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Allan Logan Interview: Our Regional Trials

IN Laddie People 20th March 2017/by Jane Carswell
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We’ve just finished distilling the barley from three discrete regions of the Scottish mainland for the fourth year in succession. Our Regional Trials are a long term project…

Production Director Allan Logan says he is delighted by the quality of the new make spirit that’s coming through. “Every harvest we we can see clear differences between each of the geographical regions. We are also seeing differences from year to year so we are assuming that annual variations in the weather are also having an influence. It’s just trying to build up a kind of archive of knowledge; if there are patterns, the more years we get the more it’ll become clear. So it’s all very interesting but we’ve got so much work still to do!”

The 200 tonnes of grain for each of these regional trials comes from three farms. In the south, Lothian, we have John and Tom Lawrie at Ransefield Farm. Colin Tough at Barnyards Farm, Turriff Aberdeenshire in the east, while Donald Jack farms at Kilcoy, Black Isle, in the north.  If you think of Islay as our western region we have a complete geographical spread!

All the farmers have been sowing the same variety, Concerto, including some of the Islay farms that we’re handling separately. The Islay barley harvest last year was more than 1300 tonnes, up to 30% of all our production, so, “The day when we’re doing similar amounts from the three other regions is hard to imagine… But you never know…”

“The growers are all very proud to be able to see the results of their work right through to the end product.” says Allan. “Because it’s not very often that happens in Scotland; generally farmers just grow barley that disappears into a big black hole! They don’t tend to know what it goes into or where it ends up.”

In terms of whether our whiskies will ever form individual releases with this extra layer of provenance information, Allan says: “It will be great if we get to somewhere between 3 and 5 years’ maturation and there are still clear differences. Obviously, over three years is very important (for the legal definition of ‘single malt whisky’). But the influence of the cask will start to tell in the spirit and it will get to the point where it’s harder to trace these subtle variations.”

“Even the fact that we’ve just made whisky from the four regions of Scotland is quite unique… Nobody’s ever done anything like this before…”

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WMD – THE STORY OF THE YELLOW SUBMARINE HAS BEEN FULL OF CHARACTER AND CHARACTERS RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING.

It started with our friend ‘Demolition Dave’ helping Duncan McGillivray and his gang to demolish the old Inverleven distillery – buying up all the old equipment for scrap and loading it onto barges on the Clyde. All so Duncan had some spares to keep Bruichladdich running in the days of No Money.

As this odd flotilla was being towed round the Mull of Kintyre and up to Islay, Laddie MD Mark Reynier received an email from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in the USA who had been monitoring distillery webcams on the grounds that our processes could have been ‘tweaked’ to produce the dreaded WMD. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’.

Never one to allow the opportunity for a good story to pass him by, or to get his beloved distillery in the news, Reynier embellished the tale, which soon grew to involve spies and the CIA and visits by weapons inspectors. All of which made great headline-grabbing copy in the febrile media atmosphere then prevailing around WMD.

One of the stills from Inverleven was dutifully set up outside the old Victorian buildings, and became an iconic sight, with a pair of Duncan’s old wellie boots sticking out of the top to represent those weapons inspectors searching for dangerous chemicals deep in its copper bottomed interior.

A special bottling was commissioned (of course) and dubbed the ‘Whisky of Mass Distinction’ (geddit?) and much hilarity ensued. At least among the Laddies, the rest of the whisky industry having long since given up on the noisily irreverent rebels.

WMDII: A YELLOW SUBMARINE

Things were about to get even more eccentric because, shortly afterwards, Islay fisherman John Baker was heading home to Port Ellen when he spotted something awash in the sea off the bow of his boat. Being a resourceful man, he attached a rope to said object and towed it into the pier where Gordon Currie lifted it out of the water. It proved to be a very beautiful yellow submarine.

Very conveniently, the yellow vessel had ‘Ministry of Defence’ and a telephone number stencilled on it, which was of course immediately called. What happened next was to become the stuff of legend. He was connected to the Royal Navy. “I have found your yellow submarine” said John. “We haven’t lost a yellow submarine” said the Navy. Which was an odd response as the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming.

John and Gordon then loaded the submarine onto a lorry and took it to a secret location in Port Ellen (actually fellow fisherman Harold Hastie’s back garden). The local newspaper was called, then the nationals, and the following day the red-tops were full of pictures of the two friends astride the lethal-looking machine, carrying fishing rods, and asking: “Has anybody lost a yellow submarine?”

Hilarious… unless you were the Royal Navy – who did eventually admit to it being theirs. HMS Blyth, the minesweeper that lost it, eventually came to pick it up, slipping into the pier at dawn to winch it aboard. By that time, Bruichladdich had (of course) commissioned another bottling, WMD2: The Yellow Submarine, and a box of lovely liquid was graciously offered, and accepted by the captain as a goodwill gesture.

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