There are many angles and unique selling points being pitched to the world from every startup distillery over the last couple of decades. Environmentally friendly production processes, zero carbon footprint, organic grains, some unique cask type that no one has ever used before, creating employment in deprived areas, investment in the community, blah blah blah.
Over here in China, we have startup distilleries banging all of those drums, but spicing it up with additional headline grabbers: the first this, the first that, the largest most super duper smurf friendly jingley jangley with bells and whistles all over it kinda distillery.
It has already got boring and this is exactly why we’ve side stepped all those claims and instead of focusing on “spin” (we have none of those big budget PR bunnies tasked with creating some headline grabbing angles) we’ve dedicated our time to building out our vision of what we think we need to make world class whisky. People. Whisky loving people. And lots of them.
It Ain’t Rocket Science
Making whisky isn’t rocket science. It’s a pretty simple process. It’s obviously more challenging to make amazing whisky. But it’s still not impossible. Take a look at the amount of distilleries who have gone from nothing to winning international awards in just a few years. Unless of course the entire international awards industry is just giving out stickers for anyone that pays to enter…….but hey, let’s park that story for another day and get back to people.
So, where we saw the challenges were in making world class whiskies that anyone and everyone could enjoy. THAT is the real challenge because, well, people are fickle and it’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time. It’s almost impossible to even try and please anything that resembles a majority. We see it on a daily basis. We have some people that will only drink a Speyside sherry bomb. Other people that will only drink bourbon. In some parts of Islay there’s almost a cult-like status for one of the leading heavily peated drams and fans of that dram would roll their eyes and curse if you presented them with a floral and fruity lowlands Scotch.
Additionally, with Scotch, just that word alone (unless followed by the word “egg”) is enough to draw in vast armies of enthusiasts all across the world who will hand over their money, buy it, glug it and tell the world it was amazing just because of the s-word (Scotch, if you’re not keeping up with us) despite the fact that the lion’s share (in volume, not value) is cheap blended swill exported in bulk in IBC containers and drums, to be bottled and sold in country as Scotch whisky.
China doesn’t have the same status in most alcohol categories, so we knew we would have to sell our whiskies on quality instead of blind, ignorant loyalty to the S-word. But how to ensure we get it right is the tricky bit. How do other distilleries do it? How does one whisky brand decide “this is what we want to sell”?
In most cases, it’s a legacy product that has been around for 100 years or more, so it’s a case of trying to match what they consistently crank out, by marrying various casks to get a decent match in aroma and flavour profiles. There are natural changes over time, and many “whisky experts” will whinge about “this whisky was soooooo much better 20/30/40 years ago”. But, that’s not our problem as a startup, therefore, we have a blank canvas and no memories of old grey beards to placate.
The Sensory Tasting Panel
For new whiskies (both startup distilleries and old school distilleries who create the occasional new release or a limited edition offering), it’s all typically driven by a sensory tasting panel, made up of staff members within the company.
Bigger companies with hundreds of staff have a much bigger and broader pool of people to draw from. Startups with just a handful of people either have a very small panel, or could outsource this to a third party to either resource or completely manage.
It stands to logic and reason that the more people that can be involved in this process, the more useful the feedback and the better the eventual end product should be. Which is why we always knew that we would want as many people involved in this project as possible so that we can have more confidence in our ability to craft whiskies for everyone.
Typically, a sensory tasting panel at a top 5 Scotch single malt will be made up of 20 to 40 people from various departments within the company – a diverse selection of people who are selected for their natural ability to detect aromas and flavours to an above average level. There are some basic tests that can help determine the sensory perception of an individual and this process creates a short list of the people most suitable to be trained and developed further.
As part of a sensory tasting panel, panel members will be involved in a number of different reviews of new make spirit, young spirits, mature spirits or spirits that have utilized (either by full maturation or some type of finish) different types of cask.
Core tests include “difference testing” to detect the difference, if any, between two or more samples; “descriptive testing”, defining the intensity of certain aromas on a scale of zero to five; and finally “ranking”, where panelists will rank samples in order of intensity of a specific attribute or preference.
Sensory tasting panels might typically undertake one sampling each week and this would normally be in a laboratory type environment, a clean room, free of anything that could influence aromas or tastes, and all panel members would adhere to certain rules including no aftershave, no perfume, no overly spicy or rich food on the previous day. We have additional requirements specific to our project which include all panel members undertaking the entire exercise while sitting on Dobbin, our mascot pantomime horse, wearing nothing but leather chaps and a ten-gallon hat. This will of course be video taped and held as security to ensure the utmost confidentiality about anything we are crafting, until it’s ready for release to the world.
Our Whisky Mob
We currently have a pool of 135 people involved in our project. We expect that to increase over the next year or so and of course, the more people that are involved, the richer and deeper our sensory tasting panel will be. But until we are actually producing spirit, we also explored a number of ways where we could leverage this abundance of knowledge, creativity, and experience across a vast plethora of industries. We thought of flash mobs where 135 people could break out into song and dance to one of the lead tracks to The Sound of Music at random villages dotted around Fujian, but that has been done to death in the west and would have almost no meaning here in China.
With jokes aside and silliness parked (at least for the short term) we realized that there was so much more than 135 noses and palates available. We had artists, graphic designers, web developers, product designers, copywriters, project managers, industrial engineers, plumbers and pipe fitters, electricians and industrial power experts, software architects, mechanical engineers, mathematicians, physicists, structural engineers, logistics experts, pilots (yes, we actually have two pilots!), some former soldiers, golf professionals, factory bosses, an expert in lasers – hell, we even have someone that really could be classified as a rocket scientist!
Pretty much everything we have done so far on this project has been a direct output of the people who have invested their pennies. Building our website, creating our social media content, publishing on and managing all the social media platforms we are present on, designing our glass bottles, designing our packaging, the products that we have already created and sold (whisky stones and whisky advent calendars), creating the concepts for our architecture and refining it multiple times, designing our stills, documenting our end-to-end production process, our sales and distribution network (even before we have whisky to sell!) – absolutely everything has been achieved “in house” and at no cost to our project.
Even today, at the end of 2021, when faced with just the latest challenge in this mad crazy fun journey to our dream of building a whisky distillery (we have to move about 40’173 cubic meters of earth to build our distillery) the solution was once again a team effort. 135 people with shovels and wheel barrows……*
We have no claim on being the first whisky distillery. We have no claims on being China’s first single malt. We have no claims on being the biggest, the richest, the coolest or the funkiest.
But we do have 3 coach loads of whisky lovers all pooling their time, knowledge, experience and love of whisky, to come together and make something different.
There are other projects in China that are stepping up to make whiskies. The more the merrier. One day China might even have its very own whisky trail. We’re all waiting patiently for the day when whisky tourism becomes a real thing for all of China.
But there will only ever be one whisky for the people. Whisky made by whisky lovers, for whisky lovers. It’s the vast array of people we have involved that will help craft what we believe will be something very special, and that’s why we’re starting to introduce them all to you, one by one.
*please note, we will be using bulldozers and excavators. The manual approach to move that much earth would be 8.436 million shovels full. Or, 62’491 shovels per person. As we said, we have a mathematician on board so he did the maths for us.
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Good to learn!