Whisky - Scotland's Water of Life

I got it, it was dispensed with a hand as sparing as curaçao or benedictine." Change of scene! They had to start doing dinner service on the ground floor, so I went upstairs because I didn't want to be THAT guy. Anyway, in In 1785, Robert Burns, that same poet who had once been a tax collector or excise collector, actually wrote a poem extolling the virtues of what he called the Scotch drink: "Let other poets stir up a fight, over vines and wines, and let the drunken Bacchus and the names and stories of crabs torment us." , and we grate our ear: I sing the juice that the Scottish bear can prepare for us in a jug glass.

Oh you, my muse! Guide the old woman Scotch drink!... Inspire me, until I lisp and wink, to sing your name." Burns wrote this poem in part to restore some pride to the drink, as he would later, and probably most famously, do with haggis, and Whiskey needed some pride right now because it was about to face its most test. hard. Now, illegal stills had been around since those first regulations in the early 17th century, but by the end of the 18th century new laws were being passed that meant that virtually all whiskey in Scotland had to be made secretly, and it spread throughout the country. country.

At one point there were 8 legal stills in Edinburgh and 400 illegal stills, but the regulations were definitely more draconian for the Highlands, effectively banning all whiskey produced there. This was really the era of illicit stills. They hid under bridges and in houses, even in barns and churches, and there was a practice of labeling whiskey barrels with the name sheep sauce because sheep sauce was a poison they put in sheep to prevent them from contracting insects and fungus. Smuggling was rampant, as was corruption among distillers and excisemen, and when the government cracked down, one of the ways it did so was to offer a reward to people who would hand over the stills, but What actually happened was that the distillers themselves would take their old stills, hand them in, receive the reward and go buy a new still, although, ironically, all this regulation meant that the Highland distillers could refine their production, producing better whiskey than the Lowland distillers who made it. en masse, and thus fell into the trap of poor quality mass production.

Now Parliament finally realized that the more they regulated, the more people broke the law, so in 1823 they passed the Excise Act. This imposed a flat license fee plus a per-gallon payment on any whiskey distilled, and made it much more equitable across Scotland. The industry began to prosper and in 1848, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert began summering at Balmoral Castle, just down the road from where I am now, they ordered whiskey in casks from the Lochnagar distillery, which made the drink was socially acceptable among the nobility once again. Now, just after this whiskey benefited from a virus, the same virus that absinthe benefited from in France, it was called phylloxera and it decimated the vines of most of Europe, and therefore the wine industry, and So while the wine industry was trying to get Absinthe back on its feet and filled the void in France, but in England Scotch whiskey went down and made sure the country didn't have to spend a decade sober.

This is the period in which many of the famous whiskeys still enjoyed today began to be produced, and it was also the first time that blended whiskeys truly became an art form. This period also saw a return of whiskey marketing in a way that had not been seen for quite some time. At first, Robert Burns distillers played on the drink's Scottishness by adding tartans, Scottish dogs, and kilted bagpipers to their advertisements. When we visited Dewar's distillery in Aberfeldy we learned that in the early 20th century, to help with their marketing, they bought the essentially Scottish painting 'Glenn's Monarch' for £26,000, which is a lot of money today, but back then it was An extraordinary amount that costs almost as much as the distillery, and to get their money's worth they put it on bottles, posters and all kinds of marketing material, and while we were there we also saw that they resurrected another marketing strategy that had not been used for quite some time, and that was promoting whiskey as medicinal.

They had a bottle of Doers labeled as anti-diabetic whiskey and many distillers did the same, one of which calls itself "a wholesome stimulant that promotes good health and does not affect the head or liver." And while I think the marketing strategy has gone away, Scotch whiskey definitely hasn't. In fact, it has only grown over the last 150 years. Ironically, the only place where its consumption seems to be decreasing is Scotland itself. Around 1800, the average Scot drank half a liter of legal whiskey a week and an untold amount of illegal whiskey. Well, by 1900 that number had dropped to about half a pint, and it's continued to slowly decline ever since, but based on the number of distilleries I've seen around the country and the number of people drinking at every bar we're in, no I don't think we have to fear the demise of Scotch any time soon and I for one am very happy because I have definitely come to enjoy a glass of ushkabeha.

So thanks again to the Balmoral Arms for letting me use their restaurant and now their bedroom for filming, and be sure to keep an eye out for more Scottish episodes in the coming months, and we'll see you next time on Drinking. History. *GLUG*