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A Day In The Life Of Professor Jill Bumsden

August 5, 2024 by whiskysponge

Whisky Sponge has received this exclusive extract from the diary of Professor Jill Bumsden (in fact she placed considerable pressure upon us to publish this) giving fascinating insight into the creative process behind Glenmorangie and Ardbeg.

Jill Bumsden’s collected white papers are now available in a special single roll, double sheeted edition. Published by Andrex. Wipe clean Kindle edition also available.

02.39 – Remove excess body hair, have a quick ten minute blast on the turbo-bidet and turn in for the night.

04.30 – Rise and shine! Quickly update dream diary, sleep-invented seven new bottlings! If Paul McCartney could write Yesterday in his sleep, I can dream up a way to flog the leftover pallets of that Ardbeg 8yo!

04.50 – Men from the council come round to give me a power wash. Big Billy knows how I like it, he always has such sensitive action with the crevice-nozzle.

05.00 – A couple of swift septuple espressos and then it’s time to dedicate an hour to the ongoing work on my autobiography. Agent tells me new working title ‘Up The Shitter’ is a considerable improvement on the previous title. Feel like “touching the outer postcode of publishability” is the sort of feedback a girl needs at 5am!

06.00 – Exercise time! Really getting into my Jazzurbate workouts, competition level masturbation to exotic rhythms. My core is puckering like Donald Trump in a Miss World changing room.

06.30 – First Teams meeting of the day, only a few new lawsuits filed against me this week so pretty straightforward stuff.

07.00 – Head over to the lab. Nobody there. Get naked for a while.

07.45 – Get started with complex art of blending together the latest batch of Glenmorangie 12 year old. Have to open new stock software programme, export list of all casks with AYS now above 12 years, do select all, cut and paste into ‘Bottle now’ tab, then have to go through and toggle the crash dilution, femto-filtration and dark matter caramel options. Takes at least three fucking minutes! No one appreciates me…

07.50 – Light breakfast of Currywurst, whole roast salmon, root beer float and venison porridge. Jazzurbate works up quite the appetite.

08.00 – Staff begin to arrive. Scramble to put clothes back on. Leopard print lab spandex on inside out and shard of Currywurst snared in armpit vent but don’t think anyone noticed.

08.10 – Get team together for pep talk. Tell them they’re great blah blah blah. Dole out a surprise firing at the end – keeps everyone on their toes. Bit of waiting around for people to stop crying, frustrating as keen to get on with the day!

08.30 – Concept meet for new bottlings. Still a lot of remnant inventory of Glenmorangie Cake, suggest re-bottling as Glenmorangie Bakesale and offering at cash-recovery pricing. Response from team charitably describable as lukewarm.

Glenmorangie A Tale Of Tokyo feedback is in. Apparently, customers find association of such a culturally vibrant and iconic city with ‘impenetrably bland’ product is generating unsustainable levels of cognitive dissonance. Team agrees new series with Glenmorangie Milton Keynes and Glenmorangie Knaresborough both strong contenders for the follow up release.

Decide to unveil new concepts I’ve been working on:

Ardbeg ‘Bottle You Own’ – follow up to that £16 million cask thing we did. Get coopers to make 250 liter casks in precise shape of Ardbeg bottle (paint green?) and sell as new fillings for £2.5 million a pop. Seems to have traction with marketing.

Glenmorangie ‘Le art de la piss take’ – if we can summon the shamelessness to release a 25yo Californian chardonnay finish for £2k a bottle, surely we can do something a bit French with some sort of random wine cask thing and do an 18yo for 2.5k…? Big thumbs up from everyone!

Ardbeg 10yo 100 proof – Bit of a far out one this one. Take a careful selection of refill hogsheads and a few first fill barrels of Ardbeg, marry them together, reduce slowly to 57.1% and release a one-off special version of Ardbeg 10 at the classic 100 proof strength, designed to really showcase the distillery character. Unanimously rejected.

Glenmorangie: The Robo-Jill Scoosh-Bot 3000 X Lamborghini – Been feeling somewhat jealous of all the whisky / posh car / sex toy fusion products coming out of Bowmore and Macallan lately. Suggest a fully functioning sex doll in my image, entirely constructed from sustainable materials, that gets delivered in a Lambo Revuelto and can squirt Glenmorangie Signet. The dashboard could be made out of a cask or some shit like that and we’ll do a blokey version with a valinch for a willy. Haven’t approached Lamborghini yet, but team suggests if we can’t get them then Citroen would deffo be up for it. This one get’s all round thumbs up for fastracking!

Team suggests I sacrifice what ‘microns of credibility’ I still possess after the Rollercoaster set and do a bottling called Glenmorangie Custard so we can re-create the Cake photoshoot and really ‘drill into the bukkake energy’. Sign me up, I declare with gusto.

11.00 – Do big virtual tasting for bunch of whisky geeks on my Only Fans. They love it! Big coin for Jill!

12.00 – Pick single casks for private customers with my tried and proven darts and a blindfold method. New rules are in from the Head of Ultra High Net Wankers division: single casks are only to be sold to private individuals who will gift them and NOT retail them. Unless they pretend that they won’t, in which case they can, especially if it means they will buy a cask.

12.30 – Suggestively smoke large cigar with my office door open while everyone trying to assess cask samples

13.00 – Lunch: suckling pig, Curlywurly.

14.00 – Lab reports back to me after I asked them to explore if there’s any way to further asset strip charisma from the Glenmorangie distillate. Conclusion is that this ‘remains impossible with existing technology’.

14.30 – First test bottling of Ardbeg ‘One Million Parts Per Million’ arrives on my desk. Cork comes out ok, but seems to be a physical peat brick encased in glass; unable to pour into glass – needs more work. Suggest possibly selling bottle with special insertable stick and then people can smash glass and have peat lolly? Mixed reception from team.

15.00 – Afternoon Jazzurbate session. Draining! Lab staff ask if I can use the gym next time.

16.00 – Visit experimental warehouse where we are developing Glenmorangie Rave series. Batches of slow growth, quietly confident, north facing, personally motivated, lightly toasted, tentatively massaged, medium char, deeply exfoliated, Ozark American white oak hogsheads of Glenmorangie maturing in separate dance spaces playing continual playlists of techno, house and jungle choons. Careful analysis required to discern which genre of music is delivering the best results. Quite difficult to do after skulling two eccies and feeling the euphoric rhythms course through my soul.

17.00 – Attend Keeper Of The Quaich dinner. I’m being made a Grand High Teabagger Of The Quaich. Ceremonial penetration by the sacred salmon instigates rapid comedown. Takes all my focus while formally dunking my lady mudguards in that wee quaich not to throw a massive whitey!

18.00 – Receive surprise award as runner up in the Most Skillfully Erotic Master Distiller competition (damn you, Jim Beveridge, you sensual bastard!)

20.00 – Go for post-dinner game of golf with industry colleagues from William Grant & Sons, Gordon & MacPhail and Iain MacLeod. Get relentlessly bullied for not having gone to private school. Little do they know the arousal their taunts kindle within me.

21.00 – Toss off a couple of well-worn penis jokes then it’s home time for me.

22.00 – Write a few more White Papers. ‘Marketing In Space: Zero ideas for zero gravity’, ‘Lies: A Distiller’s Guide To The Scientific Misuse Of The Word Innovation’, ‘Molecules of Misery: The Science Of Crywanking Into a Mashtun’

23.50 – Brush teeth.

00.30 – Gargle with Ardbeg 1976 Manager’s Choice while silent tears course down my cheeks as I contemplate the sacrificing of my professional reputation on the altar of indifferent multinational capitalism and how the cumulative efforts of my life have merely dusted the pockets of the intermittently wealthiest man on the planet.

00.45 – Meditative sleepytime Jazzurbate.

01.00 – Early bedtime. 

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Some more thoughts on whisky and independent bottling

April 1, 2024 by whiskysponge

This is sort of a follow up to this piece here.

When I started doing independent bottling in 2019, it was very much as a side project – something of an experiment to be honest. Since then, accounting for everything on our imminent bottling plan, we will soon have done 221 bottlings. Mostly whisky, but also rums, cognacs, armagnacs, one wine and soon a calvados as well. I think it is fair to say that’s quite a lot in the space of just under five years.

I’ll pick up from where I left off on my previous post, just after point 24…

25: I have come to believe that the future of independent bottling is not all doom and gloom. I’ve had a lot of conversations with other bottlers, and with other people in the industry and, while there was a time when I was quite pessimistic about the future of indy bottling, I have to come believe that potential still remains in this pursuit. In my view a large part of this is contingent upon the emerging new wave of distilleries and their willingness to co-exist with the indy bottling scene. To recognise the mutual benefit in collaborating and to see that these two worlds cross over, and that it is the key aspect of ‘independence’ that they both share, and which is integral to their success as businesses and to what makes them attractive to their culture and commercial audience – an audience which they certainly also share. It is also about embracing whisky, and spirits, from beyond Scotland and the other major or obvious producing nations. This is something which is, and will increasingly be, necessary, but which is easier said than done. Consumers aren’t buying these sorts of whiskies with the required consistency yet to make them as predictable or viable as a cask of Scottish malt whisky. So, there will need to be a bit of a collective heave in that department in terms of education and promotion; it’s also why the symbiotic natural of the relationship between indy producers and indy bottlers is so integral. The future is also contingent upon the ability to source and do vaguely interesting things with casks. That is something which remains much more susceptible to the whims of the mainstream industry, and far less predictable. However…

26: …the price of casks seems to be coming down. This is something that everyone I speak to is either noticing, commenting upon or predicting. My own view is that it is true, but I’m not convinced that it will have a meaningful impact upon the end consumer just yet. The price of 2015 Tullibardine might be going down here and there, but the price of 1995 Jura, or 2003 Bunnahabhain is only going up. Aged stocks are still at a premium and I see no way that will change.

27: What underpins a softening of cask prices is that the wider economy isn’t in great shape and it’s having an effect on the spending patterns of whisky lovers and in particular long term malt whisky enthusiasts. Those folk who understandably look at a stash of bottles, realise they have more than they can healthily drink in one lifetime and suddenly feel less disposed to accepting the blatantly insulting pricing that whisky as a global drink increasingly seems to jab in their faces…

28: …but… but! This isn’t causing some long prophesied ‘bursting of the bubble’. The secondary market is still buoyant for what I would call ‘awesome whisky’: delicious old (and new) bottles of high quality whisky. Instead what’s happened is that flipping is pretty much dead for the time being, prices have generally softened, and retail is much tougher, more competitive and generally slower and more difficult than it has been for years. We have reached the start of a new cycle of interest and investment which will probably take some years to return to what we’ve become accustomed to in the last few years. But people are still buying whisky. Lots of people involved with selling whisky, in different markets around the world, say that what does well is the lower price point bottles £50-100, and the top end bottles £500-1000. We also hear that silly bottles over four figures also struggle. People want to buy good shit that they can painlessly drink, and incredible shit that they know is of dwindling availability and is likely going to make them happy in future: either by selling or consuming the bottle. They also increasingly know where to draw the line and when they are having the piss extracted from them.

29: I have deeply uncommercial tastes. This is something I have come to realise slowly, and slightly jarringly. At Decadent Drinks we obviously sell whisky, and have made what I would say is a reasonable fist of this over the few years we’ve been going. However, I realise that what I love, what I want to bottle, what I like to taste and drink and what I frequently write about – distillate driven, Scottish malt whiskies, without too much cask influence – are not really of that much interest to today’s mainstream whisky drinking community. It’s not to say that people do not still discover these whiskies, or that they are not valued or enjoyed by the whisky community, but they are niche, and tend to require a bit of experience to arrive at. It’s also true that hardly anyone is making this type of whisky anymore. When I started out in whisky, the culture was dominated by people older than me who weren’t necessarily rich, but were generally able to afford a malt whisky hobby and who had a good level of experience and understanding of older as well as contemporary bottlings. The tastes of the (at that time) European-dominated whisky community was highly informed by this sort of experience, and those tastes and cultural discourse were of huge subsequent influence upon me. Today, I realise that I am increasingly of a different generation and of a different pool of experience, and as such also increasingly of a different taste and opinion about whisky. This is completely natural; things change and cultures evolve. I’m actually very comfortable with how this situation seems to be unfolding, but I am also unsure of what to do with this knowledge. I am not confident about how to use this in my work or about how I should let it inform the sorts of bottlings we release at Decadent Drinks. You’ll notice that we do not always release these kinds of austere ‘distillate dominant’ bottlings that I profess to love. Partly that is simply to do with their lack of general availability – these are hard types of whisky to find good examples of these days – and partly because I’m increasingly aware it would be commercial suicide to only release this sort of arid mineral juice all the time. We increasingly tip-toe into more wood-driven, modern whisky bottlings now, and I do my best to select what I believe are good quality examples of this style. I don’t think I would be doing a good job as an independent bottler, if I wasn’t able to select bottlings that I thought ticked quality boxes for people and drinkers that exist outside my own parameters of preference from time to time. However, I recognise that my true preferences seem increasingly narrow, and also increasingly separate from a lot of modern whisky culture’s general interests and tastes.

30: From what I understand, the big companies general strategy is to put prices up and rely on an influx of new drinkers to the various whisky categories, who come with cash to spend and a distinct absence of memory or knowledge of times when prices for these sorts of drinks were quite staggeringly cheaper. The hope seems to be that these new generations of consumer will accept Talisker 18yo at £160 a bottle because ‘that is the price’. This seems to be their strategy for how to make their next order of billions, and it addresses the fact that these companies cannot expand volume and output forever. I am very cautious about critiquing this approach because I’m highly aware that these are very large companies with very deep pockets who will have hired people far, far smarter than I am to develop these strategies in fine detail. It’s hard to resist this notion of: ‘they know what they’re doing, who am I to argue?’ That being said, I feel this approach makes too many assumptions about the willingness of new consumers to overlook the volumes of these liquids produced and how those millions of litres do not really square with the prices asked – after all, this is not difficult information to avail yourself of. It makes too many assumptions about the numbers of new consumers that will enter the whisky categories, especially in a world where trends of alcohol consumption are reportedly on a downward trajectory. It also makes many inherent assumptions about the levels of sustained interest these consumers will hold for whisky. In a coming era of social and technological upheaval, it seems that tastes and consumption trends will be less consistent and predictable, and that bullish pricing could just have the most obvious of effects: putting people off.

31: Everyone’s a critic. I engage with social media less and less these days, and in many instances actively avoid it. People are very quick to vocalise and post their opinions when the perceive you to have done something wrong, or put out something they dislike, whereas they rarely go to such lengths to praise you. I think it is very important to expose yourself to criticism (as a notorious critic myself, it’d be the height of hypocrisy for me to say otherwise), to open your mind to different and opposing ideas, but sometimes you can only go so far with this. Sometimes, all you can do is get your head down, work hard and try to do your best. This seems increasingly to be the mentality of many of my professional contemporaries in the whisky community, and it’s certainly one I’ve arrived at myself.

32: I do not want to keep doing Whisky Sponge, either as a blog, or as a bottling series in perpetuity. I’d rather draw a neat line under it than see it become stale or boring, or allow myself to really lose interest or run out of creative steam with it. When I started this blog it really was just that: a blog. Intended as a bit of fun and a chance to scratch a creative itch, try out a specific style of writing and poke fun at an industry that was very easy (and often deserving) to poke fun at. It was never intended as a means or route to employment or monetisation. When we started bottling it was initially as a hobby / side project and using the Whisky Sponge blog as a brand seemed like a natural way for me to extend the ‘having fun’ aspect of the blog to the realm of bottling, and to learn a bit about the whole process in doing so. Over 200 bottlings later I think it is rapidly approaching time to draw a line under Whisky Sponge. It was really an era of my career and life where I was making things up as I went along and just trying things and seeing what worked. With a distillery, a bottling company and a growing family (my son is due early May), I’m definitely in a different phase of my life and career. I like to keep moving forward, not do the same thing forever, not let something go on too long and become stale and to force myself to take on new creative challenges. As we’ve already made clear, we will end the Whisky Sponge bottlings at Edition 100, after which we’ll start a new series, one which we’ve put a lot of work into, which shares much of what I hope people like about Sponge and which will hopefully still be a lot of fun for drinkers and for us. I’ve been writing a bit more on the blog lately and I’ll try to maintain that through to later this year, after which time it will be put to bed for good, along with the Whisky Sponge bottlings.

33: The world is frightening, but whisky is still a comforting and exciting culture and product. My position has always been that I do not like the whisky industry, but I love whisky itself – I love the product and the community that has grown up around it. That still stands and, despite the wider world feeling like an increasingly scary or uncertain place, I still see a lot of brightness and potential in whisky’s future. It also emphasises to me how much value we place in that which is made and created by fellow humans. Whether that’s distillate or label artwork, people value these things because of the cumulative judgement and creativity of fellow humans that stands behind them and led to their existence. It is why I believe we are some way off AI generated label art being as motivating as that conceived and drawn by humans.

34: It is just a drink. A silly, often overpriced, funny, odd, strong drink that is not good for our health. It’s worth remembering this from time to time. But this drink does have function and effect, both physical and cultural. At its best it does bring us fun, it does draw people together and has undeniably founded a community, one that is growing and diversifying around the world all the time. It may not be the most noble thing in the world to work independently with whisky, but it is a product which gives people escapism, a hobby, some pleasure, decadence and friendship. Theses are things which humans need, these are things which contribute to the joy of living – and which help to dull the frequent, keener edges of that very same existence. So: it’s just a drink, but it’s a fun drink, and in its own small way, that matters.

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Port Ellen Distillery’s New Production Techniques: A Whisky Sponge Guide

March 27, 2024 by whiskysponge

Everyone is very excited about the new Port Ellen Distillery by Ikea. With many people wondering about the production techniques of this new thing.

Thankfully, Whisky Sponge has secured a secret tour of the premises and is in a position to issue this detailed report on their methodology.

Malting & Milling

A mixed bill of UHNWIs, HNWIs and anyone willing to participate via their Instagram accounts in the performative nature of overpriced lifestyle brand wank is brought together, gently pulped and fed a manure-rich slurry of 3D printed marketing.

When this coagulated mass reaches critical twattery, it is slowly emaciated using a long string expensively filmed video content.

Finally, the husks of human personalities they once were are ushered to the distillery and crushed under the omnipresent weight of unspoken expectation that they will post gushingly about the whole charade on their social channels.

Mashing & Fermenting

Lukewarm, bored money is gently added to a porridge of wealth-coveting brand hyenas. Their desperation for access makes them hustle round the money like cocks straining at a busy glory hole.

This well-frotted broth of twaddle is then left to fester in the wilderness, until a naturally forming bacteria of highly funky opinions begins to appear, once sufficient levels of misguided, know-nothing hyperbole have accumulated, the whole thing is subdued by the warm, homogenising comfort blanket of distiller’s yeast.

Distillation

Over time this brew of influencers, opinion-havers and partially interested money owners is slowly concentrated into a highly potent, intoxicating army of uniform brand-Nazis. Goosestepping all over the internet, worshipping at the rotating Gemini cube of eternal naffness!

Port Ellen’s new Gemini bottling.

Maturation

Everything is filled into bank accounts and great efforts have been undertaken to control losses.

Port Ellen’s new Head of the Theatre Department, Count Bhegoth Von-Tasgarr III, said:

“In recent years Islay has become blighted by out of control populations of rich arseholes. We at Diageo take our role in the local community seriously and recognise that we have a responsibility to Islay locals, and to the wider Islay ecosystem. In order to ensure we manage these populations and that they don’t upset the delicate equilibrium of Islay life, we’ve constructing this rich arsehole flytrap on the outskirts of Port Ellen. And who knows, one day we may even make whisky there too…”

The cafe is also open serving Cullen Skink and Morag’s ‘Snooty Dumpling’. Tours are at 06.00 hours sharp and include £5.00 back off a Port Ellen themed vajazzle in the carpark by old blind ‘Yeasty Murdo’ the Brewer. Anyone who earns enough can also join the mailing list, called ‘Associates of Port Ellen’.

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Macallan Finally Make Their Bottles Easier To Shove Up Your Arse

March 14, 2024 by whiskysponge

Macallan have yielded to unrelenting pressure and joined Bowmore in the burgeoning whisky bottle/sex toy hybrid market.

The new Macallan Horizon, developed in partnership with Bentley as part of their Drink Driving awareness and copying Bowmore campaign, is designed to offer simultaneous perineum AND P-spot stimulation while also having the added hygiene option of a post-frot whisky bum duche!

Head of product development and Bowmore ripping-off for Macallan, Petronella MacProstate said:

“This is incredibly exciting for us, not only are we doing our bit to copy Bowmore by clubbing together with an overpriced sports car brand, but we’re demonstrating to our valued community that we have truly listened to their requests to ‘shove it up your arse’. There’s nothing quite like the jab of a visionary horizontal vessel up your jacksie to really set the day a tingle!”

She added:

“It can be enjoyed by anyone, whether you’ve got a front bottom or a willy!“

Macallan Master Whisky Maker, Pristine Drambell, said:

“There’s some whisky in this thing… I think. Probably some of the stuff from the some of the casks in one of the warehouses… or actually could be some Malibu, can’t remember. But if you give it 20 seconds in the microwave it feels more like the real thing…“

Other Whisky / Sex Toy / Sports car collaborations in the works include, but are not limited to:

Auchentoshan: the Robin Reliant triple wood

Auchentoshan partner with reanimated British car manufacturer Reliant to make a hugely laborious reference to the fact that their whisky is triple distilled. Buyers of the £30k bottle will be invited to a special brand experience day where they get blind drunk and put behind the wheel of a Reliant Robin, anyone who can achieve three wanks before crashing gets a free tour and keyring.

Ardbeg Car-masutra

Drink a bottle of Ardbeg 10yo and shag Professor Jill Bumsden while driving a tractor from Port Ellen to Bowmore. Anyone who is able to finish before sight of the round church gets a free STD test.

Dalmore Mazda 12

New Dalmore thing with 12 point stag antlers which are actually dildos made out of melted down glove boxes from old Mazda MX5s. Any willing to fork out £1 million quid for the bottle will be allowed one hour of drunk driving on the M1 with legal immunity.

Glenlivet Citroen 2CV

Entirety of The Whisky Exchange staff squeeze into an old Citroen 2CV to attempt a messy drunken orgie while being driving across a freshly ploughed French cabbage field by a disinterested farmer. Special commemorative post-coital bottling is flogged via the new Whisky Exchange page dedicated to the hyper-inflated margin capture of Pernod Ricard blending inventory.

Macallan’s new deputy head of Deliberate Misuse of the Word Innovation, Sammy Davis Blendr, said:

“We’re already working on follow up version of the Horizon that has seven vibration settings inspired by different cruising speeds of a Bentley Flying Spur and achieves the same core temperature as our wash still… the launch will be called ‘Event Horizon’ and we’ll pay Laurence Fishburne ten million quid to sit on one!”

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Introducing Kythe Distillery

April 1, 2023 by whiskysponge

Jonny McMillan, Aaron Chan and me.

How the fuck do you get tropical fruit and wax flavours in whisky? 

There is much else to it, but when you strip the matter back to its most basic, skeletal core, answering the above question is why I am starting a distillery. It’s not only me, I am doing it with two friends as business partners: Jonny McMillan of Berry Brothers and Aaron Chan, director of Club Qing in Hong Kong. Our distillery will be named ‘Kythe’, an old Scots word meaning ‘to make known’ or ‘to show’, and it will be located on a farm in Perthshire, just outside Coupar Angus. 

“Why on earth would you do this?” I hear you ask. The usual doubtful whisperings about the multitudinous clutter of new distilleries, or the wind always on the cusp of departing from Scotch Whisky’s sails are rarely out of our culture’s public discourse. I’d also be lying if I said these arguments didn’t concern me on occasion as well, in my head the distillery map of Scotland starts to resemble a murmuration, pulsing and expanding seemingly to its own whim and rule. There is so much along the road about an undertaking as monumental as this that gives you pause for self-doubt – not to mention mortal terror! 

The answer is because I do not like the Scotch Whisky industry very much. I do not like its general lack of imagination and its inherent conservatism. I don’t like its pomposity and silliness; I don’t like the way in leans, bloated and breathless, on the zombie tropes of Scottishness, landscape and a history that has long been rendered meaningless by the dislocating power of the modern world and all its various upheavals. I don’t like all the superfluous fucking packaging. I don’t like the homogenisation and the ‘this is good enough’ approach that dominates the mainstream consensus around concepts like quality and style. I don’t like the endless, incurable obsession with wood at the expense of distillate. I don’t like the lies, bullshit, auto-storying and rose-tintery of its marketing. I don’t like the corporatism of the companies that dominate the majority of the industry and I don’t like their narrative about what Scotch Whisky is, or isn’t. I don’t like the rather Borg-esque mentality towards production, and particularly towards efficiency – efficiency is the enemy of character. 

But, it isn’t good to define yourself by what you are not – or by what you do not like. 

I have been writing stuff like that previous paragraph for years, and to tell you the honest truth, I’m fed up with it. I have no interest in protest and critique simply for the sake of it. It doesn’t achieve anything and it doesn’t create anything – it simply curdles in the ever-fattening opinion-berg of the internet. The truth is, as much as I don’t like the whisky industry, I love whisky. I love the drink, I love the culture and I love many of the people I have encountered along the way since I first properly stepped into this baffling pocket universe of high-functioning geekery and lanyards back in 2004. 

This is a world of grown adults gathering giddily and with furtiveness around a car boot full of tiny sample bottles. It’s a place where, in the space of about twenty years, this thing called the internet has culturally lashed together a medley of countries and continents that in ye’ olden days might have taken centuries to happen. It’s a messy, heady world built on experience, memory and flavour. There’s lots you can criticise about it (and Hell on toast have I done my fair share of that on these pages!) everything from obnoxious ‘shelfies’ and virtuous online posturing, to pricing, to the evils/virtues/disruptions of the secondary market, to the laughable investment ‘boom’. But, in spite of the things that annoy us about whisky, it’s still remarkably and persistently a lot of fun. The drink itself, when it is good, is still outrageously delicious, heady and intoxicatingly pleasurable to sip away at and blether about. 

In fact, if I had to define my whisky ‘journey’, I would label it 95% ‘sipping and blethering’ – the other 5% would probably be ‘carrying stuff’. And it is out of that very sipping and blethering, that we return to the question at the top of this post: how the fuck do you get tropical fruit and wax flavours in whisky? After all the conversations I’ve had with distillers, blenders, bottlers, collectors and any number of people vastly more educated and knowledgable than me, I don’t think anyone has given a concrete, or a certain, answer to this question.

What’s more, I don’t find these flavours in modern whiskies today. The chemistry, the intent and the recipe may say one thing, but I find it rarely aligns with the reality of flavour. Nothing produced in the last thirty years, anywhere, ticks the ‘fully old style’ flavour profile box for me – not completely anyway. In 2005 I stood in the car park at Ardbeg distillery and drank a small glass of Lagavulin 12 year old White Horse bottled around 1978 and I thought to myself: what the fuck is this? How does it taste so different. At time of writing, in March 2023, I still don’t really know the answer to that. 

I’ve been involved in what I’d term ‘old style’ whiskies pretty much ever since, and largely built the first part of my career out of them. I adore these whiskies, I find them fascinating and utterly compelling, but most importantly I find them delicious and I know that my palate is telling me, thousands of times over now, that they are different. They are undeniably and unequivocally of a different profile, character and flavour to their modern counterparts. I don’t know conclusively why that is, but I have ideas. Lots and lots and lots of ideas. Theories, plans, experiments and hypothesis spilling out of every pocket and conversation, but no concrete certainty – and no way to test them. 

This is why we want to start our own distillery, this is the purpose of Kythe Distillery. We don’t want to write about it forever, we don’t want to conjecture and to criticise from the sidelines what other people are doing. We want to make something ourselves, to really, truly push the boundaries on quality and to make something that matches the character and brilliance of old style, highland single malt whisky. We want waxiness of flavour and texture, we want tropical fruit, and we want fatness, minerality, oiliness and an emphatic personality of distillate. 

All of these various high concepts we hear about today, from wood policy to terroir, are often distractions from what I believe is the hardest and most important goal in making single malt whisky: quality. And for me, quality is beauty, and the only route there is painstaking. Kythe Distillery has been designed from the ground up to be painstaking and ruthlessly ideological in its purpose. Every aspect of production, from a fermentation capacity to deliver fourteen day, brewers yeast ferments as standard, to a directly wood-fired wash still and electrically heated spirit still. From a focus on heritage and brewing barley varieties as a base ingredient, to a carefully managed production level of just 50,000 LPA from a one tonne mash plant, all serve a higher, holistic purpose: create something beautiful and utterly distinctive, a distillate that derives its value from its inherent personality. 

Kythe’s directly wood fired wash still with worm tub – a return to true direct firing.

Thankfully, this vision is also shared and supported by our shareholders. One of the proudest aspects of this project, for me, is that we will be a distillery funded entirely by whisky enthusiasts. The foundational motivation for this venture to succeed is essentially drinkers who would like to taste these flavours again, without necessarily having to fork out the ever-spiralling auction prices. 

Anyone can be critical, or be negative, and whisky is a world that I think desperately needs robust, intelligent, fair and useful criticism. I hope that when I’ve been critical of whisky in the past, that it clearly comes from a place of loving the drink and the culture, and Scotland more broadly, and wanting it to be better. We are critical of that which we love because we love it. I have just come to the point where I know I would rather actually create my own whisky. All three of us in this project have always dreamed about doing this and we have decided to make it our life’s work.

I believe there is an increasingly vibrant and positive movement in Scottish distilling at present. The argument that there are too many new distilleries often fails to take into account the fact that the combined output isn’t even equivalent to a single expansion of one of the major Diageo distilleries. This new wave of distilleries is incrementally breathing diversity of character back into Scotch Whisky. Contained within this growing number of independently owned new projects is greater variety of approaches to, and opinions about, production – with sufficient years this will manifest as a broader spectrum of flavour in Scotch whisky once again. There’s also more willingness to move away from such obsessiveness around yield and try to imbue value in whisky by means of character. This is all good news for Scotland and good news for whisky drinkers. We hope Kythe Distillery will be a meaningful part of this movement and all the implications it carries for this coming decade.

Whisky can feel like it is in a very silly place at the moment, a place that can be dispiriting to those of us who just quite like the culture, the pleasure of tasting and, yes, collecting or accumulating a few bottles here and there; who love the experience and general camaraderie of it all. My hope is that projects like ours are better news for those of you who align with that clan. That in the grand sweep of cycles and phases that Scotch Whisky has always existed within and responded to, that Kythe Distillery is another positive herald for the drinker, and for all of us who would like Scottish whisky to remain fun and exciting.

Now, all we have to do is make incredible, old style whisky. Did I mention we have some ideas… 

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Large Hadron Collider Fails To Detect Blair Bowman’s Sense Of Shame

December 20, 2022 by whiskysponge

Higgs Boson: literally massive in comparison.

CERN Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have abandoned their decade long quest to discover professional idea pincher Blair Bowman’s sense of shame. Professor Gertrude Von Toblerone said at a gloomy press conference:

“No one wishes to admit failure. But under the circumstances we can draw no other conclusion than that Bowman’s shame is either non-existent – which my team believe to be the most likely case – or it is of such an unfathomably sub-atomic scale as to be not yet detectable by science. To think: I was part of the team that discovered the Higgs Boson! To know that the work we have been doing here at the LHC these past years has been discerning the most infinitesimal quantum fabric of existence. To be halted in our endeavours by a self-satisfied whisky pillock with a blatantly performative Twitter feed and a passion for self-promotion. I think I will retire now.”

It isn’t actually redacted, they are just blank.

Dr Jane Brain, head of insufferable attention seeker psychology at Glasgow University, said of Bowman’s recent virtual ejections:

“What is most fascinating is the time taken to conceive and execute these quite astonishingly performative and blatantly self-promotional tactics. There is a beautiful irony about it because, of course, someone who is actually this busy and successful usually does not put out press releases and posts. Let alone pretend to care about such nebulous and generally silly things as ‘whisky NFTs’ in a carefully curated and highly virtuous fashion. It would also be the case for most humans, that they would consider placing a story on the BBC website about themselves isolating from Covid for fear of it damaging their highly precious nose, perhaps to be in somewhat poor taste and judgement at a time when more important things were happening – like some people actually dying.”

Mr Bowman is looking forward to a prosperous 2023 selling re-racked hogsheads of 8 year old Macduff to Saudi Arabia and making sure as many people as possible are aware of just how many unread emails he has in his inbox.

In related news, other whisky-flavoured attention coveters are available…

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Elixir Distillers Progress With Takeover Of Pernod Ricard

June 22, 2022 by whiskysponge

It was a toss up between this or Jacob’s Creek.

Whisky company Elixir Distillers continued this week to expand like like a ravenous Mothra larvae gorging itself on discarded thermonuclear waste. Its acquisition of Tormore Distillery sees the completion of its latest phase in a strategic, hostile takeover of Pernod Ricard. A project that started life back in 2005 when one of Pernod’s junior sales executives accidentally sold 6 bottles of TWE’s allocated stocks to Master Of Malt.

Speaking while casually thumbing through a laminated copy of ‘Minion Flailing for Control Freaks’, Elixir Distiller’s director, Sukhinder Singh, said:

“Phase One was to sell The Whisky Exchange to Pernod for a squillion gold bushels. We have just completed Phase Two which was to obtain Tormore Distillery from them. I will now establish there a communications lair, a subterranean lab containing an order of Carthusian monks churning out Chartreuse, a novelty cocktail trolly and a modest local gardening fete on Sundays. Phase Three commences after I officially leave The Whisky Exchange and Pernod attempts to digest the figurative trojan reality horse that it is extremely difficult and complicated to run a massive retail company and nobody wants to sell them allocation of nice things anymore because they’re Pernod and not me who people are scared of.”

Elixir’s newly appointed head of sitting wisely in a garden and wearing a massive sun hat while gently pruning topiary, Willy Bishop, said:

“Phase Two is my favourite phase. Phases Three and Four involve, but are not limited to, an armed amphibious landing on Orkney to take Scapa, the establishment of a temporal singularity at Longmorn Distillery by triggering an infinite escape velocity on secondary market prices for 1969 G&M CASK bottlings. And ruthlessly coercing Pernod Ricard into a position of such desperation that they are forced to collaborate with an ailing sports car brand. I hope Phase Two lasts a long time… “

Sukhinder added:

“Finally, my dream of owning an illogically named Islay distillery AND a Speyside-based garden centre with its own chimney is complete! As for the name? I’m thinking Tor Mhor…?”

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Bowmore Announce Exciting New Sex Toy

June 17, 2022 by whiskysponge

Bowmore have partnered with popular sex toy specialists SquirtJam to create a thrilling and futuristic new sex toy that takes inspiration from some of the industry’s most iconic designs.

Maybe you sit on it?

Willie Fapp, head of wank at Beam Suntory, said:

“This is a sex toy so enigmatic that merely being in the same room as it can lead to dangerous states of arousal. Only yesterday I was collating images of the new Bowmore ‘Spark-52’ and rapidly found myself in a the grip on an insatiable sexual trance. I came to after an indeterminate amount of time, only to find myself slathered in 1960s Umbongo and hessian wank-sock shrapnel.”

Lead designer on the product, Quim Wibbler, said from her laboratory dungeon deep inside Bowmore’s No.1 Vaults:

“We’re not actually sure how it works, it just does. We think it may be something to do with a combination of nudging your genitals with a weird shaped object in the knowledge that you are the sort of person who can afford to spunk away 75K on something that could be mistaken by the casual observer for an unloved lava lamp in a charity shop. If you edge yourself while thinking about all the people who are probably using food banks in the UK, apparently you can achieve the kind of dehydration-inducing climax that requires putting a bin liner down first.”

The new Bowmore Spark-52 is limited to 100 editions and will be available in September from the sort of places that sell these sorts of things to atrocious people.

Sex toy and whisky blogger, Clitty O’Grist, said in her write up of the new product:

“It was fine until I put it up my bum, now I’ve got Ardmore. One star.”

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Some thoughts on independent bottling

April 1, 2022 by whiskysponge

What have I learned since starting doing independent bottling a couple of years ago?

1: Everything takes far longer and is far more complicated than it feels like it should be; perhaps this is the case for many types of business. But the act of disgorging a cask into bottles, labelling them and then selling them is riven with pitfalls. Pitfalls which can be by nature logistic, regulatory, resulting from human error of judgement, miscommunication, timing, finance – the list is bewildering and inexhaustible.

2: People matter. More than ever, smaller brands and bottlers are attached to people and names and faces and personalities.

3: Labels matter. People are influenced by labels and by the presentation, values, design and style of brands. This isn’t to drift into marketing doublespeak, rather it’s just an observation that people place value upon that which they find beautiful, or funny, or just aesthetically pleasing in ways they can’t quite articulate.

4: The whisky itself still matters – but arguably not as much as it used to. People are more motivated than ever by the contents of a bottle, but that motivation is more varied, diverse, educated and often more cynical than ever before. The diversity and number of people around the world that are interested in, desire to possess and are willing pay serious money for good quality single malt whisky is larger than ever. That said, while single malts may be booming, they are still a niche product. As such, it is unsurprising that the reasons why people are interested in the liquid aspect of bottles is also diversifying and become more complex. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Everybody wants Springbank, Bowmore and Laphroaig. Only a few want Macduff. Everyone calculates on price for everything. Lots of people flip, lots of people open and drink, lots of folk do a mix of both. Few whisky people conform rigidly to one group or easy category.

5: Selling whisky is fucking hard work. Everyone thinks Sponge bottles fly off the shelf, and at one point they did for a brief while, sometimes they still do now – but it isn’t the word ‘Sponge’ that shifts them so much as the word ‘Bowmore’ or ‘Ardnamurchan’. Selling whisky is tough. There has never been so much interest in single malt whisky, but there’s also never been so much of it on the market. So much diversity and volume of bottled products, in retail and at auction in the booming secondary market. If you are a whisky enthusiast, the competition for your money is fierce and you have never had such a wealth of opportunity to spend that money. This is something we forget in a world where we obsess over scores and prices and single casks; we miss the fact that there’s quite a lot of good whisky available between £60-100 in the shops. Despite what it may seem like, independent bottlings do not always self-evaporate from the virtual shelves.

6: Scores and reviews absolutely do not carry the kind of weight that much of today’s blogs and commentary would have you believe. There’s been about three occasions where a score of between 90-92 points from Serge or Ruben had a meaningful impact on our sales. There has to be a pretty specific alignment of price and score for a bottling to sell out like hotcakes. I notice this sometimes in relation to my own scores and notes, I often see bottles I’ve scored 90 or above still available quite a while after a note has been published. There’s many factors behind this, but I believe it’s primarily to do with the fact there’s a far higher quantity of ‘very good’ whiskies around that reach the 90 point level and that prices are really quite eye-watering for most decent aged, named malts now. As mentioned above, there’s huge competition for your pocket money so as consumers we tend to be reflexively more selective these days. Bottom line? 92 is the new 90.

6b: Having said all that, I believe that critical consensus, writing and sharing tasting notes, and using scores as part of that communicative method is still hugely valuable, fun and important. But it’s a broad brush stroke, cumulative process that relies hugely upon the slow foundation of consensus. As whisky becomes brutally expensive, scores become political, but tasting notes, common language and the open exchange of information and ideas is still hugely important.

7: Whisky is better than it used to be. Which is one way of explaining why there’s stacks of 90 point whiskies sloshing about and cluttering up the internet – and your shelves. Another way of saying that is that whisky is more clever, more technological, more informed, more consistent, more predictable, more curated. More soulless. There’s an abundance of ‘very good’ box ticking drams out there. There’s a dearth stunning, heart-stopping, deeply idiosyncratic, joy-spinning whiskies that make you realise all over again why you adore this drink and are bothering with it in the first place. They still come along, but rarely.

8: There may be a lot more good whisky out there – but there’s still an ocean of dullness. The very bad and the very good are comprehensively outweighed by the very boring. Most whisky is boring, mass-produced industrial distillate flavoured with oak. Most people instinctively know this and that’s why they are willing to pay a bit extra for the good stuff (both modern or old in style), and often a lot extra for the very good stuff. That’s why the laws of supply and demand swoop fast and viscous upon the ‘very good’ – there’s a lot more consensus on what’s ‘very good’ than we often acknowledge.

9: Pricing for bottles of good malt whisky is undeniably getting painful for everyone. But the price of casks is more painful still. The price of casks is going up faster than the prices of bottles, the result of which is indy bottler margins get squeezed.

10: Who is to blame for point number 9? If you’ve read these sorts of rambling, serious ‘writing’ posts I do from time to time on here, you’ll know I am not a fan of un-nuanced, ‘hot take’ style, over-simplifications of these sorts of complex situations. But in this case I’ll make an exception, if you’ll permit me a whinge. It’s the fault of all these flash in a pan, cask investment, snake-oil peddling, charlatan, ‘liquid gold’, asset/portfolio/capital/1000% return, anonymous cunts. They’re spoiling things far more than any bottle flippers and they should fuck off.

10b: It’s definitely a bit more complicated than that, and at the same time probably just a lot to do with human greed. But I really don’t like these bullshit investment companies, so let’s just all agree to blame them some more.

11: I know prices are often pretty disheartening these days, and I know ours are often on the higher side. We bottle hand to mouth and don’t have the luxury of working with stocks we purchased 10+ years ago. I also tend to only choose the kinds of whiskies and drinks that I love and that I desire to work with and experience. That’s why it tends to be, on average, older and slightly pricier stuff we put out. Nevertheless, our most frequent reason for rejecting a cask or deciding against doing a bottling is because we think it is just too damned expensive. We all have to work with the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. Sometimes to decide against doing a bottling because it is more expensive than we would like it to be, is also to decide against doing business we know we can achieve. Some arguments characterise that as making the situation worse, some would say it is reacting to the realities of the market. Now that we employ people and have livelihoods to consider, these kinds of decisions tilt more from ‘should we sell this?’ to ‘can we sell this?’. However, the ultimate question is always ‘is this good enough quality?’.

11.B: I’d love to do a lot more cheaper bottlings. But finding actually good, exciting, interesting whiskies at that price point that aren’t very similar to what a lot of other bottlers are already putting out is extremely challenging. What’s more there’s quite a few bottlers now who are really nailing doing interesting stuff with casks and younger, modern malt whiskies at these price points. Something which makes it an ever harder area in which to compete and do interesting, creative work.

12: I still really love tasting and occasionally drinking whisky. But I find myself less and less fussed about the whisky, and increasingly far more fussed about who I’m drinking it with. I also notice a lot more keenly these days how circumstance, mood and company affect the pleasure factor in almost any dram.

13: As you’ll have noticed by the increasingly distant publication dates on these Sponge blog posts, I really don’t have time to give this site proper attention any more. Which makes me think I should probably put it to bed at some point in not too distant future. This makes me a little a bit sad, but I would much rather end it neatly and tidily than drag in out for years on end and it be a series of diminishing returns. No doubt some of you already think that’s the case (hello to my occasional anonymous trolls. Xx)

14: I would really like to do a lot more small batch and blended malt bottlings. But they are much, much harder to sell (all you lot who profess to just want affordable, lovely, egalitarian, good old ‘drinking whisky’ are single cask coveting fibbers the lot of you!) and really you need a warehouse to do this kind of potions shit.

15: I would do despicable things to have my own bonded warehouse. I would also do despicable things in my own bonded warehouse. Not sure if those things require a separate HMRC license though…

16: Brexit has, empirically and demonstrably, not been a good thing. It has damaged this business. That’s the last time I’ll ever mention Brexit. Well, at least until my wedding speech…

17: I wish I could draw. I love designing the labels for Whisky Sponge but it’s pretty frustrating not being able to put down the fucked up images in my head onto paper by my own hand. That said, the collaborative approach with our artist makes them stronger and is an asset. I am very happy with our labels and the fact that I think we’ve been able to pair them with generally delicious and interesting drams.

20: There’s a lot of pretty angry, judgmental and critical voices online these days. Simple, often conspiratorial explanations are touted and rather passive aggressive slogans and hashtags keep getting bandied about, #openyourbottles being a prime example. I’m not convinced these ideas, hashtags and voices are particularly representative of the wider whisky community which I find myself viewing from different angles these days. As mentioned above, today’s whisky world is a lot more diverse and joyously muddled than it’s given credit for. There’s a lot of people out there just quietly getting on with having fun.

21: You cannot please everyone.

22: Scotland isn’t automatically the king of whisky anymore. There’s loads of great distilleries dotted about the world producing everything from the fantastic to the funky. I see this only as a good thing for whisky drinkers and for independent bottlers. I also see it as a perfectly healthy thing for Scotland. As a Scottish person who is emotionally invested in Scottish single malt whiskies I see only healthy competition and the ball sitting in Scotland’s court. I also see more than a few folk here rising to all these new wave challenges.

23: The future might feel doom-laden for all sorts of reasons these days, but from a whisky perspective things look rosy and pretty exciting at the outset of this decade.

24: I still prefer malts to blends. Depending on who I’m dramming with of course…

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Macallan Release More Of Gordon & MacPhail’s Whisky

February 10, 2022 by whiskysponge

Empty tourist processing facility, Macallan Distillery, has announced the exciting launch of yet another of the casks they quite evidently purchased from Gordon & MacPhail shortly before Gordon & MacPhail build a second distillery.

‘The Grasp’

The new Macallan 81 Year Old was distilled in 1940 and has been packaged in a circa 2005 sculpture-themed lamp stand from Homebase.

Head of blue sky drinking at Macallan, Pristine Campbell, said:

“The three-armed sculpture represents three facets of The Macallan. First of all there’s some serious ‘Zombie emerging from pond goo’ energy going on here, obviously this represents our mindless customers who swallow this gibberish. Then there’s that lovely sense of the futile grasping of shameless, desperation-scented investment obsessives – that’s clearly represented in the slightly more gnarled second arm. And last, but not least, there’s the a third arm because the bottle kept falling off and smashing when it was just two.”

She added…

“We did want to use fists to celebrate the long history of kink and fetish nights at Easter Elchies house and the thrill of going up to the elbow into a junior marketing executive as the moonlight bounces gently off the guttering of warehouse 12. But, alas, we had similar balancing issues with the bottle when using clenched fists. Although, I do look forward to flipping one of the extremely rare ‘prototype fisting plinths’ after I move to another company in a couple of years time.”

Other ‘oldest whisky in the world’ bottlings planned for the next couple of decades include…

2027 – Glenlivet 1945 – 82 year old

This is the next release in G&M’s Generations series. This time the bottles are housed in actual log cabins, each hand crafted from a single square acre of the Brazilian rainforest. Purchasers have visiting rights three times a year and can sign in up to three guests. If they ever choose to drink the whisky they are contractually obliged to burn down the log cabin in order to prevent them flipping the empty on Righmove.

2028 – Macallan 1945 – 83 year old

Macallan continue their desperate scramble to hold onto the top spot with a rushed out release of more G&M stock. This time the plinth is a massive basket of copper feet and dicks.

2033 – Glen Grant 1948 – 85 year old

G&M return with another Generations release. This time a very lovely 85 year old Glen Grant 1948. It is packaged in very rare ‘physical bitcoins’, hand mined from rare asteroid minerals in the Kuyper belt by William Shatner. Purchasers are offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to accompany Stephen Rankin on the maiden voyage of G&M’s prestige customer, oak-hewn rocket from Elgin’s new spaceport.

2034 – Macallan 1948 – 85 year old

Yawn. Plinth etc. Nestled in the bumhole of a massive brass arse this time.

2050 – Strathisla 1960 – 90 Year Old

G&M launch this exclusive duty free bottling for the luxury Lunar Colony where all the rich people are room mates with Elon Musk. Presented in special boxes sculpted from the last few remaining chunks of Antarctica’s glacial ice. Purchasers get a ticket to the ‘viewing lounge’ where they can enjoy uninterrupted views of hundreds of millions of climate refugees on Earth perishing and warring over the dwindling natural resources and habitable land.

2051 – Macallan 1950 – 100 Year Old

Macallan jump the gun and finally make it to the 100 year old whisky mark. Due to the the breakdown of Scotland’s climate there are 9 bottles remaining in the cask at natural cask strength of 78.6% alcohol. Director’s of Edrington would like to reduce the bottling strength but potable water is now worth several orders of magnitude more than Macallan.

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