“It is the same answer for both of those questions,” Billy Leighton says. Irish Distillers’ master blender emeritus has been asked to give something he admires and something he finds annoying about Dave McCabe, his successor as the company’s master blender. “Dave has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about the industry, and every single aspect – from the barley to the cask, to oak trees, to the distillation process, everything – which is great and that’s something I totally admire about him, but at the same time it makes me feel a little inadequate.”
McCabe and Leighton share a laugh. Who could blame them? The idea that Leighton – who’s worked at whisky megalith Irish Distillers for 47 years, including 19 as master blender – could be inadequate does seem laughable.
Now it’s McCabe’s turn. What he says he admires in Leighton is his ability to remain calm in the face of any challenge. “I would always be at a loose end trying to stay cool, calm, and collected, but Billy will say, ‘This happened 15 years ago when barrels didn’t come in on time, or whatever, and we did this.’ There was always a solution. So, Ihave learned over time that Billy has lived through every scenario and has never overly worried about anything because of the experience he has.” The thing that irritates McCabe about his mentor, to whom he was unofficially apprenticed as a process technologist in 2017, is his proficiency with numbers. “Every time I’m working on something with stock and I can’t get something right, he’ll spot calculation errors that I’ve made.”
