There’s a lot of variety in the world of whisky colours, and an even longer list of evocative, descriptive terms for the amber liquid. But what does colour actually mean for your dram? And where does it come from?

Taste is subjective. That’s why in the wonderful world of whisky you’ll hear many people talk about the different ‘tasting notes’ they get from the same whisky. We know that this can sound a little daunting, especially if you feel like you’re the only one in the room (or zoom) who can’t pick out a specific flavour of ‘pine needles’ or ‘orange’. Although you shouldn’t worry too much (really you just need to know whether you like it or not), there are good reasons behind why some people are able to pick out certain flavours from whisky.

While taste is subjective, flavour compounds aren’t. They’re measurable bits of matter that exist in everything we can taste. Compounds like isoamyl acetate for example, taste like banana sweets. Ethyl caprylate, like pineapples. Cinnamaldehyde, rather unsurprisingly, tastes like cinnamon. There are thousands of these flavour compounds commonly found in your whisky, and using a fancy test (Google “Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry” for a rabbit hole of scientific fun) we can even pretty accurately tell you both what compounds, and how much of each are present in any given bottle.

So how does this objective information turn into subjective deliciousness? To put it simply, it’s all down to you.

How you perceive a whisky and its complex combination of flavour compounds, alcohols and water will vary depending on a whole host of factors. Firstly, in your ability to taste certain compounds. For example, people who think coriander tastes like soap tend to perceive compounds like aldehydes more intensely. Secondly your experience and history with certain flavours has a big effect. One persons vague “citrus” might be another’s “homemade bergamot marmalade”, it all depends on what those flavour compounds trigger in your brain.

There’s a whole host of external factors that can effect how you taste as well. Ever wondered how aeroplane meals can be simultaneously the saltiest and also the blandest thing you’ve ever tasted? The cabin pressure and loud noise of an aircraft will seriously effect your ability to taste, and whilst that’s an extreme example, everything from temperature, lighting, weather, even the colour of the room you’re sat in, can impact how something tastes to you. So when we’re talking about tasting notes, we’re really talking about what we think this tastes like, based off of our personal experience, as well as our general ability to taste and perceive flavour compounds.

Now the big question, where are all these flavour compounds coming from? What makes whisky taste like whisky? The answer, as I’m sure you can imagine, is wildly complicated, so we’ve made it a little simpler to prevent any nodding off!

1. BARLEY

Here’s where your grain characteristics are going to come from. Compounds like Hexanal and Furan are commonly formed in barley, which taste like citrusy grass and nutty caramel respectively. The malting process for barley can also develop and add more flavour. Reactions when drying barley can cause caramelisation and sweet, toasted flavours, and some distilleries dry with peat smoke, adding smokey and medicinal notes.

2. FERMENTATION

Yeast doesn’t just eat sugar and produce bubbles and booze. It also produces a ton of flavour in your whisky, most notably esters. Shorter esters like ethyl acetate taste like green apples, and ethyl lactate like butter. There are also longer esters that effect texture more than they do flavour. Ethyl palmitate, for example, can give whisky a waxy/creamy quality.

Different yeasts, fermentation times and temperatures will all produce different levels of these compounds, which is why we at Nc’nean have two different yeast recipes, designed for different lengths of maturation, and also why we run annual yeast trials, to discover new flavour possibilities in our whiskies.

3. DISTILLATION

This is a rather different category, as whilst some flavour compounds are formed here, distillation’s main role is actually to remove a lot of them. More dangerous alcohols like methanol, and undesirable esters and aldehydes are removed in the foreshots and feints (that’s the first and last liquid off the still). Finding the cut point between these and the good “heart” of the run is the skill of a good distiller.

4. CASKS

Maturation has a massive effect on the final taste of the whisky. Ageing spirit in oak barrels will add new flavour compounds, like vanillin (vanilla), cyclotene (caramel/maple) and eugenol (clove). The vast majority of Scotch whisky casks will also have been used for a different product beforehand, which will leave its own unique impression on the whisky, like our STR-Red wine casks tasting rich and spicy, and our Ex-Bourbon casks tasting sweeter and softer.

Maturation can also help other compounds develop or break down due to the influence of oxygen. An alcohol molecule can oxidise into an aldehyde, creating a new flavour, which can oxidise further into an acid, creating another new flavour, which can then combine with another alcohol molecule and form a new ester, creating yet another new flavour, yeah science! This constant development, along with more volatile compounds evaporating with the angels’ share is how whisky mellows and matures over time.

The result of all this complex development is a whole world of flavour possibilities in single malt, but also why the basic formula of malted barley, yeast, water and oak creates an unmistakable “Scotch” character. And that, very briefly, is why whisky tastes like whisky.

Glass: often deemed the more ‘sustainable’ option for being nontoxic and infinitely recyclable, but it’s not all good news. From carbon impact to recycled content, glass’s impact on the planet is not one to be taken lightly. To get into the nitty gritty about glass, we’ve been chatting to our sustainability guru Amy to find out the truth behind glass and how we can help to reduce its footprint.

THE GLASS VS PLASTIC DEBATE: WHY DO CONSUMERS TEND TO FAVOUR GLASS OVER PLASTIC?

Glass is often seen as a more environmentally friendly alternative to plastic because we have a big issue globally with plastic pollution. This has mostly been driven by the disposal of single use plastic which tends to end up in our oceans, soils and in our food chain. Moving away from single use plastics is a good thing, but we need to recognise that not all plastics are bad, and that sometimes the alternatives are not always as green as you think. In fact, per ‘unit’, a plastic bottle has a much smaller carbon footprint than a glass bottle. On the other hand, glass is infinitely recyclable making it a popular choice from that point of view.

CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE CARBON IMPACT OF GLASS?

Glass is made in very large furnaces that create on average 300 tonnes of glass a day. They operate by being continuously heated in order to melt the raw ingredients (sand, limestone and soda ash) into molten glass which is then poured into moulds. The furnaces are never switched off – and in the course of one day natural gas is continuously burned to create the temperatures needed to melt the virgin raw materials, releasing 62 tonnes of CO2. On top of this we have ‘process CO2’, which is the emissions given off by the melting of the raw materials, which is approximately 185kg per tonne of glass. That’s an extra 55 tonnes of CO2 a day!

ARE THERE ANY ISSUES WITH DIGGING UP SAND TO MAKE VIRGIN GLASS?

I wouldn’t say that mining the raw materials for making glass is necessarily bad because they are very abundant. However, mining does have a physical impact on the landscape and surrounding environment as well as associated emissions of excavation that add to the overall footprint of glass. When recycled glass is created, you don’t have to mine for raw materials – existing glass is melted down and reshaped. 

HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO MAKE RECYCLED GLASS?

It’s no more difficult to make recycled glass than virgin glass, but the issue in the UK is that we don’t have enough good quality recycled clear glass (cullet) to make clear glass bottles with high recycled content. At the moment, if you want a glass bottle with a high recycled content you need to get green glass. Dark glass is good, but that doesn’t work for a lot of products and brands – especially in the food and drinks industry where high quality, crystal clear glass (known as flint or extra-flint) is favoured.

The manufacture of flint glass in the UK is about 65% of the glass production, but a lot of that is exported in the form of finished products and actually what we have in our recycling bins are high percentages of green glass and brown glass – mostly because we import and consume products in these containers (think beer and wine). To add to the issue, we don’t recycle enough and we have moved away from using bottle banks and now have co-mingled recycling. You might think this makes it easier for you, but it means that the clear glass gets broken and mixed up with other colours, making it more difficult to separate and get a good quality of colour specific cullet.

If you look at any bottles on your shelf you will see they are very clear with no ‘tinge’ of any other colour and no blemishes. In the industry this is called ‘extra flint’ and generally required for all premium products. If you have one of our bottles, you’ll notice that it has a slightly green tinge and possibly some small air bubbles or blemishes. Allowing these small blemishes through the quality reviews means fewer glasses are rejected in the factory, further reducing the carbon footprint of each one.

WHY IS RECYCLED GLASS SO MUCH BETTER THAN VIRGIN GLASS?

The advantage of glass made from cullet (recycled content) is that it takes much less energy to melt down and there are no process emissions. Basically, emissions from glass go down as the recycled content goes up! This does depend on the efficiency of the furnace but as an example: every glass bottle we have made saves 0.5 kg (40%) of CO2 emissions per bottle compared making it from virgin materials. For the bottles that we will require in future we will save over 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

WHAT ARE NC'NEAN DOING TO HELP?

Despite the fact that we are doing what we can, when we are at full production even our recycled bottles produce 36 tonnes of CO2 per year. To put this into context – to make our whisky which goes in those very bottles we emit 40 tonnes of CO2 a year. So, the next move is for us to reduce the number of bottles that we need to have made, and to do that we need to allow people to reuse and re-fill the bottles that they have already bought.

This requires two things... 1) You lovely lot getting used to the idea of refills 2) For us to navigate the maze of rules that dictate the bottling of Scotch whisky.

We would love to hear if you would be happy to buy your whisky in some kind of refillable, sustainable pouch, or get it refilled at a refill station. Please let us know in the comments if you would be up for it.

You might have heard that back in August we partnered with our friends over at Whisky Auctioneer to auction off the first 10 bottles of whisky ever filled at the distillery. We donated all the proceeds to five charities who we think do a great job at making the world a better place. Read on for the story of why we did it and how we set a new world record.

WHY DID WE DO IT?

Auctioning special bottlings, first releases and very old bottles is the done thing in the whisky industry. There is a huge market for collectable whiskies. But this isn’t why we did it. We did it because in the time we’re living through, both Covid and the crisis our planet faces, we really wanted to find a good way of giving back. 

So, as a team we put our heads together to discuss which charities really meant the most to us, and which charities would most benefit from donations at the time. We threw lots into the mix, but as we weren’t expecting to raise nearly as much as we did, we decided to only pick five.

THE AUCTION

We had decided to partner with Whisky Auctioneer for the big day (well weekend actually), and as soon as they got wind of the fact we were donating all our proceeds, they too kindly offered to donate the equivalent of all their commission and fees from the auction to the same five charities.

The auction kicked off and we soon realised that we would be raising a little more than first anticipated, and as the weekend went on it looked like we might be heading towards a new world record price for the first bottle from a new distillery. The last couple of hours of the auction were (as always) the most exciting - the team spent the final 30 minutes on our Whatsapp group sharing ever growing disbelief at the prices going up and up! At the time of the hammer bottle #1 had reached an incredible £41,004. Four times the previous world record of around £10,000! Just as exciting, were bottles #2 - #10 which together raised more than the first bottle put together. With the addition of the donation from whisky auctioneer, the total auction raised £92,500, an amount that we never could have imagined. We are still in disbelief at the huge success, and are so excited to be able to give over £18,000 to each of our chosen charities.

THE FIVE CHARITIES

We think these five charities are awesome. If you have a minute, take a look at their work and consider getting involved!

Trees For Life
Trees For Life was an easy choice. Their mission to create safe spaces for wildlife and increase biodiversity is so in line with what Nc’nean is all about. And since they have planted nearly 2 million trees to date, we knew our donation would be put to awesome use with their tree planting projects.

The Drinks Trust and The Ben
Coronavirus has had detrimental effects on so many industries, but so many of our close friends in the hospitality industry have been hit hardest by the pandemic, so that’s why we decided to support the UK’s and Scotland’s top hospitality charities. The Drinks Trust and The Ben both do amazing jobs of supporting bar and restaurant workers across the UK and giving back to them at this time just felt like the right thing to do.

Morvern Community Trust 
The Morvern peninsula is our home and it's important to us that we support our local community. MCT do a great job of helping with local projects to support everyone in the area and were on our charity list from the very beginning before we even thought about doing the auction.

Scottish Farm Land Trust
We were looking for another environmental based charity that did something a bit different and came across The Scottish Farm Land Trust. The folks there help young people and new farmers take on small-scale ecological agriculture by purchasing land to be held in trust. Supporting small scale sustainable farming felt really close to our brand mission so we knew they would put our money to good use.

The humble whisky soda, you don’t need to go too far back in pub history to find a room filled with effervescing tumblers of the stuff. A delightfully simple combination of Scotch and soda water, maybe with a spot of ice and a twist of lemon if you’re feeling fancy, this unassuming drink was once a staple order in taprooms across the UK. In fact even today, spend an evening wondering the streets of Tokyo’s Ginza neighbourhood and you’ll soon find out the whisky soda is as alive and well in the hearts and glasses of many. 

So what makes this simple combination work? Let’s start with the bubbles and a quick bit of terminology house keeping. All fizzy water is, is a mixture of water (obviously) and dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) so what’s with all the different names? Well the differences are subtle but very important, especially when it comes to mixing.

• Seltzer water - just plain carbonated water. 

• Sparkling mineral water - carbonated water with naturally occurring salts and minerals 

• Soda water - carbonated water with added salts and minerals

Sparkling water is generally contains lower levels of salts and minerals. It’s these salts that give soda water its name (added sodium compounds) and are the reason it works so well when mixed with whisky. Think of it as seasoning the drink, the same way you’d add salt to food.

Now that we’ve sorted the bubbles, we need to take a look at the whisky. The soda water is going to release and enhance a wide variety of flavour compounds, for better or for worse. Lighter compounds will be more perceptible, so short chain esters, aldehydes and phenols will get a boost. Great for fruity and floral notes, but those smokey phenols in peated whisky can become overpowering, especially when factoring in a lower perception of sweetness due to the drink being cold.

Another important factor is texture. Whiskies with great body hold up really well with soda, and this is usually down to long chain fatty acid esters in the whisky. When these are combined with soda water, you can get a fluffy, creamy texture in the finished drink. So how do I find one of these whiskies? Googling “Single Malt Scotch Whisky with long chain fatty acid esters” probably won’t yield many results. Time for some insider knowledge! Look for bottles that say “non-chill filtered.”

Chill filtering (literally getting the whisky down to 0°C and filtering it) removes compounds that could make a whisky look hazy in cool conditions, like sitting on a supermarket shelf for example. Great if you want your whisky looking clear, but not so great for our good friends the fatty acids. Bottles with “non chill filtered” will most likely still contain these texture boosting compounds, and should be your go-to for mixing with soda. Bonus tip, any whisky at 46% ABV or more won’t need chill filtering, so almost definitely won’t be. The higher ABV prevents hazing and also helps with flavour intensity when mixed with soda, win win.

Now that we know what we’re doing, allow me to whet your appetite with a few suggested serves:

WHISKY SIX

2 parts Nc’nean Single Malt

4 parts Fever Tree Soda Water

Pour gently into a rocks glass filled with cubed ice. Garnish with fresh mint.

THE FAMOUS ROCK FISH "KAKU-HI"

60ml Suntory Kakubin 43 (from the freezer)

190ml Wilkinson Tansan Soda Water (one full bottle from the fridge)

Pour gently into a small frozen highball glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon

Developed by Maguchi Kazunari, owner of Tokyo bar “Rock Fish”. It’s served iceless, so all the elements need to be kept as cold as possible before pouring (including the custom etched highball glasses he has made for this drink). Most impressively, the brand of whisky used was discontinued 20 years ago, but is now made and sold exclusively to Maguchi for this drink, which is great as he makes an average of 150 of these a day…

COASTAL WHISKY SODA

50ml Nc’nean Single Malt

100ml “Sea Silk” Sparkling Water*

 Pour gently into a rocks glass filled with a large ice block. Garnish with fresh samphire.

The “Sea Silk” Sparkling water adds seasoning and texture to the drink with the addition of Sodium Alginate, giving it a luscious mouthfeel and longer finish. Sodium alginate is usually taken from seaweed and is commonly used as a gelling agent in food.

*This is homemade, so you’ll need something to carbonate water.

“Sea Silk” Sparkling Water

500ml Mineral Water

5g Powdered Sodium Alginate

Blend the powder into the water until completely dissolved, then refrigerate for 2 hours. Carbonate to a high level and keep well sealed. Use within a day.

The story of our Botanical Spirit: read on to find out where the idea came from, why it took six months of development to get the recipe right and just exactly why it is not a ‘gin’.

SOME HISTORY

Our first plans for the distillery, dated August 2013, show a gin still in a building that now doesn’t exist. In those early days, gin was still nascent and the idea of making a white spirit ‘early’ in our history seemed attractive. Fast forward four years and by the time we had a distillery up and running gin was booming and quite frankly, we didn’t have anything new to add.

So off we went to make whisky, focusing purely on making the very best ‘new make’ spirit we could. (‘New make’ is the clear spirit produced in the distillery, before we let it age in barrels, and develop whisky’s signature golden colour).

One day, a lovely Japanese lady, Misako Udo, who lives in Edinburgh made the long journey to visit our distillery on the west coast and suggested to me that our new make was so delicious we should bottle it. We are extremely proud of our new make, and it is something we put a lot of focus into as a distillery (more on that another time), but I wasn’t sure it was something anyone would actually buy.

Around the same time I’d been becoming more aware of the natural abundance around the distillery – grasses, flowers, bushes, trees. So I spent a day with local herbalist and all-things-wild guru Clare Holohan and we started to catalogue what grew locally. My favourite of all of these was bog myrtle (below) – an aromatic little bush that grows like a weed around the distillery.

SIX MONTH'S OF DEVELOPMENT

Gradually I put these two ideas together – what if we could combine some of the wonderful herbs and spices (“botanicals”) that grew locally with our new make spirit?

A few fortuitous meetings later we set up a project with Heriot Watt University to develop a recipe with some of their students using our new make and a variety of botanicals. And what a learning curve that was. The first few iterations tasted in all honesty not that great – a slightly herby new make but nothing we’d want to put out in the world.

It was through this process we realised that new make requires special treatment. It is not a normal ‘gin’ process – which takes very very high strength spirit (distilled to the extent that it has very little taste left) and adds botanicals. We were trying to layer botanicals on top of a fruity, malty spirit. So we changed our approach and doubled, sometimes tripled the botanical quantities and added in juniper and coriander, typical of gin. And wow, that was what we were looking for – suddenly we had a complex, balanced, fruity, herby, malty spirit which we felt really showcased both the new make and the botanicals.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A BOTANICAL SPIRIT?

And so became our ‘botanical spirit’ – not in our business plan, and neither did it feature in some rather dry EU law that defines different types of spirit. Said law states that gin must start life as 96% abv ethyl alcohol (the neutral tasting spirit mentioned above) so instead we named our spirit a ‘Botanical Spirit’, a portrait of our landscape: the combination of wild, local botanicals and our pure, fruity, ‘new make’ spirit. There is no official definition of a Botanical Spirit, but the name tends to encompass any spirits that use botanicals as their flavourings but don’t fit any other categories. You can find some others here. 

In terms of drinking it, we like to treat it like a gin. Our favourite way to drink it is over plenty of ice, with tonic, a dash of bitters and a slice of grapefruit. Click here to buy a bottle or here to explore some more creative ways to drink it.

Well, before we start with the casks themselves, let’s look at the distillery. Every distillery has its own story and its own distillation and maturation methods, so it’s good to take an overall look before you get stuck into the individual casks.

For us, it’s really important that our whisky makes the biggest flavour impression with the smallest carbon footprint, and that’s why we only use organic barley, 100% renewable energy, and will bottle your whisky into a 100% recycled glass bottle. The organic barley’s rich soils result in concentrated flavour in the grains, and in our spirit, giving our whisky exceptional body and texture before it even hits the cask. 

Owning a cask of Nc’nean single malt also gives you a great excuse to visit Scotland’s beautiful west coast, to see how our whisky family is getting on.

SO, ONTO THE CASKS

We have three cask varieties you can choose from, all sourced by our team to ensure the highest possible standards. All the casks have been seasoned prior to our use of them, which in turn helps each cask develop a unique flavour profile.

Our ex-bourbon casks come mostly from Kentucky – the home of some of the best American whiskies. Maturing our spirit in these barrels gives it flavours of clean toffee, vanilla and orchard fruit. If you are typically a bourbon drinker but enjoy a Scotch, then this is the cask for you.

Our red wine casks have been shaved, toasted and re-charred which caramelises the sugars in the residual wine the wood holds. Maturing your whisky in one of these casks will develop flavours of warming spices and pastries. If you're a fan of richer, spicier single malts, or even heavier bourbons or rye, then this is for you. 

And our sherry casks on the other hand taste like roasted nuts and jam. These casks produce truly decadent whiskies, adding viscosity and intensity, as well as flavour. For lovers of fruit forward single malts.

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

Our casks start from an initial cost of around £3000. Then when you’re cask is ready, you’ll need to pay for bottling, shipping and any duty or taxes in your country of residence. For example, if you purchased an ex-Bourbon cask with 5 years of maturation, you would pay £3000 up front to own the cask. Then when you’re ready to bottle, based on current figures for customers living in the UK, an additional; £3000 in UK duty, £1500 in VAT and £1500 in bottling and shipping. This brings the total estimated cost to £9000.

To put that in perspective, this cask would typically yield around 322 bottles at 46%, making the cost per bottle around £28, which we would expect to retail for a minimum of £50 per bottle.

WHERE WILL MY CASK BE STORED?

Don’t worry, you’re not going to have to re-arrange the furniture. We’ll store your cask in one of our bonded warehouses on site until it’s ready to be bottled. You’re welcome to visit whenever we’re open, just let us know you’re coming so we can ensure the team can spend some time with you.

CAN I PERSONALISE MY CASK?

Of course - we will stencil and paint your cask with a name of your choice, and send you a hand written certificate. But for 2020, we are adding something even more special. This year, to acknowledge the global feeling of hope and change in light of all the recent events, we will be hand-stencilling 'Hope lies in dreams' on the end of each cask of whisky. This quote, one which has stuck with our founder Annabel through the last few months, derives from Jonas Salk's "Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams a reality." 

CAN I MATURE MY CASK FOR LONGER THAN 5 OR 10 YEARS?

You most certainly can, you’re in complete control how long the whisky is aged for. We charge £100 for each additional year per cask to cover storage and insurance fees.

I'M IN, WHAT'S NEXT?

Simple, if you’d like more details then take a look at our frequently asked questions video below, or if you’re ready to pick a cask then you can send us your details to casks@ncnean.com, or head to our cask page to send an enquiry.

There are so many reasons to love organic farming, but giving tours to farmers who visit the distillery often throws up interesting questions or comments. ‘Surely it is more prone to disease and pests’, ‘yes but the barley isn’t of very good quality’, ‘but the yield is smaller’. The one that sticks in our mind the most, and the one that may resonate with the gardeners among us, is ‘it looks so untidy!’ There are two sides to every story, so below we take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of organic farming.

Firstly, let’s start by welcoming you to the wonderful world of internet whisky debates. There’s many of them, and they can get, unexpectedly, a little heated. So, we’re here to cool it down and let you know that the world of whisky doesn’t have to be as daunting as you expect – and to address the most commonly asked question in the whisky world… Can I add water to my whisky?

Buy a cask of whisky. We realise that sentence can sound a little daunting, and that you might need to know a lot about whisky to even think about delving into a whole cask. But in reality, we have a really wide range of cask owners - from whisky buffs to total newbies.