Compass Box founder and whisky maker John Glaser bases his blends on who will be drinking them and for what occasion.
Inside the blending room, the first thing you notice is the silence. Away from the cacophony of the distillery, it’s a hushed environment of beakers, glasses, test tubes, and high-tech gadgetry that measures everything from alcohol strength to physical weight. The silence is broken only by brief discussions and the light patter of laptop keyboards. This is where a whisky’s magic is made, in blenders’ quiet interactions with the seemingly endless parade of samples that may eventually become part of your favorite dram. One thing is clear from the beginning: Unless what you’re drinking is marked “single cask,” a blender has their fingerprints on the liquid inside the bottle, whether it’s a blend or a single malt.
Emma Walker is the master blender for Johnnie Walker, managing an inventory of over 11 million casks. She balances multiple crews pulled together from across a broad spectrum—not just the malting and warehouse teams, but also marketing and innovation. “We get a brief to determine whether we’re looking at a one-off or a legacy brand, as well as the expected volume, price point, and current inventory,” she says. “We start to build the blend on paper, showing which distilleries will work, whether there is smoke or not, refill or rejuvenated cask. We constantly communicate and discuss what we’re tasting and smelling in the glass.”
By contrast, Bruichladdich head distiller Adam Hannett uses a less formulaic approach. He is the sole evaluator for up to 19 different components used for the distillery’s core label, Classic Laddie single malt. “The components are barley variety, location, age, cask type, and the results of regional trials, among others,” says Hannett. Identifying the core of Bruichladdich is something he learned from his predecessor Jim McEwan and the historical style library of the brand. From there, “Using sherry casks, for instance, is a bit like adding spices to a recipe. The base blueprint for the bourbon barrel-aged Classic is beautiful, but bringing in the other components is a showcase for what we’re doing.”
Maintaining the heart of a whisky’s legacy and balancing that with innovation is one of the challenges facing blenders. Says Walker, “What the Walker family did versus what we have today is an exercise in balancing a beaker with a spreadsheet.” Moet Hennessy’s head of whisky creation Bill Lumsden says, “From scratch, the barrels must have elements of the Glenmorangie or Ardbeg house style. After that, the gloves come off. There’s always the possibility of adjustment.” That understanding of balancing tradition with evolution is echoed by Brian Kinsman, master blender for William Grant and Sons, referring to Glenfiddich single malt. “There’s a house style, and maintaining it is important,” he says. “It’s a continuation of the fruit, the density, and oak, and where it’s going to sit on the map of evolution,” referring to their internal matrix of flavor tracking.
Few people understand style evolution better than Compass Box founder and whisky maker John Glaser. His famous Peat Monster has gone through subtle changes during its 20-year journey and is evolving once again, as Glaser eliminates whisky from Ardmore Distillery as a component for the first time. Peated Ardmore simply isn’t peaty enough. However, Peat Monster fans will recognize the replacement, noting a heightened level of peatiness.
The trials that a recipe undergoes are sometimes personal to the blender, and sometimes handed down from mentors. “It’s primarily sensory, 95% organoleptic [using the nose and mouth],” Kinsman responds, even though he is tracking the connection back to William Grant himself. Glaser founded Compass Box with the drinker in mind. “Who’s drinking this and what’s the occasion?” is the starting point, and each sample runs through a triangulation test with his team to identify baseline vs. prototype of three blind samples; the prototype is different. If the team senses no difference, “That’s a good thing, we have a similarity.” Hannett takes on the idea of risk with expressions like Bruichladdich’s prized Black Art: “There’s always risk; two or three amazing parcels of whisky and there’s a moment when you blend that together and you’re not sure. I love that risk—it’s like a high-wire act.” Lumsden, although a trained scientist, prizes the randomness that can inspire a project. “It could come from a conversation, a dream, a cup of tea, a color, or a flavor. But when I’m in the moment, I’m not thinking; I’m feeling my way through. You can’t teach that.”
Beyond the core offerings are a range of experiments, innovations, and personal influences. Their origins tell the personal and human side of the process. Brown-Forman master blender Rachel Barrie confesses that “Glendronach is my dad’s favorite, so this provides me an ideal opportunity to share its depth and richness with him.” “After 23 years, Eleuthera is still the most beautiful whisky I created,” says Glaser. “It’s a recipe structure we’ve gone back to, its newest iteration being Tobias and the Angel.” Lumsden admits that “Glenmorangie Signet was such a labor of love and 100% my creation. Coffee is what inspired the flavor…but it was a 25-year process, starting with my student days until the launch in 2008.”
The choice was obvious for Hannett, “my fingerprint is on the 10 year old Port Charlotte. I went through the casks and found the 10 year olds to be perfect, at the peak of peat but had the classic Bruichladdich fruitiness.” For Kinsman though, it was like asking to pick his favorite child. “The Ailsa Bay was a completely new approach to whisky making, but the 14 year old Bourbon Barrel Reserve was all about the excitement of bringing the Glenfiddich DNA to the American palate, with notes of vanilla, toffee, and oak.”
And just as these projects get bottled for the rest of us to rejoice in, some experiments don’t see the light of day. “It would be horrible if everything was predictable,” says Kinsman. One cask finish that never happened for him involved “eastern European oak casks that the cooperage said couldn’t be filled because they were too light. I’m not Hercules, but I was able to pick the barrel up myself,” thereby ending the experiment and using them to fire up the barbecue. “For our [Bruichladdich] Virgin Oak, we filled some French oak barrels but put them at the bottom of a three-stack rack and we couldn’t get to them,” confesses Hannett. “They were too over-oaked to be useable. But we started introducing them in blends of other products and they brought an amazing depth and backbone to them.”
Glaser remembers getting some samples of Chichicapa mezcal from Del Maguey that were aged in Pappy Van Winkle barrels. “We could never make it work, either it diluted the mezcal or overwhelmed the scotch.” Working with 11 million barrels “of some of the best whisky in the world,” Walker sees “every wonderful prototype failure as an idea for a future project.” No one embraces that idea more than Lumsden, turning failure into one of his favorite creations. “We were filling tokaji wine casks going back to the 1990s, but after 3 years the Glenmorangie 10 year old developed tannins that made it bitter and undrinkable. I swore to do it again, this time with 11 ½ year old Glenmorangie finished in tokaji for 13 months. It ended up being The Tale of Cake.”
Maintaining the heart of a whisky’s legacy and balancing that with innovation is one of the challenges facing blenders.
Hannett reminds us that “This is what blending is about: how to manage risks and use the results.” This is where the art of whisky blending becomes distinct from distilling, the merging of subjective inputs into quantifiable and quantitative results. The outcome is a tangible product that has a market value “of compelling quality,” as is written in the Compass Box ethos statement. It is on one hand intensely personal and on the other highly collaborative. Curiosity, passion, the desire to keep learning, and the need to be “courageous and creative,” according to Barrie, become the qualities that fill those quiet, library-like rooms on the other side of the pot stills. And with that, we remember what our moms told us about those quiet ones, right? They’re the ones secretly having the most fun.
Maintaining the heart of a whisky’s legacy and balancing that with innovation is one of the challenges facing blenders.
