“We’re all a bit like Formula One drivers, trying to find out what everyone else has under their hoods,” says Marc Watson, distillery and operations manager at Edinburgh’s charmingly playful Holyrood Distillery. He’s talking about him and his fellow ‘new-make nerds’ with whom he spends time chatting about what goes into a distillery’s unaged spirit before it eventually becomes whisky.
It’s no secret, though, that new-make spirit is often an overlooked topic when it comes to discussing whisky outside the distillery. This despite the common adage that ‘it’s the DNA of whisky’. It’s a strange phenomenon: for all the work that goes into making the liquid coming off the still, bringing up the subject of new make can often leave one a social pariah. And trying to talk about it to consumers? Unless they’re seasoned whisky lovers, you might as well forget it. Yet when you do meet a fellow enthusiast, that new-make chat really flows. And with distilleries experimenting with different raw materials and trialling new yeast strains, and the flipflopping debate around ‘terroir’ in whisky ever present, it seems that these conversations are becoming more and more common.
While only a handful
