I'm Bruce Fummey. If you want to know the history of Scotch Whisky, but you're too busy getting your
next dram to read a big book, then let me distil it for you. Like many things Scottish, we think that
distillation of wine came from Ireland with missionary monks, but the exchequer roll of James the Fourth
in 1494, is the first time that we have a record of the distillation of beer made from malted barley,
and it was here at Lindores Abbey in Fife. Over time this aqua vitae, the Latin for water life,
would become the Gaelic Uisge Beatha, the shortened form of Uisge, was first written in 1736 by
a Red Coat army Captain, Edward Burke, to give us the English word whisky.
tell me in the comments what's your favourite whisky, or even just the last one that you drank.
If you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history, then click the
subscribe button at the bottom right hand side of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
In a time when there was good seasons and bad seasons, surplus and shortage, whisky was a way
for farmers to turn their excess barley crop into real liquid cash, that wouldn't rot, but the story
of whisky is one of proscription, promotion and perfection. The 1609 statutes of Iona were James
the Sixth' attempt to control the Gaeltacht, and one of the things that James did, was to restrict
the sale of whisky from the mainland to anyone in the islands, other than Barons or wealthy gentlemen. Grrr
Now right down to the modern day, governments tend to control whisky, but they tend to do it with
taxation rather than outright bans, but the first time that that happened was during the English
Civil War. The English Civil war started because Charles the First wanted to tax the English
Parliament, so that they could fight rebellious Scots, but the Parliament said 'no' and so he needed
to tax Scotch so that he could fight rebellious Parliamentarians. It was a temporary tax in 1644.
Not quite as temporary as you might think eh, but taxes have guided the route of the whisky road
ever since. The first commercial distillery was Ferintosh on the Black Isle. Now during the
first Jacobite uprising in 1689, Jacobites burned down the distillery that was owned by Duncan
Forbes of Culloden. With compensation of 54,000 pounds due, the Scottish Government said 'I tell you what,
why don't we waive the taxes on a whisky made from grain on your land instead?'
So Forbes bought up huge swathes of land, built distilleries and villages for workers to tend
them, d'oh! Then the Scotch Whisky Trade expanded because of an increase in taxes.
you see not long after Scotland had been subsumed into England, London, being heavily
in debt, decided to extend the English Malt Tax to Scotland. Now this caused rioting in the streets,
incidentally, I'll leave a link to my video about the 'Malt Tax Riots' at the end,
but the tax on malt made beer more expensive in the Lowlands, and so people turned to untaxed
whisky, smuggled from the Highlands and the water of life flowed from north to south.
This created problems for authorities. It wasn't just the loss of tax revenue, but control of grain
supplies, and in the post-Culloden world, control of everything Highland, but pretty much every farm
was distilling whisky. As they did here outside Crieff at the oldest distillery
still active. Whether you're American, Canadian, Australian or Kiwi, the water from Loch Turret
has been used to make whisky here, since before your nation state existed, or was even conceived.
They were distilling here in 1784 when the Wash Act banned private stills, and split the country;
cheaper licenses for smaller stills in the Highlands, and higher fees for bigger stills
in the Lowlands. Now if you're thinking, that won't lead to an epidemic of smuggling,
Lowland stills having to run faster and at a lower quality to compete, accepting all sorts
of crap, thereby reducing demand, creating even more smuggling and illicit stills,
then you've probably been drinking too much of that dodgy Lowland whisky you're so fond of.
The Government said, right, a tenner (£10 note), every license is a tenner. We'll reduce the duty per gallon and we'll
say no more about it, and by the way, landlords, if we get so much as a sniff of vanilla, blackcurrant,
Christmas cake or floral notes on your land, we'll come down on you like a ton of bricks.
Actually by that time, Isaac Newton had worked out that a ton of bricks comes down
exactly the same rate as a kilo. The point is, that the reduced license cost created a boom
time for whisky production, and a year later we got the Glenlivet, now the oldest licensed distillery.
The Edinburgh agent for Glenlivet was a guy called Andrew Usher,
and he started mixing some of their malts together to make what he called 'Old Vatted Glenlivet, OVG,
and in 1860 the Spirits Act allowed people to mix malts from different distilleries
and other people started to get in on the game. A grocer called John Walker and Sons in Kilmarnock,
and the Chivas brothers in Aberdeen. Welcome to the still house. I'll leave you here, thank you very much. Thank you.
Meanwhile, ingenious Lowland distillers had been finding solutions to the Highland competition
by selling cheap to the English market, and more importantly,
developing continuous process distillation. Instead of doing the distillation in batches, refilling
pot stills like these each time, what they did was to use new cylindrical tower stills
in one continuous industrial flow. They could make grain whisky faster, smoother,
lighter and then mix in richer flavoured malts to make blended whisky later. Whisky was just
about ready for popular acceptance down south. All it needed now was an aphid infestation!
In 1863 an aphid called phylloxera started munching its way through European vineyards.
In fact, it's only because some vines had been taken to the Americas to plant vineyards there,
that there's a wine industry in Europe at all. If I remember my wine tasting lesson
in France, they had to scrap everything and re-import original vines from America.
In the meantime, seeing as there's no wine and brandy, have you tried a wee tipple of this?
A French aphid made the whisky industry, that and a London borough council.
As whisky became more popular, there were all sorts of Del boys down the London
market selling hooky, knocked off imitations and Islington Council decided to clamp down on it.
There were several prosecutions, questions in the House and before long, a Royal Commission, to decide
what was, and what wasn't, whisky. Long story short, to qualify Scotch whisky, it has to be brewed, and
distilled in Scotland and matured in Scotland for no less than three years, in oak casks.
You can use water, yeast and malted barley, maybe whole grains of other cereals, and a
push, a little bit of caramel for colouring, but not flavouring. Are you mental? You can make up any
old marketing pish you want, so long as you don't change the raw materials. That is Scotch whisky.
So that is the potted history of whisky, but there's three quick yet important points
to finish: one, American prohibition led to all sorts of grog being sold as whisky, from moonshine
hooch, to embalming fluid, and all that enhanced the prestige and popularity of proper Scotch
whisky. Some of today's distinguished brands went back to their smuggling roots. This time with more
murderous gangsters, two, when post-war Germany benefited from the Marshall Plan, Britain had to
repay its debts to the US. Needing every bit of foreign exchange money, Winston Churchill wrote,
'On no account reduce the barley for whisky. This takes years to mature, and is an invaluable export
and dollar producer.' Whiskey continues to generate foreign exchange in tax revenue to this day,
and lastly, varying taxation and the time for maturation creates challenges in projecting
future sales volumes. Over the years combine that with incautious entrepreneurs and oversupply
and there have been bankruptcies, corporate amalgamations, distilleries closing, reopening
smelling of mothballs and a Scotch whisky industry, largely owned by foreign companies.
At least we can always have a dram and forget about it. Now there's a link to my video on
the Malt Tax Riots here. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.