Is it a fully home grown product?

e?

No.

Are all the ingredients for whiskey grown in scotland

Doubtful no e’s used in Scotland.

No, my folks send a lot of barley north of the border for use in whiskey along with a lot of other farmers.

Simpson’s Malt makes it’s money from sending it over the Border for Whisky.

Seems the onehundrethidiot has edited his post, either he realised he was wrong or that you don’t grow Malt.

I’ve just had a wee nip of this (I know, a bit early isn’t it). You can taste the barrel, so is that classed as an ingredient?

IMAG0521 by MattNSmith, on Flickr

I was on the tour at Talisker the other day and there were some gaps in the process that the guide didn’t explain properly, I didn’t want to be a prick about, and I like Talisker so didn’t want to ruin my experience.
It all felt a little homeopathic.

I’m not sure how anything other than the barrel and the water they dilute the condensed alcohol sprint with can affect the taste or mouth feel.

Grain comes from all over UK
Barrels from USA.
Water from carbost
Barrels stored “on mainland for min of 3yrs”
I’m not sure where they get stored for the balance of that time.

Interesting Brant cheers. Apologies about the spelling, Irish ancestry..

brant, did you wander up the the Oyster Shed further up the hill?

A far more authentic (and memorable!) experience 🙂

Yes. Had oysters there. Lovely.
Had same oysters at The Three Chimneys too, but they cost a bit more that £1 each!

Yeah brain tired so jumped the gun on my answer.

Worked in Elgin United Distillers for a while doing quality control on all aspects of the process, plant to product.

Some of the barley was from outside Scotland, barrels too.

Edit: The main process that was a pita was checking the malt, had to be done daily for every distillery, every delivery of grain had to be checked to. Mind destroyingly tedious.

I seem to remember something, somewhere, about the air from the sea adding to the flavour as it matures. But as barrel evaporates that can’t be true either.

It’s the min 3yrs maturing in Scotland that makes it Scotch.

Fact: Johhny Walker’s biggest export market in the world is…..you guessed it…. Saudi Arabia.

Yes. Had oysters there. Lovely.
Had same oysters at The Three Chimneys too, but they cost a bit more that £1 each!

Good stuff 🙂

Did you get chatting to Paul? He likes a good chat! One of my favourite places on Skye. Good for stocking up for a shellfish BBQ.

Elgin local here too. Barrels from outwit UK – USA, Portugal as well (possibly others).
Malt / barley comes from outside UK as well IIRC, other than that, yeast (UK I’d presume) and water (local).

Main affects on flavour / maturation – water, malt (peated / unpeated), barrel (type of wood, previous ‘owner’, refill count), storage (really affects evaporation more than anything – salty taste doesn’t really come from air ingress); but really the still shape and the way they run them affects things substantially – some stills run hot, shape of still, length and shape of arm..

Fact: Johhny Walker’s biggest export market in the world is…..you guessed it…. Saudi Arabia.

Is that the knock off version of Johnnie Walker’s?

Barrels stored “on mainland for min of 3yrs”
I’m not sure where they get stored for the balance of that time.

as risk management barrels get divided and moved around the country – you don’t want to lose all your product for one brand in one fire so a distillery will usually house an amount of its own booze for show but also also lots of different ones from other distilleries and similarly theirs will be split between several other sites

I dont know but ive done the tours of Ardbeg Laphroaig Bowmore and Lagavulin and its all bloody lovely stuff 😉

My granduncle’s whisky ingredients were all local. Lovely drop, bit fiery.

Shame they arrested him for it. 🙂

It’s been a long while since I worked for Grants (Girvan) but the Balvenie is stored in port barrels as far as I remember.

I was on the tour at Talisker the other day and there were some gaps in the process that the guide didn’t explain properly, I didn’t want to be a prick about, and I like Talisker so didn’t want to ruin my experience.
It all felt a little homeopathic

I’ve been on tours like that – “our whiskey absorbs the fresh air off the mountains at the back of the distillery, the morning breeze off the ocean, the unrivalled freshness of our spring water”

Yeah, right – so why is the place air-conditioned with a water treatment plant out the back?

If they were just honest – “our whiskey is good because we have good ingredients, a very high-tech and sophisticated distillery, and we age it in barrels that have held other things”

I was on the tour at Talisker the other day and there were some gaps in the process that the guide didn’t explain properly, I didn’t want to be a prick about, and I like Talisker so didn’t want to ruin my experience.
It all felt a little homeopathic.

IIRC, they told me that most Talisker is put into Johnnie Walker Black Label.

different target audience I guess (as you know really) – tourists (quite often from abroad) that /want/ to hear the romantic stuff, folk after the ‘free’ dram at the end – and engineers who just want the process explained in great detail – which not all the guides are up to..

Not all the distilleries are that high-tech – well, I guess they are now, but process would be “that’s the way we’ve always done it” versus e.g. Diageo Roseisle distillery which is, or was, experimenting like mad to get a multi-flavour / character whisky output.. in bulk..

Me and my mate were smashed on the Laphroaig tour . I ended up buying half the shop lol and got a lift home. Just the tour guy and me and my mate he liked Yorkshire and firefighters and we liked the whisky 😉 must go back there

funny nobody has mentioned the caramel yet…
In Germany the ingredients list for whisky has one more item on it that in the UK. I guess they’re more strict about companies lying about what’s actually in there.

I went to the Penderyn distillery, they were unashamedly high tech about it all, which was nice.

The barrels were selected from wine and spirit manufacturers the world over for the taste they imparted to the whiskey – they choose carefully between sherry, wine etc to get the taste. Apparently madeira wine is a favourite at Penderyn. AFAIK this has always been the case for whiskey.

So a large part of the taste is not in fact Scottish at all, possibly Spanish.

I was informed, on a Tour of a distillery, that Japanese Whiskey uses Barley from here (as supplied to the Scots Distillers), it’s then shipped to Scotland and part distilled, then shipped to Japan in Oak Barrels then distilled again then stored in the Oak Barrles that is came over from Scotland in….

What
A
Faff

caramel is a ‘permitted’ ingredient though. But yes, maybe should be acknowledged.

As kcal says caramel is added to some whiskies in order to maintain colour continuity between batches to keep consumers happy/make connoisseurs unhappy!

It neither adds nor takes away aroma or character but I agree – if it’s in the bottle it should be on the label.

NB: Casks are oak wood containers, a barrel is a 196 litre cask.

There are wholly homegrown ones, Outer Hebrides does (or has done) locally sourced ingredients right down to the barley… (that’s western isles local not just scottish local). Bruichladdich do one as well that’s entirely Islay but I think it’s a really limited run. And probably disgusting too.

IIRC, they told me that most Talisker is put into Johnnie Walker Black Label.

same with any malt. Each year it might be that only around 1 in 10 barrels will be any good as a single malt – or at least good at being the malt you’re aiming to make. So when a distillery like Talisker makes each batch – decades down the line when its ready to bottle a lot of it might be perfectly nice whisky – it just won’t all taste enough like talisker so it won’t get sold with a talisker label on it and either go into blends or as a supermarket own brand

Non of us, for instance, will have been on a tour of the Tesco distillery on Islay

As I understand it, there’s an internal swap shop with the big distillers, where they trade casks with each other to top up their blends with the right ‘notes’ – which might vary from year to year. Some distilleries are popular for this, others more or less filler. Some in between.

Even single malt changes character – so that continuity might have a variable line as tastes alter.

OT but it’s the same with beer – cheaper ones (eg supermarket ones, etc) are often made of batches of premium ones which didn’t end up quite right, blended with others to taste approximately right (or at least, the same as usual).

Walkers up here re-sell their underweight or over-fired shortbread at knock-down prices..

Is that those big bags of chocolate shortbread for about £1?
excellent.
Especially after getting hammered at the Aberlour tasting tour when you partner pipes up that she doesn’t actually like whisky so you have hers as well.

One of the few joys I had as part of the corporate machine was when we had a “staff bonding exercise” of a distillery tour followed by curling. The distillery thought we were a party of 30 but there were 8 of us – trying to fling big lumps of stone on the ice after three large whiskies was fun 😉