Ask a whisky distiller to tell you where the flavour in whisky comes from, and they’ll likely talk about oak barrels for a while, maybe give you some detail about their stills. Fermentation may come into it. But precious few will talk about the grain, whisky’s humble raw material, too often taken for granted.
That’s because, for the past few decades at least, efficiency has trumped flavour when it comes to whisky grain varieties. Change is afoot, though, as distillers have begun to rediscover long-lost varieties of grain, finding that they not only taste better, but are more sustainable, too.
REDISCOVERED FLAVOURS
For Irish distillery Waterford, the appeal of heritage barley varieties is purely about flavour. ‘We’re natural flavour seekers, so what could be more natural than the flavours created in one’s own landscape,’ says founder Mark Reynier. He realised that
