And the call went out … Workers, comrades let us unite and go do a distillery tour on Beltane.
And so I did. Mainly for my comrades. And the revolution, which is my boyfriend.
First, a confession: I had managed to get the Cabrach distillery and the Cairn distillery muddled up in my head, so I was slightly surprised to end up at a corporate place not a community project; immediately upon arriving at the sleek ultramodern (fresh new in 22) Cairn I realised my mistake. “Corporate” is a big ugly word to throw out there, I must say I do react badly to the extreme money-making side of the whisky industry, just as I do with vinyl or zines. On the flipside, I had a good time at the Cairn and everyone who worked there seemed cool.
This is a Gordon & McPhail project producing 1 million litres a year. These guys, run by the Urquart brothers who are identical twins, are known as independent bottlers but according to wikipedia are moving towards their own lines with Ben Romach and the Cairn. They’ve been making blends to show what they hope the Cairn single malt will eventually taste like – I was the happy recipient of a bottle of the CRN 18 blend as I left.
The tour was fun, we started with a broken slideshow then entered the shiny distillery which is like an oil tanker, with one dude controlling everything from a collection of monitors. Our guide was the softly spoken Stuart Urquart who also led the blending workshop afterwards. He taught us a bit about how to nose and grade, and was kind enough to answer my strictly amateur queries. I know now to let my blend sit for a week and to take alcohol strength into account when constructing the tail, as well as the mouth. Currently my basic tactic is to pour the end of Speyside malts into a bottle and then add Laphroig oak select until it tastes good, but I didn’t tell Urquart that, I’m not having G+M stealing my hot innovative idea 🙂
We blended our own whiskies, honestly I had no fckn idea what I was doing but it was fun. I wonder what my blend will taste like .. it’s called KADMPF. We had a decent discussion about Trumpy stuff, G+M’s line is that they are not too bothered since they hope to ride out the bumps, which I guess makes sense when you think long term but it also certainly helps to be a brand people know and respect.
This was an illuminating two hours and a beautiful drive too, I love turning down towards tbe Caingorms at Mulben, it’s one of my favourite things to do lately, especially because the road takes me past Upper Lagmore stone circle at Ballindalloch, which I popped up to on me way home.