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Trans­parency. We support Compass Box

IN Transparency
18th February 2016/by Carl Reavey

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We fully support the campaign by Compass Box that is aimed at allowing Scotch whisky companies to reveal more about what is in their bottles.  As their whiskymaker John Glaser says: “Scotch whisky is one of the few products where it is prohibited by law to be fully open with consumers. This is an issue that… limits the ability of the producer to share pertinent information with their customers.”

He continues: “We believe the current regulations should change. That Scotch whisky producers should have the freedom to offer their customers complete, unbiased and clear information on the age of every component used in their whiskies. That those customers have the right to know exactly what it is they’re drinking.” We agree.  If you do too, please register your support for John Glaser and the team at Compass Box here.  We have.

We will also support their campaign in a practical sense.  We believe that our customers should be able to find out the age, provenance and proportions by volume of all the casks that make up the different vattings of The Classic Laddie, bottles of which do not carry an age statement.

Every vatting of The Classic Laddie has been created using a different suite of casks and therefore every batch code will give different results. We celebrate natural whisky and variety.

Every vatting of The Classic Laddie has been created using a different suite of casks and therefore every batch code will give different results. We celebrate natural whisky and variety.

The age and origin of all the various casks used in every vatting to date and every future vatting, will be published as a menu on www.bruichladdich.com/archive. During April 2016 we will provide a new field on The Classic Laddie product page of our website.  Every bottle we have ever produced carries a simple batch code.  If you enter this code into the field it will list the component casks.

Every vatting of The Classic Laddie has been created using a different suite of casks and therefore every batch code will give different results. We celebrate natural whisky and variety.

Dave Broom, Becky Paskin and Richard Woodard of www.scotchwhisky.com had this to say on the importance of this issue for NAS (no age statement) whiskies:
“Our opinion is that having the option to be completely transparent and precise about the composition of these whiskies – including the age of the components and their relative proportions in the final product – would assist greatly in explaining the rationale behind their emergence and creation.” We agree.

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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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