TWELVE DATES OF WHISKY

Gavin D. Smith escreveu este interessante artigo para a Scotch Whisky Review, excelente publicação da Loch Fyne Whiskies (leia-se Richard Joynson), uma das melhores lojas de whisky da Escócia, localizada em Inveraray, ao noroeste de Glagow. Gavin seleciona as datas mais marcantes, dentre tantas, para a consolidação do whisky como o mais nobre dos destilados. A tradução do artigo, com a devida permissão de Gavin e Richard, sairá no Whisky News, publicação da Sociedade Brasileira do Whisky.

The recorded history of Scotch whisky stretches back more than half a millennium. Here we explore the heritage of the world’s greatest drink by focusing on a dozen key dates in its development.
1494
The first written reference to Scotch whisky occurs in the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland: ‘...eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aqua vitae’. Eight bolls is 1,120lbs or 50kgs—a sufficiently large quantity of malt to suggest that whisky-making was already well-established by this time. Aqua vitae is the Latin for ‘water of life’, in the Gaelic uisge beatha, from which the modern word ‘whisky’ is derived.
The Arabs are usually credited with discovering the art of distillation, or, at the very least, perfecting it and it is believed to have been brought to Europe in the tenth century, principally for medicinal purposes and it is thought that the secrets of distillation travelled from Ireland to the west of Scotland.
1505
The Guild of Surgeon Barbers in Edinburgh was granted a monopoly on the manufacture of whisky. This action reflected whisky’s traditional role as a medicine, though by this time it was almost certainly being consumed for pleasure as well as to relieve pain. Writing in 1564 Raphael Holinshed made such elaborate claims for the curative effects of whisky as to make even a modern day advertising copywriter blush: ‘Beying modrately taken it cutteth fleume, it lighteneth the mynd, it quickeneth the spirits, it cureth the hydropsie, it pounceth the stone, it repelleth the gravel, it puffeth away ventositie, it kepyth and preserveth the eyes from dazelyng, the tongue from lispyng, the teethe from chatteryng, the throte from rattlyng, the weasan from stieflyng, the stomach from womblyng... and truly it is a sovereign liquor if it be orderlie taken.’
Whisky once again assumed the status of medicine during the period of Prohibition in the USA (1920—1933) when it was theoretically only available with a doctor’s prescription. ‘Medicinal” whiskies such as the Islay malt Laphroaig were particularly popular. Judging by the amount of spirit consumed during Prohibition, America must have been a very sick country indeed. The larger-than-life whisky figure Tommy Dewar, of John Dewar & Sons of Perth, wrote of travelling through a dry state of Canada during the 1920s and being advised to try a pharmacy if he wanted to buy whisky. This he duly did, only to be rebuffed, and offered instead a bottle which announced its contents as being ‘Cholera Mixture’. On the reverse of the bottle was the familiar label of his own family blend!
1644
The first tax on spirits was imposed by the Scottish parliament. This was intended to raise revenue for the Royalist army during the Civil War. The level of duty was set at 2s. 8d. Scots per Scots pint, a measure of just less than half a gallon. In 1707, the Act of Union between England and Scotland led to the formation of the Board of Excise, which began to enforce the laws relating to excise duty quite rigorously. Thus, the battle lines were drawn up, with the excise officers or ‘gaugers’ versus the native whisky-makers or ‘smugglers’.
The opposition between law-enforcer and law-beaker has provided some of the most fascinating factual stories and less verifiable anecdotes connected with Scotch whisky, and the ingenuity of the smugglers could be quite extraordinary. They had the great advantage over their adversaries of intimate knowledge of the physical terrain in which they operated and they enjoyed the —at least tacit— support of most of their neighbours. Nonetheless, no fewer than 14,000 illicit stills were detected during the year of 1823 and this must have been the tiny tip of a massive alcoholic iceberg.
The levels of duty levied on whisky have remained a matter of controversy ever since their initial imposition. The Scotch Whisky Association wrote in 1997 ‘Taxation in the UK is extremely high, accounting for as much as 70% of the retail price of a typical bottle of standard blended Scotch Whisky.’
1784
The Wash Act of 1784 reduced the level of duty and simplified regulations, as well as establishing a precise, geographical ‘Highland Line’ which separated the Lowlands from the Highlands for purposes of differential excise levels. The Act aimed to stimulate legal distilling in the Highlands and to reduce smuggling. Accordingly, lower rates of excise duty were applied to small-scale distilleries north of the line which used locally-produced barley.
The Wash Act also led to a great expansion of legal Lowland distilling, as it encouraged distillers to produce more spirit from each batch of ‘wash’, with the licence fee being based on each distillery’s capacity. Lowland whisky consequently gained a poor reputation as a result of being distilled very rapidly in extremely shallow stills. Writing in 1788, the poet Robert Burns described Lowland whisky as ‘a most rascally liquor.’
Single malt whiskies are still categorised geographically, with the ‘Highland Line’ of 1784—running between Greenock on the Firth of Clyde in the west and Dundee on the Firth of Tay in the east—continuing to divide Highland from Lowland malts. Other geographical categories now in general use include Islay, Speyside and Campbeltown, though many writers and industry experts sub-divide within categories.
1823
The Wash Act and a number of subsequent pieces of legislation failed to curb illicit distilling to any significant degree and in 1822 the Illicit Distillation (Scotland) Act was passed, imposing more severe penalties for illegal whisky-making. The Highland distillers had an influential supporter in the Duke of Gordon, a substantial landowner in north-east Scotland, where the problem of illicit distillation was particularly serious. Gordon and some of his fellow landlords promised to help stamp out the illegal trade if the government provided an incentive for the smugglers to distil on the right side of the law. The result was the Excise Act of 1823, which cut duty dramatically to 2s. 3d. per gallon, while a distilling licence cost just £10 per annum. The first new distillery to be licensed under the Act was built by George Smith of Glenlivet, one of the Duke of Gordon’s tenants.
As a consequence of the 1823 Act, the number of licensed distilleries in Scotland doubled in two years and production of duty-paid whisky rose from 2 million to 6 million gallons per annum. Illicit distillation fell dramatically, with the 14,000 detections of 1823 falling to 692 in 1834 and to just 6 in 1874. The 1823 Excise Act was a major stepping stone on the way to the multi-million pound Scotch whisky industry which exists today.
1826
In 1826 leading Lowland distiller Robert Stein of Kilbagie distillery in Clackmananshire patented a revolutionary type of still, one which would change the whisky industry forever. Stein had invented a method of continuous distillation, which meant that spirit could be produced much faster and in appreciably greater quantities than had previously been the case in pot stills, which had to be cleaned and re-charged between batches. Stein’s pioneering work was perfected by former senior Irish Excise official turned distiller Aeneas Coffey, who produced a twin-column version of Stein’s still in 1830. Two years later he patented the new design, which could distil 3,000 gallons of wash per hour. Not only was the Coffey still ultra-efficient compared with the pot variety, but it also utilised a variety of cheap grains rather than malted barley. Vast quantities of comparatively inexpensive but quite characterless spirit could now be produced and initially much of it was exported to England for redistillation into gin. By the middle of the nineteenth century grain whisky was also being exported to Australia, South Africa, India, Canada and the USA.
1853
As grain whisky was comparatively characterless and pot still single malt whisky was considered too charcterful and variable for polite society, it was inevitable that someone would decide to try mixing the two.
Until 1853 it was not lawful to vat or mix whiskies of different ages, even when they came from the same distillery, though the blending of different batches of malts had been taking place for many years in order to achieve a level of consistency. Some legal whisky-makers had even added illicit whisky to their own coarse spirit to improve its flavour and it was also not unknown for merchants and publicans to mix malt whisky with cheap grain to increase their profit margins.
The prominent Edinburgh spirits merchant Andrew Usher is credited with being the first person to blend whiskies commercially, creating Usher’s Old Vatted Glenlivet in 1853. The Spirit Act of 1860 paved the way for whiskies from different distilleries to be blended without payment of duty. Usher used his vatting experience to mix malts and grains and create a palatable, comparatively inexpensive product which was likely to have a very wide appeal. Blended whisky had been created.
The global growth in sales of blended whisky during the last three decades of the nineteenth century owed much to the audacious marketing and salesmanship of men like Tommy Dewar, James Buchanan and Peter Mackie. Of great assistance in the battle to make blended whisky a drink for the world was the absence of brandy from the drinks cabinets of the great and the good. This was due to the fortuitous havoc wreaked on French vineyards by the insect Phylloxera. Blended whisky now accounts for some 95% of all Scotch sold.
1877
In 1877 the Distillers Company Ltd was formed by six of the foremost Lowland grain distilleries, namely Cameron-bridge, Kirkliston, Glenochil, Cambus, Port Dundas and Carsebridge. The aim of this amalgamation was to create a powerful and influential grouping in the booming world of Scotch whisky. In 1919 John Haig & Co Ltd joined DCL and the Dewar, Buchanan and Johnnie Walker companies were enticed into the DCL fold in 1925, being joined two years later by White Horse Distillers Ltd.
By 1930, DCL was the largest player by far in the Scotch whisky industry, controlling one-third of all operational distilleries in Scotland and owning virtually all the major blended whisky brands, as well as having a number of other significant commercial interests.
The Distillers Company Ltd continued to dominate the industry, through good times and lean, though it closed more than twenty of its distilleries during the over-production crisis of the 1980s. In 1987 DCL was acquired in acrimonious and highly controversial circumstances by Guinness, who had fought a bitter battle for control of the company with the Argyll Group. The new venture was named United Distillers.
1899
As blended Scotch whisky took the world by storm, so there was an accompanying rush to increase whisky-making capacity and many new distilleries were built. The Speyside area of north-east Scotland was at the centre of this boom in construction, with no fewer than 21 of the 33 new distilleries that opened during the 1890s located on Speyside.
Whisky came to be seen as a sound financial investment, with potentially high returns on capital invested and, inevitably, there was to come a time when boom turned to bust due to over-capacity within the industry.
The crash came early in 1899, when the Leith-based blending and whisky wholesale company of Pattison’s Ltd went into liquidation, at which time the firm’s liabilities were found to amount to more than £500,000, while its assets were worth less than half that figure. This was major bankruptcy and the collapse of Pattison’s sent shock-waves through the industry. A considerable number of individual investors were ruined and many companies were financially affected due to the complex network of credit arrangements within the industry. Several distilleries were also forced to close down.
Pattison’s had approached the marketing of blended whisky in an energetic and brash manner, but behind the rapid rise to prominence of the company was serious financial mismanagement and fraud on the part of the Pattison brothers, Robert and Walter, both of whom served prison sentences for fraud as a result of the firm’s collapse.
As depression set in, several of the recently-opened Speyside distilleries closed almost as soon as production began and after Glen Elgin was completed in 1900 it was to be more than half a century before another malt distillery, Tormore, was constructed in the Highlands. Prohibition in the USA, a world-wide economic slump and two world wars all conspired to keep the Scotch whisky industry in the doldrums.1906
In 1906 a court case in the unlikely setting of Islington, London, turned out to have great significance for the Scotch whisky industry. Malt distillers had been concerned for some time that the reputation of their product was suffering due to the high level of poor quality, blended whisky being passed off as ‘malt’ and the Islington case concerned a publican and off-licence trader who was charged with selling as malt a product which turned out to contain 90% grain spirit.
Islington Borough Council won their case against the publican, but the judge’s conclusion implied that a blend of malt spirit made in a pot still and grain spirit from a Patent still could not be sold as whisky and ultimately a Royal Commission was set up to investigate the ‘What is Whisky?’ case. Not surprisingly, the Distillers Company Ltd was at the forefront of those lobbying on behalf of blended whisky.
After eighteen months of deliberation, the Commission came up with a definition of whisky, which stated that it was ‘...a spirit obtained by distillation from a mash of cereal grains saccharified by the diastase of malt.’ The blenders had carried the day.
1930
In 1930 the Canadian company Hiram Walker bought Glenburgie distillery near Forres, followed by Miltonduff six years later. In 1936 the company also acquired the blending firm of George Ballantine & Son and began to create a vast, integrated distilling, blending and bottling complex at Dumbarton. The arrival of Hiram Walker in Scotland signalled the start of ‘globalisation’ of the Scotch whisky industry, which continued apace after World War Two when fellow Canadian distillers Seagram bought Strathisla distillery in Keith and proceeded to create Glen Keith distillery from a derelict flour mill nearby.
Both companies pursued energetic acquisitions policies in Scotland, building up impressive portfolios of distilleries and brands, with Seagram now owning such prestigious distilleries as The Glenlivet and Glen Grant, along with the deluxe blend Chivas Regal. In 1990 Whyte & Mackay was taken over by the US company American Brands.
The Japanese had began to develop a domestic whisky-making industry in the 1920s and in the 1980s they began to take a significant interest in Scottish distilling. Suntory bought into and, ultimately acquired control of, Morrison Bowmore Distillers, while Tomatin distillery in Inverness-shire and Ben Nevis distillery at Fort William are both now in Japanese ownership. Today, few Scottish distilleries remain in the hands of private individuals or domestic companies.
1997
A new company—United Distillers and Vintners—emerged from the £27 billion merger between Guinness and rival GrandMet. UDV is the largest spirits company in the world.
Scotch whisky is unquestionably the world’s leading spirit, with a global consumption of 84 million cases (1,008 million bottles) in 1998. The industry employs more than 12,000 people directly, and around 60,000 indirectly. Some 90% of whisky produced is exported, and Scotch whisky is one of Britain’s top five export earners, selling in over 200 countries. Fascination with the process of how whisky is made leads more than one million people to tour Scotland’s distilleries each year.