springbank.

You earn your dram.

This is quite steep.

-Oh!

-You can smell it, you can smell the peat,

the smell of smoke.

So this is the first half we put away this morning.

This is the second half just dropping in now.

So what you've seen from above, this is where it's dropping into.

That's coming off the conveyor belt upstairs?

Exactly. And dropping in, yeah.

A conveyor belts transports the barley into a kiln,

where it is either dried or smoked with peat,

depending on the type of whisky being made.

I'm very biased, I have to say, I would like to see, as there are,

more individual distilleries opening up because each individual distillery

has to find a market for its whisky,

as in its single malt whisky.

If the majority of what you make is going off to be blended,

which is a very big market,

it's something which means you're making more and more,

rather than you're watching what you're making.

So small, independent distilleries,

like ourselves and a few others...

The quality of what they're going to put their label on

is very important to them.

If they become too big then it starts to become

the quantity they can sell,

and I think that's something which makes the difference between

a corporate with lots of shareholders to fund

and something like Springbank.

As we're making a batch of peaty whisky, it's time to light the fire.

I'm just about to set Springbank distillery on fire.

It's this peat reek, an essential part of the process

which helps to give the malt whiskies their individuality.

The dried malt is stored ready for use. A grinding mill,

the first of many modern machines in today's process,

replaces the two flat stones used by our great-grandfathers.

The malt is reduced to grist -

coarse, medium and fine.

Next, Springbank veteran Gavin takes me to the Porteous rolling mill,

where the peat smoked barley is ground down to become grist.

It's easier for the water...

Then a process called mashing takes place.

In a mash tun, the grist is mixed with hot water to change its starch

into fermentable sugars.

Oh, there's life going on in there, isn't there?

The sugary liquid produced, called wort, is then put into wash bags.

Yeast is added and fermentation begins,

resulting in a beer-like liquid known as wash,

of around 8% to 10% ABV.

It'll go around, eating up all the sugars, converting it into alcohol.

You know, the whole thing's live, that's an organic process going on,

gurgling and bubbling.

It's quite ferocious, more powerful than I thought.

-Get the vapours from that, eh?

-I'm really getting the vapour.

Clears the sinuses.

This wash is transferred into copper stills,

heated and then distilled twice to create clear, new make spirit.

There must be some heat in there.

Springbank has a wonderful old-fashioned atmosphere,

and traditional way of doing things,

even down to the warning bell that tells the workers

that everything is running to plan.

Hazelburn's one, two, three.

But the Springbank's at one, two and a half.

The distiller must be able to judge exactly which part of the spirit

from the second distillation is to be retained as new make,

checking on its progress as it runs through the spirit safe.

Now, do you do it...

When you know when the middle part is ready, do you do it by taste,

or by smell, or by sight?

It's all done by temperature...

as well, when it's coming in.

You'll know as well - it will be cloudy to start

when they're checking the glasses.

And then when you go on to clear spirits, the first 45 minutes

is bad, as you call it, that's all your bad spirit.

-We don't take that.

-Will you recycle that?

Yeah, that goes back in to the pipes.

As we're Scottish, we don't waste anything.

Everything gets reused right down to 1%.

It's very simple, it had to be simple for our great-grandfathers,

being distillers etc, or being involved in distilling.

My family, they were farmers, and the distilling was the other bit.

It was simple - they brewed a beer, they distilled it.

Quality was simple.

Does it smell OK?

Does it taste OK?

Do we shake the bubbles?

Is the bubbles OK?

That was their early quality control.

We're getting near the end of the process, Gavin.

The cask will sit here, you lift this up, it's like a petrol pump.

When the spirit hits the bottom of the nozzle, it cuts out,

and it records on the meter there

how many litres is going in the cask.

And then from here it is taken to the warehouse

and stored for maturation.

We had a man who always was responsible, in the filling store,

of emptying down all the pipes once we'd filled all the casks.

There was always a remnant,

and he had to take this remnant and put it into a remnant cask.

And he had to take it into a bucket and then fill it in a funnel,

into the cask.

And one day, the customs and excise officer,

who was permanently present,

came in to the filling store to check that everything was OK

and this man, I won't mention his name,

was taking a sip from a bucket...

..of the new spirit.

And the handle of the bucket went over his head,

and when the customs man came in, he was like this,

trying to shake it off, you know.

So these stories happened.

Yeah, we had excisemen who knew where the good whisky was,

and helped themselves from time to time.

It was all very...

It was just accepted as part and parcel of the job.

Once the new make has been filtered into oak casks,

it is left to mature for three years and a day,

only after which can it legally be called whisky.

Single malts like Springbank though,

are usually matured for at least a decade

and often much longer.

I never knew it was that easy to break open a cask of whisky.

Slainte.

A lovely drop to sample.

But drinking in any distillery's working area is now a rarity.

For many years though, distillery workers regularly drank on the job.

It felt like they needed to.

They might well be on shift, if they were working in the maltings,

at four or five in the morning.

And the brewer, the number two manager in the distillery,

would pour new make, or white, or cleric, as it's known,

and the boys would take off a good measure of that

and then they'd have some later in the day.

But you've got to remember, this was very hard, physical work.

Changing a malting floor, rolling a barrel,

moving casks of whisky into a warehouse

is hard, dirty, physical work.

I wouldn't care to do it.

If I had to do it, I'm sure a dram or three

would definitely be called for.

I think the alcoholism was almost deliberate,

because it kept people from asking for proper wages

and it kept people tied to a place.

I think they're very strict about people drinking now,

in the distillery, but I think also they pay them better.

If you look at a lot of these jobs,

they were not necessarily jobs that required highly educated workers.

Although they needed a good skill, they weren't necessarily highly educated,

so if you didn't have to pay them very much,

if you paid them in alcohol... Because in the '50s and '60s

alcohol was very expensive - people couldn't afford...

Normal people couldn't afford whisky every couple of weeks

or every month, so it was a way of keeping them.

So although I'm sure the stories are, "It was really fun,"

I do think it was really fun

cos that was how you got through those circumstances.

Whereas now it's a job that you get paid a good wage for.

If you can't afford to buy the single malt that you're making,

then you're going to help yourself to it a wee bit,

you know.

They were doing it for sport,

for a bit of fun, but also because it is that natural, innate rebellion

that we all have.

A distillery worker that I knew who's since retired,

he told me that when he started in the distillery in question

he had gone to listen to the radio, and the radio wasn't working

so he got another radio and it wasn't working.

And he went around the entire site and he couldn't get any

radios working, and he realised that none of them had an aerial.

And he found out the reason none of them have an aerial was cos

they'd all been broken off cos they were getting used as straws

for dramming from the casks.

These days, on-site drinking is usually confined

to visits and open days,

a core part of many a distillery's business model.

Springbank's open day takes place once a year,

and is attended by people from across the world.

I am attending Springbank whisky school, which is great.

And have you learned much from it?

Yes, I thought there was not too much they could tell me, but, yes,

I've learned a lot from it.

Coming to Scotland in 1992, I was just over the age

where I was allowed to drink, and I didn't have much money so I visited

four distilleries, because at this time it was free.

Today, it's a big business, but at this time it was free, it was marketing.

So I visited four distilleries, got four great drams,

so every time was saying, "Why are these drams different?"

And that got me into wanting to know more about whisky.

It's my 18th time coming to Scotland now.

-18th?

-Yes.

I'm also coming for other reasons, for the people, for the landscape,

for everything, but whisky is still the main reason for me to come here.

The distillery's family-owned, and has been since it opened in 1828.

The present chairman is of the impression

he now should be putting that back to Campbeltown,

because his family have had this distillery for so long.

And it's the people of Campbeltown that did the work, made the whisky,

which made the place famous.

So he now decides,

or wants to have a company which puts money back to the community, provides jobs.

It would be so much easier to bring barley in ready-malted,

but then that would lose people jobs, so we still do all that

by hand, by ourselves. We bottle the stuff here -

if we did it by sending it out to Glasgow, that's another 17 jobs.

It's very labour-intensive, but then it's also what makes us Springbank.

And I think that's why there's a feeling of pride in what we do,

cos everybody employed is a custodian for the next generation

that is going to come along. And if we expand, it's more jobs.

We're certainly not going to modernise and mechanise things.

Springbank is special -

it is as close as Scottish distilleries get to the original model.

The place is rooted in the local community,

something that shows in the merry band of workers who get the whisky

into bottles and finally to market.

That's you, you've bottled four Springbank bottles.

Even if you hold it up that way, even if there was a blemish

on the back, you can see it right through.

Did I put two labels on?

Did anyone notice?

Don't tell anybody, will you?

My secret's safe with you.

Thank you.

That's the best birthday present I've ever had, honest.

The Highland malt whiskies used in any Scotch blend of real consequence

must each be aged in oak.

Scotch in the bottle will never improve.

There is another magic secret in the creation

of an outstanding Scotch blend, and that is that there must be

a combination of many individual distillates if there is to be

a well-rounded, tasteful, distinctive Scotch of best quality.

While Springbank thrives on its single malts alone,

the strength of the whiskies industry has, in fact,

long been built on the back of blended whiskies.

A blended whisky contains many single malts and, just as crucially,

grain whisky.

It was a technological development in the distilling of grain

that changed Scotch whisky for ever.

Though makers had long blended their wares,

mass production of blends became possible after 1830.

That year an Irishman, Aeneas Coffey,

refined a Scottish invention, the continuous still.

His development, creating what is now known as the Coffey still,

meant grain whisky could be made on an enormous scale, and at low cost.

From the 1850s it was mixed with single malts to create blends

and trailblazing Scots peddled them across the world.

So you had a generation of Scots entrepreneurs who grabbed these

technological changes, who looked at the evolution in the marketplace,

who looked at the legislative changes and said,

"We can come up with a product that fits better in the marketplace."

And so the DNA of the great blends goes back to those days.

So there was a Mr Buchanan, there was a Mr Hague,

there was a Mr Walker, there was a Mr Dewar.

And so a Dewar's blend today, a Walker's blend today,

has its roots in what Mr Dewar or Mr Walker did, historically,

in the mid and late 19th century.

So Walker, for example, always had at its heart west coast whiskies.

Dewar's blend always had Perthshire whiskies at its heart.

Going from the background of having licensed grocers that blended tea,

so had this ability to take different flavours

and characteristics and blend them together

and then started blending whisky,

and then you begin getting these individuals that start, really,

travelling the world extensively and selling our wares

and going out there as pioneers.

You know, there's a number of well-known brands, nowadays,

which are blends that all carry people's names.

And to be able to tell to international visitors when they come in,

"This is not a name that we made up," that some marketing agency

10 or 20 years ago thought, "That sounds like a great Scottish name.

"That sounds like a nice picture, let's put that."

It's true. It's genuine, authentic heritage,

and these are the people that made the blends,

these and their families and their ancestors were the people that took

them to market, that were these pioneers that in some cases

where these eccentric characters.

That, I think, is one of the cornerstones of Scotch whisky

which makes it so successful in terms of its competition,

is that it has this real authenticity behind it

in these huge international brands.

The ingenuity of these blend pioneers met with a vital piece

of good fortune for Scottish whisky when, in 1871,

the phylloxera virus destroyed French vineyards.

With the vineyards destroyed, little or no brandy could be produced,

and so whisky, which up until then

had been the drink very much more of the working man,

was allowed to move into that space in the market that had hitherto

been taken by brandy

which was the drink of the middle and upper classes,

who would not have touched whisky.

But along came branding to make it more acceptable,

blending to make the product more palatable,

patriotism to make it an acceptable thing to drink,

and a shortage of supply of brandy.

The most popular middle-class drink in London at the time

is brandy and soda.

All of a sudden you've got Scots and the Irish going,

"Hello, we can actually do that as well, you know."

And they reformulate the blends to make sure it does go

with soda or ginger ale or whatever.

All of a sudden you've got popularity,

you've got middle-class respectability.

That's the way any drink is built -

as long as you've got a middle-class behind you, you're going to be fine.

With the vineyards barren for another 25 years,

Scotch whisky now only had one rival competitor - Ireland.

Prohibition in the USA became a victory for Scotland.

Various bootleggers head across to Ireland and knock on the door

of Mr Jamieson, Mr Roe, Mr Power and they go,

"Listen guys, ship the stuff to Canada or to Bermuda or wherever.

"My friend Mr Capone here, you can trust him,

"he will ship it in for you.

"You will have done nothing illegal.

"All you'll have done is shipping to somewhere where booze is legal."

The Irish distillers, to a man, said, "Be gone with you."

They then moved from Ireland across to London, and up to Glasgow,

to all the blending houses and said exactly the same spiel.

"So how much exactly do you want?"

Increasingly, Scottish blends were made for American tastes,

lighter and suited to being drunk with a mixer.

One such blend was Cutty Sark,

created in 1923 and now made alongside Famous Grouse

by Edrington in Glasgow's Drumchapel.

This is Drumchapel, where I spent ten years growing up as a boy,

and in contrast to the tenements of the East End of Glasgow,

it was a paradise, but now it is home to Famous Grouse whisky,

and it's changed a lot in those years.

Now, I often think that the magic and the mystery of whisky is in

the soil, in the barley and in the water and in the hands that make it,

but actually there is a very profound science behind

the making of the drams we know and love,

and when I tell you that 90% of the whiskies we export around the world

are blended whiskies, then you'll understand the need for that science.

And I'm about to look into it.

Kirsteen Campbell is master blender for Famous Grouse and Cutty Sark.

Kirsteen, you're a noser and a spitter -

what a hell of a way to make a living.

Well, yeah, I guess it is.

We are referred to as nosers within the industry,

and the majority of my work is done by nosing.

But you're quite right, we do on occasion have to taste the whiskies,

but when you're looking at up to 600 samples a day,

you couldn't possibly taste them all, so that's where

the elegant spitting comes in.

600 a day! So you spit into a bucket?

Yes, we do, we do, but it's really just at the final stage

where I tend to taste the whiskies, or if I'm developing new ones.

Otherwise it's all done by nose.

So the nose is really important?

Absolutely, yes, yes.

So tell me the process you go through, because I'm a single malt man,

I live and die by single malts,

and I think blended whisky's for boiling your tatties in.

I know, you see, that's sacrilege to you.

So convince me of the beauty of blends.

You know, you need to be open about blending, rejoice in blending.

It's a creative process,

it's not just a matter of taking this distillery and that distillery

and some grain whisky, bunging it together and you're going to get

the same end result, because distilleries open,

distilleries close, and companies fall out and stock supplies are...

You might have a surplus, you might have a scarcity.

And each cask is going to be different,

so what a master blender does is actually look at all

of the possibilities that they have in front of them,

and tweak that recipe.

So they might have a recipe, but it will be tweaked every single time

a vatting is going to be made.

There might be a little bit more grain, there might be a little less of that first fill sherry,

there might be a different distillery coming in or combinations

of different distilleries, to produce the same overall effect.

And when you go into a blending lab and you get that explained to you

by a blender, you kind of... Your head kind of explodes.

How do you keep all this information,

you know, within your brain?

How do you learn all of that?

How do you know that this whisky and this whisky and this whisky,

when combined, will give that result?

I mean, that's just mental.

I hesitate to compare it with a box of Kellogg's Cornflakes,

but when you buy a box of Kellogg's Cornflakes,

you want it to be exactly like the last box of Kellogg's Cornflakes

you bought, and you want the one after that to be the same again.

So you want your bottle of Bells or Dewars or Walker,

or whatever it may be, to be consistent to what you as a drinker have come to expect.

What I've got for you, David, is really the process

from new make spirit, because my job begins right back at the distillery stage

where we look at the quality of the spirit before it goes into cask.

Then we move on to the cask types and the importance of the flavour

that develops during that important time period during the whisky,

and then how we bring all these complex flavours together

to produce the same flavour of blend time in, time out.

Had you not have had blenders, you would have had a fairly rustic,

cottage industry which would probably have never got

to the stage it was, because a lot of the products that were being made

in the 19th and early 20th century

were very difficult for people to drink.

Blenders sort of democratised whisky by making it more accessible

from a flavour point of view.

How many whiskies would be involved in each blend?

Well, it can vary, actually,

because for our blends we have core whiskies that we use

each and every time we put the blend together.

Then there are other whiskies we put into flavour categories,

and we can pick within those flavour categories,

perhaps one or several within those.

That's why it can vary from blend to blend, but ultimately,

the flavour of the whisky must be the same, every bottle we put out.

That must be really difficult to sustain.

That's part of the training and the experience.

-That's the challenge.

-Yes.

I am astounded by the fact that 90% of all Scotch exports are blends.

-Absolutely.

-I seriously am.

I mean, 90%, all over, at home and abroad.

The numbers are huge, and personally speaking, for me,

within Edrington and our blends, I'm responsible for over

-50 million bottles, so yeah, it's huge numbers we're talking.

-Wow.

I'm a massive blended whisky fan.

I just think that, going forward,

blended whisky is going to have to keep up with the expectations

that consumers have, that are being set by other products.

It hasn't quite caught up yet,

but from a production perspective it's so enormously creative

that it absolutely will do, it's just waiting for people

to sort of do it.

'While Kirsteen guided me through some of the whiskies which go into

'her blends, the full list remained tantalisingly confidential.'

So that's us covered five new make spirits,

everything from a light grain through to heavily peated malt.

Those are your basic ingredients.

-These are some of the basic ingredients.

-Some of them?

-There are much more?

-Yes, top secret.

These are the ones I'm going to share with you today.

You're not going to show me the ultimate secret?

-Not all of them, I can't possibly.

-Oh, away you go, come on.

Your secret is safe with me, Kirsteen, honest.

I'm an incurable romantic and I like to think that the production

of whisky is an organic, creative, mystical kind of process,

but it's got a sound base in science, hasn't it?

Especially if you're trying to achieve the consistency of quality and flavour in a blend.

You have to have both.

We do a lot of research, and there is a lot of background science

into how maturation performs and that type of thing.

But ultimately, at the end of the day,

there isn't an instrument that's as sensitive as the human nose,

so it requires us as blenders to be there at that critical point

of blending the product, to know how the flavour...

And it's a lot about how flavours combine, as well -

a machine can't tell us that.

A master blender is the person who sort of

marries these two positions together, and creates the whisky.

So I think master blenders are essential,

because they're sort of this meeting point, they gather up everybody,

they gather up these opposing, sometimes opposing ideas,

that are actually part of the same process that tend to get a bit lost,

and bring them together.

I have always been a snob in terms of whisky,

and I've always dismissed blended whisky.

You're the first person in my life that's convinced me otherwise.

Stop, Hayman, being a goddamn snob in terms of the whisky you drink.

-Thank you.

-I'm delighted you've said that.

Across the world,

millions of us hold dear the romance that surrounds Scotch whisky,

but as Kirsteen's work demonstrates,

this drink has long been underpinned by science.

The making of alcohol was first studied

at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University during the early 1900s.

OK, so now for the second stage...

'I'm joining today's students in what is now known

'as the International Centre For Brewing And Distilling, or ICBD.'

Welcome, first year brewers and distillers.

This is your first kind of congregual meeting together in one room,

and to have you make your first whisky.

We're going to do two distillations today -

we're going to be doing a stripping run,

and all we're doing in the stripping run is stripping all the alcohol out.

So we're going to take our raw material, our 8% ABV wash

and we're going to take all the alcohol out

and turn it into yet another raw material.

Have a smell and pass it around.

It's an interesting blend of science, as well as craft,

because there are still many mysteries in the whisky industry we don't know about.

So there's things going on in the still, chemical reactions,

interactions between different chemicals inside the still,

as well as in the maturation process in the cask.

So, I've always been a bit of a science kind of geek, if you will.

Basically it's an interesting combination of science,

then combined with that slight element of mystery and craft,

that the whisky brings those two elements, or many elements, together.

So what's the end product of all your work and your research?

It's to increase the consistency of the product

without losing any of the romance.

We recently had a meeting of minds at Holyrood, of all places,

at the Scottish Parliament, and the SWA, the Scotch Whisky Association,

the people who look after what is Scotch whisky.

And one of the key takeaway points that struck a chord with me

was the fact that there is an ageing demographic

in the distilling industry.

Here at the ICBD we specialise in providing the young blood for the industry.

Note that in my notebook, fill out all the relevant,

truly exciting paperwork.

It's time to make your mind up time.

I'm going to offer you... You've got four different options.

You've got European oak,

which is going to be your sherry cask-alike...

'Just as a distiller must choose which type of oak barrel to use

'for maturation, the students are offered a selection of wood samples.'

..all the exciting things that help to add the other notes

around the distillate...into the distillate we're making today.

So of all of the tools in the distiller's armoury,

it's the distiller's nose that is one of the most powerful tools

at their disposal.

Think about what you're actually smelling.

'Putting the new spirit into a makeshift glass and oak barrel

'was left to a refined, more senior student.'

Well, a historic moment has been had. Thank you very much for doing the honours.

All we need to do is put this on here,

and then commence some very fiddly,

fiddlesome screwing-on techniques,

and we have our first-ever freshers' whisky,

ready to be opened in three years and one day.

So thank you very much for coming and spending the time with me,

and it's taken a little bit of work to get everything together

all at the same time.

Thank you for sharing the experience and I hope to be around

when you guys crack her open and we can toast the dram together.

I'm probably too young to remember my first whiskies,

because I think it was used for my first teeth.

The honest answer is no, I can't.

It's lost in the mysteries of time.

The whisky was Ballantine's.

I was quite young, because my dad used to make me hot toddies,

but he used make me hot toddies with Macallan whisky

cos that was his favourite drink.

It's one of those weird things, to me that was what whisky tasted like,

and I remember being at a friend's house when I must have been

about 11 or 12, and her grandfather deciding that I could play

with his grandchild because my father drank good whisky.

My first taste of whisky was with my grandmother in Inverurie,

when she gave me a little thimbleful of Glengarry, eight years old.

This would have been in 1977

and I was only eight years old.

I think it must have been at New Year,

because that's the only time we ever had whisky in the house,

and I think probably my grandfather insisted when I was 15 or 16

that I should have a wee dram and not be put off with a sherry.

'When my journey continues,

'I'll be visiting Islay to find out how landscape affects Scotch,

'taking the water of life on Speyside,

'Scotland's whisky republic,

'examining the booming markets of investment and collection,

'learning inside tales of wealthy connoisseurs

'and revealing the marketing magic which sells Scotch, and Scotland,

'to the world.'