Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
off-licences or even heard of at all. The guy was almost messianic in his zeal, and I duly
left the shop clutching several bottles of cask-strength, completely unadulterated whisky
and with a certain degree of righteous ire that our national drink had been interfered with,
emasculated and basically laid low by blandly vicious corporate suits with dollar signs in
their eyes.
Something of all this duly got into
Complicity
, a novel I wrote a year or two later;
Cameron Colley, the journalist who's the central character, works on a story about this
and is personally and professionally affronted that his tipple of choice isn't as hairy-ches-
ted as he'd always assumed it was.
So what does chill filtering do? It takes out of the whisky certain oils that would oth-
erwise make the stuff go cloudy when it's chilled. The story I heard was that this was the
fault of the American market; most people in the States take their whisky with ice, and -
because the whisky has been watered down to get it to a consistent strength - this makes
the resulting mix look cloudy, like there's something wrong with it, when the oils come
out of solution. The remedy is to chill the stuff before it's bottled and run it through a
fine filter (at one time the filter was made of asbestos, which wasn't something the in-
dustry used to publicise heavily; there's no evidence that anybody ever came to any harm
through drinking asbestos-filtered whisky, it's more guilt by association, though you do
have to wonder if anybody ever contracted asbestosis from handling the filters them-
selves). The whisky will now remain clear when ice is added, but the oils that have been
removed will no longer be there to be tasted, or contribute to the feel in the mouth.
The watering-down bit is just to get the whisky to a standard strength, and means
the manufacturer doesn't have to keep altering the print on the label that tells you how
strong the whisky is. It also makes life easier for the tax people, as they do their calcula-
tions. This is the least problematic alteration, always assuming that the water that's added
is stuff you'd want to drink neat in the first place. Most Scottish water is quite soft and
drinkable straight from the tap; if you wanted to be really purist about it you might want
to specify that the water added to your whisky should come from the same source as the
water that went to make the whisky - via the mash tun, etc. - in the first place, however
even the most nit-picking taster is usually happy with water that simply and neutrally di-
lutes without adding any taste of its own.
Adding caramel is done to make whisky darker. Some whiskies are just supposed to
be dark, according to the public's perception and the manufacturer's promotional efforts.
If the whisky isn't dark enough, some distillers will add caramel. It's done in relatively
tiny amounts, and caramel itself is a pretty innocuous material - just heated sugar, basic-
ally - so if it imparts any taste whatsoever it's surely completely swamped by the flavours
left over from the barrel's earlier bourbon, sherry or whisky fills.
