TIME IS A luxury that most of us don’t have. When making whisky, one cannot do without it.
Indeed, it can take decades for a single malt to reach its ‘peak’, the point at which the character distilled from the barley sits harmoniously with the flavour and texture extracted from the cask.
Over time the spirit is imparted with flavour, colour and character not only from the cask but also from the place in which it is stored; oak barrels are porous and breath in the air around them.
And as one waits, much of the precious, maturing liquid is lost to evaporation – the ‘angel’s share’. Waiting until a single malt is ready for bottling is thus not without risk nor cost.
Benromach’s distillery manager Keith Cruickshank, however, is given all of the time he needs.
Distillery owner Gordon & Macphail is run by the fourth generation of the Urquhart family, which has been maturing and bottling whiskies across Scotland since 1895.
It is little surprise, then, that some of the Benromach’s oldest and scarcest casks have been stowed away for long-term ageing.
One of those casks is now being released as the Benromach 50 Years Old.
A single cask has yielded just 248 bottles at 54.6% ABV, making it one of the oldest and rarest Benromach single malts ever bottled.
We sat down with Keith to try it, and to talk all things scotch.
What is your first whisky memory?
I shouldn’t say this, but my first memory wasn’t a good one!
As a very young man I tried a cheap blend and that put me off drinking whisky for quite some time. In fact, I never went back until I was about 30 and started working at Benromach.
And the first dram you liked?
The first dram I tasted and really liked was one of the legacy single malts from Benromach which were created before Gordon & Macphail bought the distillery in 1993.
I was able to try different Benromach single malts once I started distilling here and that has really opened up my palate and mind to the wonders of whisky.
Dan Prince
How did you end up running a whisky distillery?
I started as a shop floor worker and worked my way up through the ranks from warehousing to stillman, and now as distillery manager it has been a real privilege to be involved with Benromach since it reopened to the public in 1998 – and I’m very proud of the whiskies that we create here.
The character of a whisky obviously varies wildly from distillery to distillery. What is Benromach’s house style?
Benromach is special in that we have revived that lost taste of Speyside, which has just a whisper of smoke in it.
Years ago, the style of Speyside would have been lightly smoky as the malted barley would have been dried over a peat fire.
Sadly, that tradition slowly began to die out as distillers changed fuel sources and moved towards lighter, sweeter styles of single malt.
When Gordon & Macphail bought Benromach in the 1990s, the team here wanted to bring back that traditional Speyside style.
As such, the majority of Benromach whiskies are defined by those classic malty, fruity and spicy notes whilst retaining an elegant and unmistakable smoky heart.
Dan Prince
In terms of maturation specifically, some whiskies age rather differently from one another. How does the Benromach house style develop when matured for many decades?
Those fruity and spicy notes I just mentioned come from a combination of cask types, usually ex-bourbon and ex-sherry casks. We use a high portion of ‘first fill’ casks – those that have come directly from bourbon and sherry producers, as opposed to first being used for Scotch whisky maturation elsewhere – which imparts our spirit with maximum flavour and character.
Given the light smokiness that is archetypal of Benromach, getting the proportion of different cask types just right is the tricky bit. If we go too strong on nutty and spicy ex-sherry casks, those delicate smoky notes will be drowned out.
As the peatiness of the spirit generally mellows out over time, too, this is a particular worry when you are ageing Benromach for several decades.
As for production methods, the way we make our whisky is very hands-on, with little automation, therefore I like to say there is also a little part of the distillers’ character in every bottle.
This handmade ethos would have come through from the team who created the spirit for the 50 Years Old back in 1972. We have then nurtured and monitored the cask over the years.
That legacy is important to us as distillers. We need to remember that what we create today is actually for tomorrow, or in fact 10 years down the line. If we’re doing what we’re meant to, we’re leaving a legacy every day.
And presumably, there is scarce stock of Benromach at that sort of age?
We have limited stocks of these rare and old legacy whiskies, which is why the 50 Years Old is so special and limited to a single cask release of just 248 bottles. It is very rare that a distillery manager gets to release a bottle as old as this, so for me it is a really special moment.
You’ve been around the Scotch trade for a while now. What has changed most?
We use more scientific methods to assess the flavour profile and spirit now, which has been a great change.
The biggest change, however, has been technology.
We are very much a hands-on distillery and keep the handmade, traditional aspects at the heart of what we do, but you can really see how others have embraced technology in the production of their whiskies.
You can now operate the distillery from a touch of a button which is great for some distilleries but it isn’t at all what we want to do here at Benromach.
248 decanters of the Benromach 50 Years Old Single Malt are available worldwide, retailing at £20,000.For more information, please visit: benromach.com
