The Black Art concept was very much Jim McEwan’s. It was a vehicle for him, starting from ambition and the ability/freedom to explore the wood, to revel in the blending and the role of the cask in making whisky. Jim is a whisky legend who started out as a cooper. Even though he had been running distilleries and involved in everything, one of his great loves was maturation.
When he started at Bruichladdich, they were going into new territory with sourcing casks. They had the freedom and ability to start buying casks from some of the great chateaux in Bordeaux and around the world, using flavours and casks that hadn’t been used before. The quality of the oak that was being used was absolutely phenomenal.
French oak is very different to American oak, which was 99.9% what was used in the whisky industry then. Exploration, challenge, has deep roots in the origins of the distillery and origins of Black Art. It was about trying new things and seeing where the flavour was going.
In my role, I know that when you take some Bruichladdich spirit that’s been maturing in a refill bourbon hogshead with a classic flavour, then you put it into a red wine with amazing French oak behind it, you start picking up all these amazing fruity, charry notes from the wine. Then this lovely structure and quality of the oak comes through to help shape that spirit… You get something completely different! It’s a new lens of flavour. So many new things develop that you completely turn away from the previous maturation profile.
When Jim was blending these casks, he would transfer the whiskies into certain casks and keep adding, making all these layers of flavour, things people hadn’t tasted before. There was this creative storm going on, bringing all these flavours all together.
That was the concept of Black Art. The name idea came to him because somebody asked the question ‘Jim, what are you doing?’ ‘Can’t tell you, completely secret – just trust me’.
So the craft, the secrecy, it was like an opportunity to try things that people hadn’t done before. The more we said, ‘We’re not going to tell you, this is just what we do! You don’t need to know; you just need to enjoy it…”, the more freedom we had to look at the layers of flavour you could get from hundreds of different cask types. The editions follow a sort of instinct through all those different options. They have a similar story, same DNA, but each one is an unrepeatable, unique whisky.
For me that goes wider than Black Art; that’s what distilling is!
That’s one of the great things you very quickly realise when you first walk into a warehouse and start moving barrels that have been laid there, with dates on from before you were born.
For the stock we are laying down today, I won’t be the person putting that into a bottle.
Something that Jim always used to say, and I think I have always been aware of, is that your job is to look after the distillery for the next generation. Leave it in a better place than where you found it.
I look back at Jim and Duncan (McGillivray)… When they brought Bruichladdich back to life, everything was about building it back up. I can see now that they put as much hard work in as they could so that when Allan and I took over those roles, we were in a better position. I see our jobs as the same thing. It’s about growing Bruichladdich, building it and about putting in foundations to pass on to the next generation.
We have interesting challenges just now (I say interesting, but they are scary…). Sustainability concerns, and climate change, mean it’s critical to our job now how we think differently and evolve. How will we leave this distillery in a better place for future generations?
I do see that with Black Art, but its wider than Black Art. That’s what distilling is. It’s time travel I suppose.
I suppose I don’t really see it as pressure. What you have got to remember is that we are not just looking at that one moment? It goes from the barley that’s grown, to the way the spirit’s distilled, to the cask that we fill, the cask that we blend and re-cask… At each part of the process, it’s being monitored to ensure it’s at its best, at every single point. So when I go to blend that Black Art, I’m not worried about anything. We have put the work in so I know that when I start that blending process, I’m starting with excellence.
For Black Art, I may start looking at the recipe seven or eight years before it ends up in a bottle, it could be longer.
It’s not something to worry about, but a lovely thing is you don’t know what you will end up with. There is experience and knowledge there to guide you along the way and you know what you want to try and aim for but you don’t know how that spirit’s going to work out until it’s finished. You have got to take risks – no one ever did anything great from repeating the same old, same old; it’s about trying new things. That’s the DNA that’s been instilled in me, to try new things – it maybe comes quite naturally to the distillery as its what we have always known.
That creative freedom – if you feel pressured by that then you are probably in the wrong job! It should be a pleasure to have that creative freedom, to try new things and see what happens; that’s the essence of Black Art.
That’s an interesting one! I suppose Black Art 9 was a bit of a reflection on the other eight releases in the series. With Black art 8 I had taken a bit of a different tack in wanting to bring a little more balance to the pre-2001 spirit so it wasn’t always about the flavour from the wood. But with Black Art 9 I took inspiration from the very beginning. The re–casks that we would be doing in those days, you would take your spirit on a Monday and by the end of the week, move it into a different cask. So there was these rapid changes to peel the layers and build the profile from each of those cask types. As Black Art 9 evolved, I wanted to go back to the idea of these very short, short maturation periods so that you were building up layer upon layer upon layer quickly, on top of similar work previously. Then bringing everything together. I think it’s worked really nicely!
What you will find with Black Art 9 is that there are a lot of different facets to it, in how the flavour profile changes as you taste it, and let it open, and nose it…
So Black Art 9 was a combination of looking back at the methods we have used over the years and bringing in another step to it and combining those – a bit of a reflection.
Well, I think it’s probably unfair to say it was the best one yet! Again to refer to the other question about taking over the work that Jim was bringing out, I wouldn’t say any of my whiskies were better than his, or his better than mine. What you are looking at is just these different expressions you are able to create from almost doing the same thing. Just letting that creative freedom take you in different directions and letting the different cask types take you in different directions. And time plays out. That’s the joy of it! We can never recreate them.
The wonderful thing is that they are not meant to be the same all the time. They are going to have these different flavour profiles. That’s what keeps you coming back for more. They are unique spirits – like children – you never have a favourite child, they all have these unique characteristics and unique personalities. It’s a bit like that for me, all magical in their own right.
It is a fantastic whisky, Black Art 9. What we have done with those short periods of maturation, built upon those longer periods of maturation – you just have more depth than we probably ever had before with Black Art.
I have always said that Black Art is the kind of whisky that you can pour one dram and you can sit there for hours drinking it. Just nosing it, smelling it. I think that’s absolutely something that Black Art 9 is for. Just nosing it over the course of time. There’s so much in there, so much complexity, huge depth. It’s fantastic…
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Our oldest ever Black Art 
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The figures below state the average representative values per serving giving 10g alcohol, or per standard 25ml measure:
| Product | The Classic Laddie | |
|---|---|---|
| Alcohol (% by volume) | 50% | |
| Nutritional values: | Per 10 g alcohol (25,3 ml serving): | Per 25 ml serving: |
| Alcohol (g) | 10 | 10 |
| Calories (Kcal) | 69 | 69 |
| Fat (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Saturates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Carbohydrates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Sugar (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Protein (g) | 0 | 0 |
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.
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.
The figures below state the average representative values per serving giving 10g alcohol, or per standard 25ml measure:
| Product | Islay Barley 2009 | |
|---|---|---|
| Alcohol (% by volume) | 50% | |
| Nutritional values: | Per 10 g alcohol (25,3 ml serving): | Per 25 ml serving: |
| Alcohol (g) | 10 | 10 |
| Calories (Kcal) | 69 | 69 |
| Fat (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Saturates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Carbohydrates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Sugar (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Protein (g) | 0 | 0 |
The figures below state the average representative values per serving giving 10g alcohol, or per standard 25ml measure:
| Product | Port Charlotte Scottish Barley | |
|---|---|---|
| Alcohol (% by volume) | 50% | |
| Nutritional values: | Per 10 g alcohol (25,3 ml serving): | Per 25 ml serving: |
| Alcohol (g) | 10 | 10 |
| Calories (Kcal) | 69 | 69 |
| Fat (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Saturates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Carbohydrates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Sugar (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Protein (g) | 0 | 0 |
The figures below state the average representative values per serving giving 10g alcohol, or per standard 25ml measure:
| Product | Octomore 07.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Alcohol (% by volume) | 59.5% | |
| Nutritional values: | Per 10 g alcohol (25,3 ml serving): | Per 25 ml serving: |
| Alcohol (g) | 10 | 12 |
| Calories (Kcal) | 69 | 82 |
| Fat (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Saturates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Carbohydrates (g) | 0 | 0 |
| – of which Sugar (g) | 0 | 0 |
| Protein (g) | 0 | 0 |
