Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Whatever; Laphroaig in particular is a hell of drink, especially if you don't like it. It's
oddly peaty (oddly because there's much less peat involved in the making of it than in
most whiskies we think of as peaty) and positively bursting with smells straight out of the
medicine cabinet, the quayside, a road repair depot and even an industrial plant (mouth-
wash, disinfectant, iodine, cough sweets … actually make that cough sours … seaweed,
tar, diesel, oil …). Pungent, no-holds-barred stuff, though arguably not quite as remorse-
lessly astringent as it used to be.
I think the truth is that, as well as having changed somewhat over the years to a
slightly
mellower formulation, Laphroaig is just a very slow-maturing whisky; it still has
enormous, restless, raw energy and character at an age when most other whiskies would
be starting to take on too much of the character of the barrel they've been matured with-
in, turning woody. Not this stuff. At ten years it's ferocious, full of antagonistic flavours,
sweet and sour and tarry, redolent of peat, pepper and burnt toffee. It shouldn't all work
together - and as I say, for some people, it never will - and yet it does, magnificently.
Five years later it's still powerful, though more balanced, slightly sweeter, less demand-
ing, and deeper, while at 30 years it's finally getting to the Hmm, just about perfect stage
(apparently - I've never tasted Laphroaig this old; I'm relying on usually reliable sources
here).
Lagavulin, barely a whisky-barrel's throw away along the coast, is a close second on
the in-your-faceness stakes, which was kind of the idea, as the guy who had the place
built, Sir Peter Mackie, was trying to make a whisky like Laphroaig. What's there on the
site now is the result of a combination of three separate distilleries, themselves the distil-
lation of about ten distinct bothies-with-stills which used to make spirit back in the pre-
excise days when it was all just a cosy wee cottage industry and everybody was basically
semi-pro.
Once upon a time: distilling as a cottage industry
.
In the old days people made whisky because it was just part of the life of being a crofter
(a croft being the Scottish term for a small farm). You grew barley, you harvested it, and
what you couldn't feed your family or your animals with, you could either sell, or make
into whisky, which you could also use yourself, or sell. Turning barley into whisky was a
good way of storing your surplus; barley goes mouldy in a damp climate. Whisky doesn't.
To people like this, making beer or whisky from their crops was as much part of their
lives as sowing the seeds at the start of the season or bringing in the harvest at the end. To
them the government was a distant entity with little day-to-day relevance to their lives;
when, during the gradual commodification and commercial exploitation of whisky, the
politicians decided that people would no longer be allowed to make their own whisky un-
less they did so on an industrial scale, and paid the government for the privilege, it must
