Ep. 96 - Once The World Largest Distillery: The History and Spirits of Tomatin
SCOTT ADAMSON // Tomatin Distillery
Listen to the Episode
Show Notes
For those that enjoyed the story of Cu Bocan, the ghost dog from the Scottish Highlands, its time to deep dive into some great history and spirits as I chat with Scott Adamson, blender and brand ambassador of Tomatin. Some revealing history around the bourbon barrel in here as well as a great discussion around the history of what was once the biggest distillery in the world. Enjoy the kickoff of a new year of Whiskey Lore The Interviews
We'll chat about:
- Highland illicit distilling
- How trains changed the region
- The origin of the distillery
- When bourbon casks first came to Scotland
- When it was the largest distillery
- Blending and cask trading
- Japanese investment in Scotch
- Benefit of tired casks
- Tasting 12 Year Old Tomatin
For More Information:
Transcript
Drew Hannush:
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lore's travel guide to experiencing Irish whiskey and Whiskey Lore's travel guide to experiencing Kentucky bourbon. And today we are heading to Scotland to dig into the history and whiskeys of the Tomaten distillery. I can't say it. Whiskey Lore stories fans will remember the distillery from the ghost dog, Kubaken in season one of the podcast. And I've had the honor of traveling around the village there and touring the distillery. And today you're going to get to learn more about it with my guest Tomaten's global brand ambassador, Scott Adamson. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Adamson:
Thank you for having me Drew, it's a pleasure to be here.
Drew Hannush:
This is great. I love the view over your shoulder for those watching on YouTube. They will get to see that, that beautiful house back there. Uh, tell me who got to live in that, that beautiful facility.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, so my lighting's not great, but it does mean you get a fantastic view behind
Drew Hannush:
Hahaha
Scott Adamson:
me of the house and then. even behind that the Monolieth Mountain. So that is one of the original distillery cottages from 1897. There was three of them built. This is the one in the middle. And for most of its history, it was occupied by the tax officer. So in Scotland, right up until we had the internet and we could have all of the casks registered online, there would be a HMRC officer on site to every distillery. And that was the house that was provided for that office. officer, by law, I think the law came in 1823 that distilleries with a licence had to provide accommodation for a tax officer. And you know, you travel around the Highlands of Scotland and the houses that they were given were absolutely stunning. More recently that was occupied by our former master distiller, a gentleman called Dougie Campbell. He worked with us here for 53 years and
Drew Hannush:
Mmm.
Scott Adamson:
towards the end of his career that was his house here.
Drew Hannush:
Very nice. Yeah, that's some of the things that I miss about traveling around the distilleries in Scotland. They're seeing the old Spirit Safe, which of course was his domain. Nobody got to touch that without him being around. And the Porteous Mills, which you have one of those.
Scott Adamson:
That's right, yeah, we have two of them. We use one of them. The other one is now being moved downstairs so it can be part of the tour. But part of the history of Tomaten was it was such a big distillery that we almost had double of everything. And the Porteous
Drew Hannush:
Wow.
Scott Adamson:
Mill being one of them, yeah.
Drew Hannush:
It's a fascinating history and to walk around the place, you get a sense that there was a much larger business going on there at one time. And so we'll jump into the history a little bit and talk about that. And let's start off with the area first because you and I were chatting before we started recording. about history and lore and the idea of distilling. Distilling has gone on for a long time in that area. The distillery's start date is 1897. But talk a little bit about that region and probably what was going on there before Tomaten existed.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, absolutely. So Tomatin, the easiest way to describe its location today is 15 miles south of Inverness. If you're in Inverness, you get yourself on today, the A9 road and you drive for 15 minutes and you'll be at the distillery. But if you take a step back and look at the map of the Scotch whisky making regions, Tomatin actually lies at the very heart of the Highland whisky making region. it's halfway between John O'Groats in the north and Stirling in the south and halfway between Aberdeen in the east and Kyle of Loch Alesha in the west. It is right in the middle of that region. And you know, whisky making in the Highlands, it's difficult to summarise because it is the largest whisky making region in Scotland by geography. And there's so many different styles of Highland whisky, even within our distillery, within our core range we're going to have different summing up what the region does is very difficult but historically when we talk about whiskey making in the Highlands prior to 1823, with the exception of Ferentosh, we're talking about illicit whiskey production. You know we're talking about what's been left at the end of the farming year, what barley's left being turned into whiskey. It was part of the household and in many instances part of the daily chores. You know, it's part of, you know, you're making bread, you're milking the cows, you're making the whiskey. It was part of the story. And when I first came to Tomaten, the story here, so where we are, we're, as I say, 15 miles south of Inverness, but we're 315 meters above sea level, one of the highest distilleries in Scotland. And in fact, when the distillery was built in 1897, it was the first distillery Every other distillery in the Highlands is coastal because you needed boats to get your ingredients to the distillery You needed boats to get your whiskey to the market But we were built in the same year that the Highland railway line was completed so that gave us a
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
different form of transport but anyway that makes us one of those kind of Classic areas for illicit production because it was just simply difficult to get to you know 315 meters above sea level it's on the eastern edge of this monoleth mountain range And the story that I heard when I started at the distillery was, whisky has been made in this region since the 15th century and
Drew Hannush:
Hehehe
Scott Adamson:
cattle drovers from Inverness would fill up their horns with spirit on their way to the market. And it's a lovely romantic story. I couldn't find a shred of evidence to back it up, but it's
Drew Hannush:
Hehehe
Scott Adamson:
still a great story. But what we did find actually is the oldest building on site here at the distillery. It's called the old Laird's House. me right here just behind the house there up on the hill there's this old Laird's house and up until 1897 it was the only building here it was built the first record of it is around about 1711 and there is a record in the days and weeks after the Battle of Culloden of a copper pot still being found in the house the person that occupied the house was called Gillis MacBain He was part of one of the local clans he fought at Culloden, later died of his wounds, and following the battle the government forces they kind of... went through a process of knocking on the door of every Jacobite and every Jacobite sympathiser to really out rule this rebellion and totally quash it. And when they got to Gillis MacBain's house they found this copper pot still which was worth seven pounds of silver at the time. So it would have been producing a decent amount of spirit and the story goes that he was selling that spirit to the kings in at the bottom of the road. So he was selling it to the people that he was hiding it from. And there's something the name of Tomatin as well. So Tomatin in Gaelic means hill of the juniper. So the word Tom means hill. So if you think of Tamnavulin, Tamdu, Tomantul, it's all hill in the same way that Glen is valley. But that Atin part is juniper, and we all know juniper to be the main botanical used in gin, but the tree, the bush that the berry grows on, when you light that on fire, it creates an incredibly intense heat, but no visible smoke.
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
fuel source for illicit distillers. So that's the name of the region, that's not the name that the distillery came up with in 1897 and said you shall be called to Matton.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
So there's stories of illicit production up and down the Glen. The real interesting part of illicit distillation is that you only have a record when people got caught. If you were doing illicit distillation well there shouldn't be a record. So
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
in some ways we're lucky to have the record of the house here on site, in other ways it's a sign of failure ultimately.
Drew Hannush:
It's the subterfuge is what I find fascinating when I was in Campbelltown and I learned about the guy who was distilling in his basement and he had hooked it up to the chimney so that the smoke was going out of the chimney. Nobody knew what he was doing,
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
but he was distilling whiskey in his basement. And you're right. I mean, this is the challenge that we have in terms of trying to document history. You can't really document what you don't know. And If they're doing illicit distilling, they don't want you to know.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah,
Drew Hannush:
So.
Scott Adamson:
and it's almost like... the criminal will always see the law as the enemy and they will be doing everything they can to when they find out a new technique, they'll be finding a new way to hide it and things like that. So it would have been a constant cycle of people getting caught, finding a way around it. You hear stories of stills being found in old churches and things like that, because there's no way they would be distilling in a church. Well, they absolutely were. And
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
that's what makes it fascinating. It's part of, part of the real romanticism of Scotch whisky's history and I think sometimes it gets blown out of proportion. I think everyone wants to lay claim to a history of distillation before the distillery was built, which you know if you've got it fantastic but if you've not tell the story of the foundation of the distillery and why it was built there you know.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, exactly. Well, and there could be some issues with that as well if your distillery started in the 1800s because nobody was really documenting that much. They didn't know that future historians would care. They were just making whiskey and making money to survive. They weren't necessarily trying to do this for posterity. Whereas today we look at it from a marketing standpoint and say, hey, you know, here is our posterity laid out for you. And so sometimes you have to sort of clutch at straws and see what you can get to be able to fill that story in. I think what's fun about driving around that area is that you get a sense of this isolation. of the area. So you kind of get that impression while you're there. But then you have the big bridge by the motorway
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
that where the train is going through. And that tells a story too of when the trains finally came through that was really your opportunity to have these kinds of distilleries and make that connection between Inverness and Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, that's true. I mean what I find fascinating about this and I only found out recently so Just to the south of Tomaten over the river Finthorn is the Tomaten viaduct And you know you go further afield and you have things like the Glenfinnan viaduct which you see from Harry Potter this incredible a piece of Victorian engineering and industrialization and they're absolutely beautiful things to look at today and you see people taking photos what I love is going back and looking at the the public commentary at the time, and people talking about how these viaducts were a scar on the landscape, and they were making the beautiful highlands horrible. And
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
it bears a striking resemblance to today when we install the wind farms. Up in the hill behind me, there's a huge amount of wind farms going in now. I think they're quite nice to look at, but a lot of people go, this is ruining the highland scenery. So that commentary has been going on for 100 years. But... You're right, you know, for us, without the railway line there would have been no tematin. And what's really interesting is that we know from archives that our founder was involved in the conversations around the route of the railway, around the final route. Now, unfortunately we don't yet know what that conversation looked like and how much influence he had over it, but we do know that he was the factor of the local estate. And you know, where the viaduct goes, there probably would have been an easier way to build the railway. It might have taken longer, it would have taken further. But this was a feat of engineering that took over a decade to build. People died
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
building this viaduct. But what it did was, up until that point in time, the railway only went as far as Aviemore, and then you had to take a real big circular route to get to Inverness. But by building the... Fintorn Viaduct and then the Culloden Viaduct, the Inverness to Aviemore route was made much, much shorter and it made, it essentially connected Inverness to the rest of Scotland and from there to the world. So this is at the time where we've got the kind of Victorian boom, not just in whisky that we talk about, but the romanticisation of the Highlands, you know, you've got the Sir Walter Scott movement, you've got Queen Victoria up at Balmoral, you have... people traveling to the Highlands to see this rugged beauty and to go hunting and fishing and connecting in Venice, which even today is the capital of the Highlands. That brought a huge amount of people to the area. But as we know from Speyside as well, the railway line gave whiskey in this region a lifeblood because up until that point in time, and I think that's, you know, it's part of our founder's story is he had spent his life dedicated to benefiting the community and we can go into that a little bit. But it was only with the railway line that he was able to bring modern industry to the region. Because up until that point, if you wanted to build a distillery in the Highlands, you had to be beside the water. That was the
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
only way to get your casks to the market and to get your ingredients to the distillery.
Drew Hannush:
Thus the reason why Campbelltown became such a huge distilling area with almost 30 distilleries at one point. And now we look at Space Side and we go, geez, if that was part of the Highlands, the Highlands would be even more diverse because we're talking about 50 some odd distilleries being added to that as well. So yeah, talk a little bit about the influence. John McDougall is the man you're talking about, right? The founder.
Scott Adamson:
That's right, yeah. So John McDougall, he's a fascinating man, and we actually, through things like his obituary and things like that, we know a huge amount about the guy. So he was born in Tomatin, which he was born in Tomatin in 1833, and at that time, you wouldn't have even been able to call Tomatin a village. It was a scattered population at best. It was shepherds, it was estate workers, but he was the son of the parish schoolmaster. And so... From a very young age he had this kind of incredible work ethic and a commitment to the community. So by the age of 17 he'd set up a business as a merchant. He'd opened MacDougall stores, which was still the name of the village shop until maybe 20, 30 years ago. And from there he became the merchant. Very successful. His obituary states it's a business unlike any in the Highlands at the time. And from there he was a busy guy, you know, he became the postmaster, the registrar, he became the justice of the peace in Invernesshire, he became the chairman of the local school board himself. But I think what's fascinating to that kind of development of the community is that he was the factor of the local estate. So
Drew Hannush:
Mmm.
Scott Adamson:
the factors role as part of the estate, particularly in the Victorian times. was designing and implementing improvement schemes. So this could simply be ways of better farming the land. It could be ways of diversifying, so you know, bringing in sporting to the area, and so having the railway station in Tomatin was a massive benefit to the local estate from a hunting point of view. But it would have also been developing ways to make more money out of the land that you had. And so in 1897 that led to him establishing the Tomatin Distillery. So he was able to get a plot of land from the estate. He was able to get access to the water source, access to the minerals, so for the peat, from the local estate. So this would have all been part of building the local community. It would have been bringing new people, it would have been building the economy. First and foremost for the estate. from the distillery. And so on the 8th of June 1897, the Tomatin Spay District Distillery Company Limited is established. I think the name's fascinating as well because by geography, by the definition of what the Highlands is, Tomatin is a Highland distillery.
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
But at the time, Spayside was so heavily romanticised and you know you had the Glenlivet and things like that, that they the distillery was founded by John McDougall and through heavy investment from other people both locally and further afield so it was almost there was a little bit of crowdfunding going on if you want.
Drew Hannush:
It was an interesting time period too. A lot of distilleries that I researched. It's amazing how many popped up there in the last decade of the 1800s. And of course the Paterson crash came along and pretty much collapsed the industry and the DCL was going around buying up all of these distilleries. I think that's what's amazing to me is that some of these distilleries just simply even being somewhat new, Ben Roemick comes to mind. uh, shut down, but then start back up. So you guys were shut down fairly quickly after the, the initial ownership. Did, did he continue to own it when it came back online or did he sell it off?
Scott Adamson:
So what happened was, so as you say, in the 1890s there was 33. new distilleries built in that decade alone, which has a striking resemblance to what we see in Scotland right now, which is interesting. You hope that the crash that followed in
Drew Hannush:
Hehehe
Scott Adamson:
the 1900s doesn't follow in the next decade. In 1897 alone, there was 11 new distilleries built. So the great thing about that was, it was really easy to find people to build a distillery. There was people with expertise in distillery building at the time. And so Tomat and opened in 1897, and it closed in 1906. Now, it's hard to say that was a direct result of the Paterson crash. From what I've been able to piece together through looking at the company's accounts from that time, it struggled from the get-go. It
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
really didn't, it wasn't one of these distilleries that opened in 1897 to huge applause and then was tragically lost. It really struggled to get going, and I think that is part of the fact You know, it was from the moment it opened, whisky was going downhill a little bit. So John himself retired in 1903 and sold all of his shares at that point. And unfortunately he passed away in 1909. So he retires in 1903, sells all of his shares, he still lives in the village. He would have overseen the closure of the distillery, which I would imagine that would have been quite a hard thing to bear witness to after all these years of trying to get to bring something to the community to see it go away in such a short period of time. And then it was purchased in the same year that he died, it was purchased in 1909 by two families from London, the Callenhams and the Saunders, who were wines and spirits merchants in their own right and were incredibly successful. So I think it's more, from what I've seen up until 1906, it was a small distillery. It was really rudimentary. It was only making whisky to sell locally.
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
I was, what was really interesting when I was researching the history of the distillery, I found, I managed to get in contact with the descendant of the distillery manager that took over in 1909. And he was able to tell me, you know, that a lot of work had to be done at the distillery because when they bought the distillery, the spirit that was being produced really wasn't of the distillery. character that these two families from London were looking for. And
Drew Hannush:
Hmm
Scott Adamson:
more recently I found in our archive a document written by Charles Doyg, that kind of renowned distillery builder of the 1800s, and he came to Tomatin when it closed in 1906 and he wrote a full account of all of the equipment that the distillery had
Drew Hannush:
Wow.
Scott Adamson:
and gave recommendations for how to re-engineer So when the distillery was purchased in 1909, they followed Charles Doyg's plans and kind of reinstated it to be a distillery of a much higher quality. And what these two families were doing was they weren't only using the whisky for themselves, that's when they started to sell it to the kind of bigger blenders within Scotland at the time.
Drew Hannush:
you
Scott Adamson:
So it went from being a local kind of community distillery, Highland distillery, Highland whisky for Highland folk, to the whisky industry at large through the tweaks that took place between 1906 and 1909. So in many ways what happened when the distillery was closed is arguably more fascinating than when it was opened.
Drew Hannush:
Hehehehe
Scott Adamson:
I actually found, and I'll try and send it over to you as well, I found a photo that was taken at that time of the house that you see behind me with the roof caved in. You know, it had been totally abandoned and the roof had collapsed. So a lot of work had to be done in that time.
Drew Hannush:
That's really interesting. I wonder whether it collapsed or they actually knocked it in because the roof tax,
Scott Adamson:
The roof tacks, yeah.
Drew Hannush:
yes, may have caused them to say because this is what kills me about going around Scotland. So many of those castles would probably still be in decent shape if it hadn't
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
have been for them knocking the roofs off of them to not have to pay tax.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, I mean, I worked for White & Mackay for a year and they had Dura distillery and all of the old photos of the original Dura distillery are without the roof because of that very thing, the roof tacks. So, you know, you wonder how many of those distilleries that were closed at that time just couldn't be reopened because of the fact that they were in such a state of disrepair.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah. Were there any stories that you found around World War I or World War II with the distillery being used for something other than distilling?
Scott Adamson:
I had come across a story, and this is one of those ones that I couldn't find any real evidence to support it, and I'm not entirely sure if it was during World War I or World War II, but one of the stories that I'd come across was that at one point in time,
Drew Hannush:
Mmm.
Scott Adamson:
Now that would be an incredible thing. It would be a difficult place. I can't imagine why you would put it here.
Drew Hannush:
You do have a train,
Scott Adamson:
So
Drew Hannush:
but that's
Scott Adamson:
we've
Drew Hannush:
about
Scott Adamson:
got a
Drew Hannush:
it.
Scott Adamson:
train,
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
so whether it was Scotland's, whether it was more local. So again, I don't know how much truth's in that. But from a whisky making point of view, one thing that we do have is we have our, and again I can send you a photo of this, one thing that I found, I want to say it was about 2015, I was in the attic of the visitor centre. realised the visitor centre had an attic
Drew Hannush:
Hmm
Scott Adamson:
but our visitor centre, if you come to Tomaten, that was the distillery's head offices up until the 1970s, 1980s and it's now been retrofitted into a visitor centre. And I was in the office one day and there's this ladder coming down from the ceiling that I've never looked at before and I asked, you know, do you mind if I take a pop-up and have a look about? And most of what was in there was the old, you know, the guest books that you It was a lot of that, it was a lot of old promotional material and things like that. But over in one corner was this incredibly big, thick, kind of skin-bound brass-plated book. And on the end it said, Tomatin Warehouse, 1909. And it was the warehouse record book from when the new company, the new Tomatin Distillers Company took over the distillery in 1909. And it records every cask of whiskey that was filled between 1909 and 1929. The cask type, who it was filled for. So that's where we start
Drew Hannush:
Wow.
Scott Adamson:
to see a lot of these blender's names coming in.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
But there are some poignant things. And one of the most poignant things is the last cask filled during the first world war. You know, that would have been the time that the distillery had to close, the boys had to go over and fight. And then a few years later there's the first cask to be filled when they're able to start distilling whisky again. I can't remember the dates off the top of my head but I can certainly find them and let you
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
know. But there is something about that, just that knowing what we know now, seeing the record of that last cask being filled. and then thinking, God, nobody knew what they were about to get into. You know, it's a horrifying thing, but
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
a fascinating little piece of whisky history.
Drew Hannush:
Well, that's the thing is that as I start digging through archives, I'm going through the national archives here, looking at the names of distillers in the 18 seventies. And then all of a sudden I start seeing that all of these distillers in 18 70 are not distilling, they're disappearing. And I'm going, okay, this is telling me a story. I need to understand what it is about this. And I may never find out, but it's one of those things that as you're looking at it, We think of these ledger books as maybe, you know, just containing some dry information, but there's so many stories that they can tell us about the time period. And the thing you bring up is the idea of what kind of casks they were using back then. Were they,
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
because here's the story that I've been trying to dig into. When truly was it that American bourbon casks started coming over? what happened after prohibition, or were there some American casks trickling in prior to that?
Scott Adamson:
Well, I can confirm that there were casks coming in prior to that, so I need to go and check. I'm trying to remember, it's been a few years since I've really spent time with the book, but if I remember correctly, the first record of a bourbon barrel that we have is around about 1914. So that predates Prohibition, the end of Prohibition, by about 20 years, you know.
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
And I'll go and have a look at that because I think for the work that you're doing and the history of American whiskey, it's incredibly important. And when I first saw it, I thought, makes sense. That doesn't add up. The story that we've been told is sherry all the way to 1933 and then bourbon ever since.
Drew Hannush:
Hehehe
Scott Adamson:
Now of course we're getting throughout the 1910s we're getting rum casks, brandy casks, porch, a lot of sherry, granted a lot of sherry, but then we do start seeing the occasional bourbon barrel and the understanding that I have is that by that point in time, as much as it was far away, the industrialisation made it much easier to make casks over there than it was in Spain. But also there was a change in the way that people drunk whiskey in Scotland. Or in the UK I guess. So you go from the 1800s where it's the toddy and that kind of big sherry style would have done very well. And then you get, I think it was called like whiskey and potash, it was essentially whiskey soda, whiskey high
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
balls. Started being drunk in the 1910s. 1920s and part of that is because bourbon casks come in and make it a slightly sweeter style. The question that I always go back to is chicken and egg. Did distillers start using this style of cask because that was how it was being drunk? Or was that the way it was drunk because distillers had changed the type of casks being used? I need to spend a bit of time in that book alone. There's a story of tomatin from 1909 to 1929 that can be built up just by extracting the information from that book. But as I say, it's yondy, but it's a massive, of tone so
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
we need to have a look at it.
Drew Hannush:
This is the fun part about digging into all of this stuff is that history is always shorthanded. And the idea is let's take this in little chunks and send it out to people so that they can understand it. And when you're on a tour and your tour guide is giving you the history of the distillery, it would be very hard to go in and give all of the intricate details that lead up to saying, something in a story. And so we come up with these shorter answers. But as they keep getting told, the more we start thinking that's the way it is, and that's the way it was. And we start missing the fact that, you know, bourbon, really the steamship probably helped bring bourbon barrels over to Europe more than anything because
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
it was faster transportation. They were probably still coming across. The question was back then, did they, were they as concerned about the barrels that they were using or were they just trying to find a barrel that they could put their spirit in?
Scott Adamson:
Exactly, and I think that's the thing. Today we associate casks so heavily with the quality of a whiskey. It's such a big part of the story that it's almost, you know, in every package you will see the cask type. If I look at Tomatin packaging from even maybe 15 years ago, there's not a mention of the cask. The story
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
is, Tomatin tastes this way because of the wonderful water source that we have. Now we know that's scientifically not to be the case anymore. It has an influence, but it's not as important as the cask type. The casks, the reason that casks were used, used right up until the 1980s and maybe even the 1990s is availability
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
and economy. It wouldn't even necessarily have been, you know, we can get these wonderful Spanish sherry casks, okay, but what about if these bourbon casks are half the price? That's the way things were done. If we look at the casks that were filled in the 1970s when, by which point, Tomaten was the biggest distillery in the world, it's all refill casks. Up until the 1990s, these whiskies were not being bottled as single malt. They were going into blends. Many of the casks that were being filled were being filled with the intention of being bottled at three, maybe five years old. There wasn't this, nobody had the foresight to be thinking, well, if we put it in this and then finish it in that, and then if we go and find a direct supply to a pork cask, then that'll add a huge amount of marketability. That wasn't what was considered, it was a case of we're making all this spirit, we need wood to put it in, where can we
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
get it from? And that's why the industrialisation of cuprages in America, as well as the kind of bourbon bean, American whisky being filled into a fresh charred oak cask, that became so important. That also coincided with a downturn in the popularity of sherry. So
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
with the downturn of the popularity of sherry, you've got less sherry casks coming over to the UK. at the same time these bourbon casks start to become more available.
Drew Hannush:
It's interesting too, you note that Tomaten was the biggest distillery, was it in the world or was it in Scotland?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, so by the 1960s, it was the biggest malt whisky distillery in the world, at which point it had 12 stills. It then increased in 1974 to 23 stills,
Drew Hannush:
Wow.
Scott Adamson:
but by that point, Hakushu in Japan was bigger. So it had been the biggest in the world, and even though it got bigger, it then became the biggest in Scotland, the biggest malt whisky distillery.
Drew Hannush:
This is interesting from a standpoint that you are upping the size of this. I saw a figure of 12.5 million liters. Does that sound like an...
Scott Adamson:
That's the number, yeah.
Drew Hannush:
Okay, so 12.5 million liters. I think about today and I think about we're in a whiskey boom and I think it is Glen Fittick and Glen Livet that both are competing for who's leading and I think they're in the 21 million liter category. This was not a boom era. So it's interesting that Tabatin got that large and was producing that much spirit in a time when we were sort of entering a whiskey depression per se.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, so what happened was, so I guess to take a step back. The Saunders and the Callenhams, they come in and they change the business model and they start selling spirit to blenders. So they're selling spirit on contracts more than anything. They're going out and saying, how much spirit do you need from us this year? We'll make it, we'll mature it on site. And then you take it off site when you need it. And that was the way they built their business. Now in Scotch whisky, you know, I'm sure there was a lot of interesting things happening on a day-to-day basis, but from the 1910s through to the 1940s, the story's dominated by war. prohibition. You know, there's
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
not a huge amount of development. But then coming out of the Second World War, Scotland, the UK, has had an incredible debt to pay and the government realised that whisky was going to be one of the ways they were going to pay off this war debt. So a lot of the laws around how whisky was made changed going into the 1950s. So small things like up until the 1950s you weren't allowed to produce whisky on a Sunday. They got
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
rid of that. up until the 1950s, you were not allowed to brew and distill at the same time. So your mashing and fermentation had to take place one week and then your distillation the next week. They got rid of that. So by doing that alone, Scotland's capacity for whisky making doubled overnight, just because now you were able to work simultaneously. So there's a huge demand for whisky. You've got a booming market in the United States all of a sudden, you've got a booming market in Japan, the demand of American troops over in Japan, and then you've got an emerging market in Europe. And it's all for blended whiskey. This is not a single malt boom. The single malt story really begins in the 1990s, and in all honesty, from a volume point of view, it takes off in the last 15 years maybe.
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
When we're talking about the post-war boom, we're talking about blended whiskey. It's that madman era of cutty sark and things like this. And Tomaten, because of its strong kind of basis that the two families had built up prior to the Second World War had this reputation as a great whiskey for blenders. By the 1970s it was regarded and the quote is Scotland's most prolific supplier of malt whiskey
Drew Hannush:
Mmm.
Scott Adamson:
and so at that point it's going into Johnny Walker, Jane Bee, Cutty Sarc. If you can name a brand of blended whiskey, Tomaten was probably the backbone So by 1974, we're producing 12 and a half million litres of alcohol. The 1970s still was boom time.
Drew Hannush:
Okay.
Scott Adamson:
But what happened over the following decade blew people away. So if you came to Tomatin in 1974 and looked at these amazing 23 stills and said to the stillman, in 10 years this distillery is going to be in liquidation, you would have been laughed out of the place. No one would have believed you. But that's what happened. Tomatin went from being the biggest, most efficient distiller of malt whisky in the world, it was the first distillery listed on the stock exchange, Heineken owned shares in the distillery in the 1970s, to 1984 being bankrupt, being the first distillery since the Second World War to go into liquidation. And a few things happened, there's a global recession first and foremost, you know, a catastrophic recession globally. So the consumer's buying power for whisky diminishes. but also we start to get to this generational thing where now people, the people that had left the Second World War and enjoyed their whiskey, they're getting a little bit older and their sons and daughters don't want to drink what their fathers had drunk. So you get this white spirits revolution, you get the boom of vodka particularly in the States and in Japan it was shochu. 1984 shochu becomes the biggest selling spirit in Japan for the first time that's when it overtakes whiskey. Economic downturn, change in tastes lead to what was called the great whiskey loch. Because back then, we were not in contact with the market in the way we are today. There was no visitor centres, there was no brand ambassadors, you know. We were selling spirit to another company who would blend
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
it and then sell it to the market. And they kept buying and kept buying and kept buying, and then all of a sudden they couldn't sell anymore. And when they stopped selling, they stopped buying from us. So we've gone from being this supplier to the industry to no longer having customers. And what was happening was companies like DCL, as it was at the time, which now went on to form Diageo, of course they were maintaining the supply from their own distilleries rather than the third party like us. So we were
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
one of the first to go. We were one of the first victims of this crash that went right into the 1990s. And it wasn't until Aaron Distillery was built in 1995 that you start to see us coming back out of this. dip as well. But yeah, 1984 Tomatin for the second time goes into liquidation, but luckily it was once again saved from that.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, so before we jump into the newer era, 23 stills, that's an interesting number.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
It tells me that maybe we're triple distilling something or what could it be?
Scott Adamson:
It was really simply a case that we didn't have a balanced system. So we had 12 wash stills, which is your first distillation, and 11 spirit stills, which is your second distillation. Now today when we're producing whisky, we have what we call a balanced system. So what that means is that... We'll take in nine tonnes of barley and we'll mash that with 45,000 litres of water and that will give us our mash.
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
That will fill one fermentation vessel which will give us 45,000 litres of wash which will fill directly three wash stills. And once that's distilled and you add the four shots and faints from the previous distillation, that will directly fill two spirit stills.
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
So today, although we have 12 stills, we only use 10. We use six wash and four spirit. So we're balanced the whole way through. Back in the 1970s, as soon as a spirit still was empty, it was filled again. We didn't have that balance system. It was really producing whiskey quite quickly. So it just worked out that the volumes meant over the 12 wash stills, you only had the liquid to fill 11 spirit stills. So there was no triple distillation or anything like that, it was just a case of, let's get this through the stills quickly.
Drew Hannush:
So the other thing that I think about is the fact in doing, cause I've done a lot of research on Irish whiskey history. And what's interesting is there were several things that brought the Irish whiskey industry down, prohibition being just one of many things. The other thing that really hurt them that I think Scotch didn't have to necessarily worry about was they were still shipping everything in barrels to blenders. And that ended up really tinkering with their quality and kind of put it out of the hands of the distillers and didn't allow the distillers to manage their own quality brand, you know, per se. So it's interesting. It makes me hear you tell that story. And I think, will we learn the lesson that distilleries sort of need to hang on to their identity and their whiskey? and not let it all go out to other people to manage their reputation.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, it's an interesting thing because if you look at our kind of inventory... We've got both. We've got spirit that's been made in the last 15 years that's been distilled here with the intention of being bottled as single malt. And the way we've made whiskey, the way we make whiskey today is very different from the way we made it in the 1970s. The core kind of characteristic is the same. It's a fruity, mellow, quite a complex spirit. That's always been the case. But today it's of a consistently higher quality, partly by moving to that balanced system, but also just by focusing on the single malt so much more. Today, for example, we have the longest fermentation in Scotland. It's a full week long fermentation, 168 hours. Back in the 1970s, it was only fermenting for as long as it took for that yeast to make alcohol. But the difficulty that we have is that some of the best whiskey that we have is from the 1970s. because what's happened is it's been put into a refill cask, a cask of very little character, but it's been left to oxidise for 45 years. So you've got this incredible production of esters and these wonderful tropical fruit flavours. So you look at those old, old whiskies of Tomaten and the 36 year old's a great example of that. It's just one, the best in show at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. That was not made in the way we make whisky today. when everything we were producing was being sold to blenders and with the destination of being blended, you know these casks are survivors in many ways. Today we produce whiskey with the intention of it being bottled under the Tomatin label. What's really important though is that every single bottle of Tomatin that you buy has been fully matured on site. Even if
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
you go back to our oldest casks, a lot of the casks that we have from the 1970s are things that were sold to blenders, but we've bought them back in the last 20 years. but they've fully been matured here on site. So part of the contract you had with Tomatin was, we will produce the spirit, we will fill it into casks, we will mature it here on site, and then when you're ready to bottle it, we'll ship the casks down to you.
Drew Hannush:
Ah.
Scott Adamson:
The casks that we still have are the casks that at some point in time, just, they just stayed on someone's ledger, and they were getting older and older and older. Eventually it gets to the point of, well, we can't put this into a three-year-old blend.
Drew Hannush:
Ha ha
Scott Adamson:
Let's
Drew Hannush:
ha.
Scott Adamson:
see if the distillery want to buy it back, So a lot of our old stock has been repatriated from other companies, so it's fascinating to go and see the filling sheets and the journey that cask has been on through ownership and things like that.
Drew Hannush:
Were you surprised when you first started dipping in and tasting things that were meant for blending and saw the character that they produced?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, I think that's a great point. So these old casks of whisky, I remember the first time trying one and thinking I didn't know that whisky could do that. It was a totally different style of flavor. And I think that's one of the fantastic things about it is. A lot of what we talk about today when it comes to maturation is this additive influence that the cask has. So the compounds that are in the wood, whether that's from the oak itself or the previous content, being added into the whisky. And they create wonderful whisky. An example I use here is our 14-year-old, which has matured in tawny port casks that have held port for over 50 years. You get this incredible influx of flavour from that old tawny port wine. When you look at these casks from the 1970s, that additive maturation's not happening because the wood was tired when the whiskey, when the spirit went into the cask. It's this productive style. It's a different type of maturation. It's a style of flavour that can't be rushed. You know,
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
so when you speak to distillers around the world and they say, because of the temperature here, our maturation takes place three times as quickly as it does in Scotland. That is true for those additive interactions, oxidation, you cannot rush esterification. It takes decades and it's why you know I think of Tomatin from the 1970s and 1980s there's other distilleries that have great examples as well of just these really tired old casks that have been left for long enough and one of my colleagues also called Scott he'll quite often be tasting this whisky tasting and he'll say you know it's actually really easy to make incredible whisky if you've just got an incredibly long period of It's a different thing
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
and I think once you understand that there are two different beasts, that's when you start to really appreciate that there's not one better than the other, it's ultimately what you prefer but they're different styles altogether.
Drew Hannush:
Well, I think what is interesting about that whole subject is the fact that when I see older ages on whiskeys, I sometimes avoid them. And the reason I avoid them is because, the American whiskey especially, boy, you know, in a new oak barrel, you're going to get some intense flavors the longer it's sitting in that barrel until it becomes just all wood. And so that's the challenge to me. There are certain styles that I don't like seeing in a barrel for too long. Peated whiskies, rye whiskies, because the longer they're in, it seems like the character that I really like in the whiskey
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
is disappearing. However, if you're putting it in a tired cask, then really you're getting a chance to let the new make still continue to shine through years later.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
and not be overly influenced by that oak. And what it says is age statements really don't necessarily tell the whole story.
Scott Adamson:
Oh no, they definitely don't. They definitely don't. And I think regardless of age, when it comes to Hetimat and Single Malt, we're always looking for a balance of... maturation character, absolutely, but also distillery character. Because without the distillery character, it could be any spirit. You
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
know, quite often when I try a tomatine that's been fully matured in an all-rosa sherry cask, which is a component of our 12-year-old, you know, that's one-third of how we make our 12-year-old, that in and of itself is a big sherry bomb, and the reason I use the word bomb is because it obliterates the distillery character.
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
We have to then add refill casks and bourbon barrels into that mix you something that has a Sherry influence but is still a quintessential Tomat in single malt. And that's where the whole age thing comes into play as you say. So you could take a five-year-old whiskey in a Virgin American oak cask or a 25 year old whiskey in a refill cask and the five-year-old might have more cask influence than the 25 year old. So
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
I think that It's not so much about age as it is maturity, and they are different things. I think that's important to remember.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, getting to understand, I mean, there's such a science behind all of that. And it's, this is what makes it fun as a whiskey fan is learning all of this and understanding the different steps and how each one of them can create such a different variation in the resulting whiskey. So, um, let's jump back to the story and we go back to 1985 and. very interesting because it's a time period where, as you say, some of the more clear spirits are doing well. You were purchased by a Japanese company and the Japanese have always been looked at as trying to emulate scotch and maybe take scotch to another level or put their own spin on the whiskey. Um, was there a lot of Japanese, uh, investment in the Scotch whiskey industry at the time, or were you guys really kind of the first?
Scott Adamson:
So, Tomaten became the first. Scottish distillery to be fully owned by the Japanese when it was purchased in 1986 by Takara Shutsu and Okura and Ko at the time. Today it's Takara Shutsu and Kikubu. It was the first distillery to be owned by the Japanese then but there had been Japanese money coming into Scotland for 15 years prior to that. So again, like Scotland at the time, Japanese 23 when Yamazaki was built right through to really the mid 1980s and even into the 1990s when we're talking about Japanese whiskey we're talking about blended whiskey but the rules there were very different and still are very different to the point that not all of that spirit was made in Japan and the reason for that was in Scotland we've got this incredible relationship with other distilleries where we will trade casks you know so I'll take a cask of tomato and we'll trade it with another distillery and then we're able to make a blend. and it's a lot more complicated than that, but largely speaking there's this relationship. Japanese producers never had that. Japanese producers would make their own spirit. And our parent company, Takara Shutsu, they had a brand of Japanese whiskey called King Whiskey. It was a blended Japanese whiskey. And between 1951 and 1969 they actually made So they made the malt whisky at a distillery called Shirakawa and we have actually just released the only ever single malt bottling of Shirakawa which was distilled in 1958 and is an incredible
Drew Hannush:
Wow.
Scott Adamson:
tale in its own right because this distillery only made malt whisky for a 19 year period between 1951 and 1969 and the reason they stopped is that in 1970 Takara Shutsuo started buying whisky from
Drew Hannush:
Uh...
Scott Adamson:
But not just, they were buying it from Tomatin, but it wasn't just Tomatin that they were buying. They were buying Tomatin single malt, but through us they were also buying other malts that we had brought into the distillery. And by 1984, when Tomatin enters liquidation, Takara Shutsuo are our biggest customer in the world. and very simply they decided that rather than losing the supply of whiskey, they would buy the distillery.
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
The ironic thing about that is that they were also, they are the reason that Shochu became the number one selling spirit in Japan.
Drew Hannush:
you
Scott Adamson:
They developed a brand of Shochu called Jun throughout the 1970s and they had adverts with David Bowie, with Sheena Jun was the biggest selling spirit in Japan. They had this incredible shochu boom, but they had also bought Tomatum by this point in time. So they totally stopped making whiskey at Shirakawa, which is why the parcel that we've got is this incredibly rare single malt from the 1950s. But very simply the reason that Tomatum was bought by the Japanese was rather than lose the supply of the whiskey, we will buy the distillery. And
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
so we kept producing whiskey and we kept selling it on Japan. What was brilliant about that is that Tomatin even today still works fully autonomously of Takara Shutsu. So our board of directors are based here at the distillery in Tomatin. As far as I'm aware in terms of the big highland distilleries, we're the only one with our headquarters still on site at the distillery. We're not based in Glasgow, we're not based in The way that I like to sum it up, and it's probably an oversimplification, is they didn't buy the distillery to change what we do. They bought the distillery because they liked what we do.
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
And as long as we're ticking the budget box every year and still making money, they're very, very happy. So what's happened in the time since then is that we've continued to supply whiskey to Japan throughout the 1990s. In the 1990s, so this is a part of the story that people don't really know. We talk about how big Tomaten was 1970s and then we talk about the catastrophe of the 1980s. But in the 1990s, we were responsible for 10% of all of the malt whisky made in Scotland. We were still a
Drew Hannush:
Wow.
Scott Adamson:
big producer, we were still really important. It was just Scotland as a whole made a lot less whisky at that point in time. Throughout that decade though, we realised that... third parties were not going to be the way to continue the distillery. We were going to have to start developing some of our own brands. We'd been releasing Tomatin as a single malt since the 1920s in very
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
small volumes. We had a brand of whiskey, blended whiskey, called Big T since the 1960s. But in the 1990s we bought a brand called The Antiquary, which was one of the biggest blends in the world at the time. That gave us our first kind of glimpse into cased goods rather than bulk spirit. And that's where we kind of took our learnings and from 2000s onward, started to focus on the single-mott and started to focus on the distilleries on brands. So since the Japanese have bought the distillery, the scale of production has come right down. So in 2001, 11 of distills were removed. As I say, we've got 12. This year will produce about two and a half million liters of alcohol. So it's a it's much smaller It's 10 million liters less than we were capable of in the 1970s But the focus has been over the last 20 years Shifting towards our own brands and very much controlling our own destiny and it goes back to the point you make about You know, we now control where our spirit goes to we now know where it's going for a long time You could find a lot of independent bottle enes of tomato because these were casks that were purchased by blenders. They weren't used in blends and they were sold onto independent bottlers. Some of them are incredible, but some of them not as good and we just don't have the control over that. So today it will be very rare that you find a tomato in independent bottling compared to 10 years ago when I started working at the company.
Drew Hannush:
Did you find in the archives some of the old labels? And
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, we did. We did.
Drew Hannush:
how far back did you find?
Scott Adamson:
So we have a bottle that from the information on the label and the information that we found on archive, I believe it to be the original bottle from 1926. So the Calinghams that owned the distillery at that time, their business was called Hennekeys, Hennekeys wine merchants. And there is a record from 1926 of a Hennekeys bottling of a nine-year-old tomato. And we were able to purchase this bottle back, sadly empty, but it's a dumpy square bottle with a wonderful label, a green glass, wonderful label on it, nine-year-old and again I can send some photos of that over and then from then we've got bottles from the 1940s, the 50s, the 60s, 70s, 80s and so on and it's been incredible to track. One of the ways that we know how it's developed is on the label there was a drawing of the distillery and you can put the bottles beside each other and you can see bits of the distillery being added and taken
Drew Hannush:
Wow. Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
sketch changes from decade to decade
Drew Hannush:
Oh, that's
Scott Adamson:
and
Drew Hannush:
great.
Scott Adamson:
going back to the records of what did the distillery look like and when, we're able to say, okay, so that kind of fits with that time period.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, great. Great that branding could do that.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
Um, so I, I also think about when I'm, when I was there and I was doing a tour around the, uh, distillery, I was looking at the barrels and I noticed, I think the oldest barrel I saw was 1967 that was there. And there were colors on the sides of the barrels. Did the colors on the barrels have any significance or, uh, was that just, um, because some of them are black, some of them are gray, some of them are red.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, so the colours are... It's how the guys on site, it's how the distillers used to know how many times the cask had been filled. Now I can't remember the system myself, but it was a case of, you know, one colour meant that this was a first fill cask, another colour meant that this was a second fill, another
Drew Hannush:
Okay.
Scott Adamson:
colour meant third fill and refill. So it was just a case of that told you how many times the cask could be used. This was long before we had incredible systems online where at the press of a button, you've got all that information on a spreadsheet.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, yeah. When you get to a barrel as old as 1967, does there become a worry about making sure that whiskey doesn't drop below whiskey levels? In other words, 40% ABV?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, so we have to re-engage these casks quite regularly. So we will go and... take a strength reading of the cask, and that other thing as well is the volume losses. These casks from the 1960s will have less than half of the original contents in them because of the evaporation. Now, we're still in a much more fortunate position in that regards than the distillers in Kentucky, for example, we only lose about one and a half percent a year here, but yeah, we, unlike Kentucky, where the strength will increase, our ABV is going to decrease because we have this incredibly humid, climate. So it's alcohol that's taken into the atmosphere rather than the water. So yeah we have to be wary that these casks will eventually drop below 40% and we know that we need to remove the liquid from the cask before that happens.
Drew Hannush:
If they drop below 40%, what can you do with them?
Scott Adamson:
So the cask in and of itself at that point, I'm just actually looking at the stock sheet here just to find out where we're at. So the 1967s are around about 44% ABV right now. So they've got a little ways to go.
Drew Hannush:
Hehehe
Scott Adamson:
The first thing. the favorable option is get the liquid out of the cask before that happens. One thing that you can do though is, and we can't do it with a 1967 because we only have two of these casks, and then it's a jump to 1971, but if we say for example we have a year where we've got 10 casks and one of them drops below 40%, we could add that in with the other nine and that would bring the strength of the overall whisky up to above 40%. one of the casks will be below, but overall the strength is above 40%, so it's still whiskey. So that's one thing you could do, but when it gets to this sort of age, you're really looking at bottling these as single casks in their own right. It's very rare that you're gonna see a mass vatting of 55-year-old single malt.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, that would be, I mean, is this kind of where your limited edition program comes from and when you look at the barrel like that 1967, do you kind of have a target for where you're trying to get it to and hoping you can get it over the hump?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, I think so. I think we've always, so we've got a quite a tight five year plan in terms of releases and then a looser ten year plan, which is kind of going, you know, if all of these things work out, okay, we'll be able to achieve this, you know. And so... you know, the first thing is how does it taste? You know, there's no point releasing it if it's not good. And it might often get to the point where you go, this is in its prime right now, we need to bottle this right now, this is never going to get better. But with something like a 1967, which is currently 55 years old, you probably are thinking, it would be good if that made it to 60, you know, that's a nice round number. So things like that. So we've had a couple of 50 year old releases over the last few years there. and that's a great thing to do. The 1967 I would like to see at least one of them get to 60 years old but it might just be the case that actually this is good to go now, there's a demand for this now so we've got to be flexible, flexible but with a plan that's probably the best way to sum up the whisky market as a whole really.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah. 67. What's interesting is I've heard this and I've never actually confirmed it with anybody. But it's my understanding that if the whiskey is really probably perfect, but you're trying to get it to that age, you could actually recask it into a tired cask. Now you're already into a tired cask.
Scott Adamson:
Already in a tired cask, yeah.
Drew Hannush:
So you don't really have that advantage, but is that a strategy that distillers will use?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, I mean, so quite often what we'll do is the other way around. So particularly when we look at younger whiskies, for example, most of what we produce here at Tomatin in the first instance, a lot of it will be filled into first-fill Bergman Bowels, a lot of it into Sherry casks, but a good amount will be filled into refill casks. Couple of reasons. The first one is that will then allow us in 40 years still to have these incredible tired old cask refill, tropical flavours that we get in our older expressions. But also, take our, again, and go back to one of my favourites, the 14 year old. It's matured for the first 11 years in refill casks and then the final three years in those tawny port casks.
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
If we fully matured it for 14 years in tawny port casks, go and buy yourself a bottle of port because you're getting no distillery character.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
Whereas those first 11 years in the refill cask, that still gives you all of those incredible, vibrant, bright, tomato flavours. It allows for some of the harsher notes that you get from a new-mix spirit to evaporate and to mellow out. But you get to this point at 11 years old where you've got this wonderful expression of tomato and spirit that's ready to take on the flavours of this finishing cask. So we'll fill, we'll quite often fill refill casks and then re-rack it into a finishing cask get what we're looking for all along, that balance of distillery and maturation character. It's not about, you quite often hear people talking about finishing as taking bad spirit and making it better, that's not what we're trying to do here. We're looking for balance. So we'll do that quite a lot. I have in some instances, so there was a parcel I think it was from 1993 if I remember correctly, I sampled these three casks and they were in second Phil Sherry casks for 27 years now, and they were remarkable, but we had no plans to release them or do anything with them. And that was an example where we said, right, let's get these into refill casks, to refill American oak casks. Second Phil Sherry had done enough, but they were at the risk of being, for lack of a better word, overcooked. So
Drew Hannush:
Hmm.
Scott Adamson:
it's a little bit like when you've got something in the oven, but you're not quite ready to eat it, just to keep it warm. That's almost what we're doing when we move something from an active cask into a refill cask. You're preserving the characteristics, and in some ways, you're going to allow for a little bit of that oxidation to take place, which is going to give you a different look altogether.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah. When I think about blending, because I've toyed with some blending myself and sometimes the experiments are amazing and sometimes the flavors clash. So when you're talking about barreling whiskies, are there certain barrels that you've run across styles of barrels where they just don't match the flavor of your new make spirit?
Scott Adamson:
It's, so one of the, and this goes back to the history of Tomatin, so you've got to think that the style of spirit that we produce. was really developed from the late 1960s onwards. So this is where kubochen and tomaten have a bit of a crossover. So up until the 1960s, all of the whiskey made in the Highlands and made in Speyside was lightly peated. One of my pet peeves, and I'm sure you've run across it yourself, is when you go on a tour of a distillery and someone says, we've been making our whiskey the same way for 200 years. It's absolute nonsense because
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
the technology's changed, the barley variety's changed, the yeast variety's changed. So much has changed. In the Highlands, it was lightly peated up until the 1960s. And then you start to get the discovery of North Sea oil and gas. You get the development of the road network into the Highlands. And you get the development of third party maltings. And that also coincides with the massive demand for malt whisky. So a lot of these distilleries are no longer able to fulfill all their maltings on site. The blenders don't want peated whisky. want a softer fruitier style. So that all happens at the same time. And that's when the style of tomatine that we noted today starts to be developed, that light, fruity, delicate style of spirit. Kuboken, which we've been making for one week a year since 2005, is a light-repeated spirit. So it's taking that kind of more historical style of highland spirit, but then adding in a more modern approach to maturation so you're getting the best of both worlds Whereas, tomato, that fruity spirit starts to develop in the 1960s and 70s with the goal of being sold to as many blenders in Scotland as possible. It had to be an incredibly versatile spirit
Drew Hannush:
Mmm.
Scott Adamson:
because these blenders aren't all producing the same characteristic. They had tomato as their backbone when it came to malt, but some of them will make something heavy, some of them will make something light, some of it will be smoky, some of it will be fruity. had since that period of time a really versatile spirit. We fast forward to today and we take that and we've still got our own cuprage on site. We still work directly with wineries and spirits producers around the world as well as some of the biggest cuprages in the world. And it's very rare that we come across something that just totally doesn't work with the spirit. I've had some examples of where we've used white wine casks and they've not... more personal preference. referenced in anything. I would say Tomaten works really well in ex-spirit casks, so bourbon casks, rum casks, cognac casks. It works really, really well because the distillery characters are allowed to flourish with those. It works really well in fortified wine casks, so sherry, port, Madeira, these things. It also works well in some nice red wine casks. It's worked well in beer casks. There's very few things that have come across and went, We're going to struggle with that.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
But you know, that's why we continue to experiment. That's why we continue to look for new casks and try different things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they really, really work. It's almost that thing. It's not that anything's gone wrong. This is a lot better.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah. So one of the things that I've noticed is a trend, especially here in the United States, I sense that this is a fairly new trend in Scotland is the release of barrel-proof cast strength whiskey. When did you guys first start releasing a cast drink?
Scott Adamson:
So in all of the time that I've been here, we've had a private cask programme, which is where our master distiller, and now our master distiller and myself, will select about 50 casks each year from the 170,000 on site. We'll select 50 casks that we believe are in and of themselves. incredible expressions that are worthy of being bottled as a single cask. And they will always be bottled at cask strength. But we released a cask strength expression in our core range in 2015. And very much what was happening was I was travelling to a lot of festivals across Europe at the time and it was just before we launched the 14 year old and I happened to have a sample of the 14 year old at Cask Strength. And I was showing it to people at the show saying, you know, this is going to be coming out next year, it'll be at 46%, but this is the style of thing. And the number of people that we had saying, your spirit at cask strength is so drinkable, you really need to do this. So we brought that back to the table and within about six months, we'd developed the tomato and cask strength. So that was back in 2015. And it's been part of the core range ever since. And I know there's, we definitely weren't the first to do it. You've got things like Aberloura Abuna and Glen Farclis 105, long time now but yeah you're right there's most a great number of distilleries now will have if not a cask strength they will have something of a higher proof within their range and it's very much is to satisfy the people like ourselves you know the kind of the people that want to try the expression of the distillery and its purest character it's definitely not how mass market whiskey is sold you know you're kind of going into a supermarket and going up for that but that's what our range exists for. Within our core range you're going to have things like Tomatantualcas which is a massive crowd pleaser, 99 points at the IWSC for $40, an incredible single malt but then within the core range you've also got things like the cask strength or the 14 year old which has more of a cask focus on it and things like that so it's all about for us making sure that we have something for everyone.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah. Well, I'm going to go in and do a tasting on your, uh, on your 12 year old right
Scott Adamson:
Excellent.
Drew Hannush:
now, which is your flagship. When you talk about a flagship or when you try to pick out something and peg it as a flagship whiskey, what should it, what should it say about your distillery?
Scott Adamson:
That's a great question. So I mean, one of the reasons the 12 year old's a flagship is that within our core range, it's been there the longest. This whiskey, we first started releasing the 12 year old in the late 1990s for the American market, and then in 2003, it replaced the 10 year old in our core range. So this product's been in our core range for 20 years now. That alone makes it the flagship. But for me, what this is, I don't subscribe to the notion of the five Scotch whiskey. regions in the sense that the way that it's told is that each region has its own flavor profile. You know so Islay, Smokey, Campbellton, Heavy and Waxy,
Drew Hannush:
Right.
Scott Adamson:
Lowlands. Sometimes yes great but then what happens if you're drinking a Brew of Gladdy which has no smoking at all that's just so and I think the Highlands is the greatest example of that where you've got a region that's always been, this goes back to the very beginning of the conversation, it's always been very But what I think about the Tomatian 12 year old is if you want to give someone a glass of whiskey That doesn't only tell you this is what a Tomatian is. It says this is what a Highland Single malt is
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
the Tomatian 12 year old is the one because From that very central location in the Highlands the 12 year old takes influence from all around It takes some of those bigger bolder flavors from the northern distilleries like the Dalmores and the old Pulpneys of the world aspects of those Eastern Highland malts, take some of the lighter more floral aspects of the Lowland Highlands and it's got that earthy style from the Western Highlands all married into one single malt. For me your flagship malt should be the most balanced expression of your range, it should be the DNA of your range.
Drew Hannush:
So it's interesting when I nose it because I pick up a lot of the apple and the baking spice and then that bit of vanilla and toffee coming in from the bourbon barrel as well. I almost get a little fresh wood scent out of there,
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
which is interesting. And you said earthy and I'm going, I'm wondering if I'm picking up... earthy and I'm just mixing earthy with kind of a smoky character, kind of an earthy smoky character that I get. It's not a peated
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
note, but it just, there's something about it. Like there's this really deep in hidden smoke note that I get out of it.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, I mean for me, what I quite often think with a 12 year old is... For me, the earthy thing is almost like a forest. It's that kind of forest floor, that pine nibbly type of thing going on that I often get there. And
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
yeah, sometimes I do get a hint of smoke, but not smoke. If you notice, it's a different thing. And I think because it's a flavor that you very often associate with smoky whiskies that you maybe think smoke there.
Drew Hannush:
Right.
Scott Adamson:
But it's just a different kind of edge to it altogether.
Drew Hannush:
I think that's what I kind of pick up. I mean, talk about you and Bunahabin and how you both do one run of peated whiskey per
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
year and you think how hard it is to clean out those stills and make sure that there's no smoke left behind in the stills. You wonder, you know, am I catching a hint of that maybe
Scott Adamson:
Right.
Drew Hannush:
in there? But yeah, it's really interesting because like I say, you have to look for it. But when you do... do sense that it's there. It also has a really nice, it's not overly milky kind of a body to it, but it has a really nice body to the whiskey, which I think is one of the least paid attention to aspects of a whiskey that I think is one of the best qualities of a whiskey is if it has a really nice mouth feel to it, it makes the drinking experience so nice.
Scott Adamson:
So a funny story there. So in March of last year, was it last year? Yeah, March of last year, the word blender was added to my job title. So I became blender and global brand ambassador. Absolutely delighted. And my business cards arrived. and about two days later I caught COVID and I had almost no symptoms but the one symptom that I did have was I totally lost my sense of smell and taste and at the time I was like oh god these I've got a lot
Drew Hannush:
I'm gonna
Scott Adamson:
of business
Drew Hannush:
go to bed.
Scott Adamson:
cards here that say blender on it. Luckily it came back but for about 10 days I couldn't smell or taste anything. But I tried a lot of, this is very geeky and I'm well aware of it,
Drew Hannush:
Hehehe
Scott Adamson:
but I tried quite a few different whiskies in that time and really developed an incredible kind of appreciation of mouth feel and body, because it was the only sense that I was getting. I wasn't smelling anything, I wasn't tasting anything, but I could feel it. I could see what it was doing in my mouth. And it gave me a much greater appreciation for that aspect of whiskey drinking. Now, something like the 12 year old, is designed as a real crowd pleaser. We bottle this at 43%. It's our biggest selling whiskey worldwide. So this is not the one that I particularly would spend a huge amount of time in a Glen Kern glass writing and dissecting, but it's got that if you want to do it. You can enjoy this just as a dram while you're watching the football at night, watching a movie, or you can really get into it and start to pick apart, what are the bourbon casks doing? What are the sherry casks? doing,
Drew Hannush:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Adamson:
wow that refill cask has really brought in this apple in pair, that distillery character is still there. So it allows the drinker to do many things there.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah, you said pair and immediately on the finish I'm going, Oh yeah, I'll get
Scott Adamson:
Yeah,
Drew Hannush:
that pair.
Scott Adamson:
it's right there. And that's the difficult thing. I always try when I'm doing a tasting, not to give away tasting notes, just because it's so suggestive, but I always
Drew Hannush:
It
Scott Adamson:
see
Drew Hannush:
is,
Scott Adamson:
my
Drew Hannush:
yeah.
Scott Adamson:
role being not to tell you what you should be tasting, but why we use those casks, what flavours we're looking for when we use those casks, and then it's up to you how the overall kind of marriage of those things has come together.
Drew Hannush:
It's funny to hear how we all got through COVID because I lost my sense of taste and smell too. And I lost it for a good probably five months.
Scott Adamson:
Oh wow.
Drew Hannush:
And during that time period, I mean, you actually feel a bit depressed. I mean,
Scott Adamson:
Yes.
Drew Hannush:
especially when you are... Once I had just gotten in and I'm like, I'm finally tasting all of this stuff. I'm finally nosing all this stuff and then it's taken away from me. It was a frustrating thing, but I found some ways to cope. One of the ways I coped was I found a whiskey that was one that was an older whiskey that was a rye, but it didn't taste like a rye because it spent too much time in the barrel. For some reason, parts of my sense of taste were coming back. one
Scott Adamson:
Right.
Drew Hannush:
or two flavors would come back. No oak, I couldn't taste oak at all, but I could taste everything else. So I started drinking all the whiskeys that I thought were over-oaky, and they all came up with these really nice personalities that I was like, oh, this is an interesting way to get through it. But it was actually Jack Daniels that pulled me out because as I was nosing it one day, I was like, ooh, I smell banana. And that's
Scott Adamson:
Right.
Drew Hannush:
a key scent in that whisky. So it's like, when it... It's interesting to see how you have to come back from something like that and how much more I appreciate Whiskey now after having gone through all of that stuff Because now I Understand how valuable that sense of taste and smell really is to the whole experience
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, no, it's incredible. It totally changed my perception of... of what mouthfeel is for me. And there were some, and I only lost my sense of smell for about 10 days. But you're right, there was a point in that where you're thinking, you know, there's no guideline as to when I'm getting this back. You
Drew Hannush:
Right,
Scott Adamson:
know,
Drew Hannush:
yeah,
Scott Adamson:
it was,
Drew Hannush:
yeah.
Scott Adamson:
and I think that's what was the depressing thing about it was not necessarily not having smell or taste, but
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
not knowing when it was coming back. That
Drew Hannush:
Well,
Scott Adamson:
was,
Drew Hannush:
it makes, it makes everything lifeless. So that's
Scott Adamson:
yeah.
Drew Hannush:
kind of that. That's, that's the hard part about it.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
Um, so, um, one last thing really to talk about is, uh, Kubakin cause it's, uh, it's, what's funny is if I said where whiskey lore stories started, it started with me sitting in a bar in, um, a tavern called the mash ton in Abelauer.
Scott Adamson:
Yep.
Drew Hannush:
and him putting together a flight of whiskeys for me. And I said, I like smoky whiskeys, but I want some Highland smoky whiskeys. And he put in, and I think it was the 2005 expression of Kubaken that he had up on the shelf, and he poured it for me, and I was reading the back of the bottle, and I went, oh man, this is a really interesting story. I wonder how much of this is true.
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
And that was one of my first challenges, was to try to... learn about that whiskey, the story of the ghost dog. I drove out to the Dalarata Church
Scott Adamson:
Yeah.
Drew Hannush:
where the witch of Lagan was supposed to have or been chased by the dogs out too and all of that sort of stuff. So it was a lot of fun going through all of that. And when I visited the distillery, I had an opportunity to taste them. I see it on the shelf, similar box as the one that I have now in the US. Occasionally I will see an old bottle there, but I don't see any new bottles. Is that something that is just going to, I mean because it's a smaller supply, something that's just going to be Scotland only or European only kind of thing?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, so what happened there, so it's really interesting actually. So the spirit itself, the whisky itself is lightly peated and it's got this incredible, again, balance of that distillery character and maturation character and I think that's a something to touch on is the fact that historically... peated whiskey was not heavily peated. It was peated by necessity. It was the only fuel source we had to drive barley. It wasn't peated in the way that a lot of whiskies are today, which is for this incredibly smoky flavor. And even when you try things like, I'll not name names, but there's some incredible, well-known heavily peated whiskies today, that if you try the same expression from the 1960s and 70s, it's actually quite fruity. It's
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
a little bit earthy. And it was because peat was by necessity. not flavour driven. And I think that's what we've created with Kubaken. But if you look at the box that's over your shoulder there, the black box with the big blue puff of smoke, you would be mistaken for thinking, this might be the most heavily-peated whiskey in the world. So one of the things that we recognised was the packaging and the way we were communicating was at odds with the liquid that people were getting. So you would have people saying, I bought this because I thought it would be a heavily peated whisky and it wasn't, it was lightly peated. And you would have people that wouldn't buy it because they were worried it was going to be heavily peated, but they would have probably enjoyed it.
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
So in 2019 we rebranded it and it's got a totally different package and look and feel now. But at that time we also made the decision to move away from the mythical story, which was again that came out of the research that I did back in 2012. So part of my research, my original job at the distillery was to research the history of the distillery. I came from a background of studying Scottish history and as much as I wanted to find the true story of the distillery, I also recognised pretty early on that the people are an incredibly important part of the Tomaten story. Today, we're the last distillery in Scotland that still provides housing to the majority of the workforce. So over half of the people that make and produce the whiskey in the distillery behind me live in the 30 cottages here.
Drew Hannush:
Mm.
Scott Adamson:
So as much as I was driven by finding the facts and the detail, I also had that in the back of my head. A hugely important part of this region is the folklore and is the stories that go along with that. the story of the Witch of Lagen and of course the Last Wolf in Scotland all came out and the designers then took that and developed Kubok and Ghost Dog. By 2019... we started to really realise that what people are looking for, you know, that kind of story of the romantic, the myth, the legend, the lore that sold whisky for the last hundred years, people were moving away from that. People now are far more interested in the truth and they're far more interested in understanding why, what they are tasting, taste the way it does and how it's been made. So Kuboken now is far more focused, certainly from a storytelling point of view. and a packaging point of view, is far more focused on the nitty gritty of the distillation. So the fact that it is lightly peated Scottish barley, the fact that it's only made for one week a year and that that's the last week of production before the distillery closes at Christmas time, the fact that we use unusual casks, all of those things, that's what the story relies on. Now, of course, if people say, Gallic for Ghost Dog and this is why that's the story but let me tell you how we make it that's
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
the way we go to know so
Drew Hannush:
I
Scott Adamson:
in terms of
Drew Hannush:
was gonna say, it still says it in a little
Scott Adamson:
Yeah,
Drew Hannush:
script down at the bottom of the boxes.
Scott Adamson:
yeah, yeah. So we launched the new packaging at the end of 2019. with a plan for a global rollout that was interrupted by COVID. So that's kind of put the launch plan back a couple of years, but you should over the next couple of years see more and more of kubochen in the new packaging rolled out into the States and into Canada as well. Kubochen's signature, which is the core expression, is the same recipe as the kubochen that you have behind you there. So
Drew Hannush:
Okay.
Scott Adamson:
if you've tried that kubochen before
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
and really enjoyed it, the first three casks that we filled all the way back in 2005, Bourbon Sherry Allorose, sorry Bourbon Virgin Oak and Alloroso Sherry, they're still the core component of signature. But around that we have the creations which is where we use casks that nobody's using. We have a 12 year old matured in Caribbean rum casks and we have a 15 year old annual release which is fully matured in Alloroso Sherry casks.
Drew Hannush:
Very nice. Yeah, I got three samples that I left there with and I enjoyed all three of them. So,
Scott Adamson:
Excellent.
Drew Hannush:
yeah. And they're in much more pastel colored
Scott Adamson:
Yeah,
Drew Hannush:
packaging
Scott Adamson:
yeah.
Drew Hannush:
now rather than the black, which I get
Scott Adamson:
Absolutely,
Drew Hannush:
that.
Scott Adamson:
yeah,
Drew Hannush:
I do
Scott Adamson:
absolutely.
Drew Hannush:
get that.
Scott Adamson:
Just kind of telling that story that this is not the big, brutish, heavily-peated whisky that
Drew Hannush:
Yeah.
Scott Adamson:
you once thought it was. This is a far more delicate, expressive.
Drew Hannush:
Well, if anybody wants the Kubaken story, they can go listen to season one, episode
Scott Adamson:
That's right.
Drew Hannush:
five. I tell the whole story with Jelagin and everything else in there. So that was a lot of fun. I will say this about lore. Is that... What I do like about it is that I wouldn't have been as investigative of your territory there, had it not been for that story, because I wanted to go see the old church. I wanted to kind of get a sense of that story. So that is kind of the fun side of it. But I do understand, whiskey fans are becoming much more about the whiskey rather than the marketing, which is music to my ears in other ways. So.
Scott Adamson:
So to bring it full circle as well, the church at Dalarossi that you went to see for the Witch of Lagan story is also where John MacDougall is buried.
Drew Hannush:
Is it?
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, yeah, so, and you can actually see, because his son died during the war and was buried in the same place, his grave can be found online and you can see the inscription of that at Dalarossi Churchyard. So you would have been right there. Yeah, yeah,
Drew Hannush:
man, I was being
Scott Adamson:
yeah.
Drew Hannush:
chased by sheep. So
Scott Adamson:
Yeah, sheep and midges, yeah.
Drew Hannush:
yes, absolutely. So well, Scott, thank you so much for taking the time today and going through the history of Tomaten and for the tastings. I have some whiskeys coming to me that I'll be featuring on the YouTube channel here at some point. So yeah, I really appreciate that. And again, love to talk with people who are into history and especially someone who has the advantage that you have of being able to dig back in the archives when you can and actually see some of that rich history. So thank you so much for being a part of the show.
Scott Adamson:
Thanks for having me, cheers.
Drew Hannush:
Cheers.