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If you want to get David Thomson, co-founder of Annandale Distillery, started, just tell him, “You don’t make peated whisky in the south of Scotland.”
“Yes, we do!” he’ll thunder.
Then expect a wee history lesson.
“If you go to Barnard’s book, The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom,” he’ll tell you, referring to Alfred Barnard’s definitive whisky guide published in 1887, “you find that all four of the distilleries that were in the south of Scotland did make peated whisky.”
“I mean,” David says of Annandale, “we live in a bog frankly, so why wouldn’t we make peated whisky? But you know that gets me to one of my sort of pet things, which is I really don’t like the kind of Lowland moniker that we get labelled with, because I don’t think it’s got very positive connotations. So I always think of ourselves as south of Scotland whisky."
In 2007, David and his wife Teresa Church took over the derelict remains of Annandale Distillery, in Dumfries and Galloway in south west Scotland.
Started in 1836 by an ex-excise officer, Annandale was taken over by Johnnie Walker in 1893, precisely because it made peated spirit.
“The peated spirit they were getting previously,” David speculates, “was coming from Islay. So into a ship of some sort, onto the Clyde coast and then presumably by train to Kilmarnock. Whereas with Annan, they could simply take it to the train station and whip it up to Kilmarnock.”
In about 1919, David continues, Johnnie Walker experienced “liquidity problems” and sold Annandale to a local farming family, the Robertsons, who made Provost Porridge Oats, and it ceased to be a distillery.
Until 2007, when David and Teresa decided they’d buy and restore the derelict distillery.
They didn’t have a background in whisky, but David was a specialist in food chemistry. And more importantly he's an expert in sensory psychology and sensory evaluation. In 1989 David and Teresa had started MMR Research Worldwide, a market research company for the food industry.
With MMR behind them, they decided to identify a whisky profile that would set Annandale apart.
"If you ask people what sort of whisky they like, you're gonna get 101 different answers. Different people like different things even within the same quite tight product category," David explains. "But although you take 300 people, there's not 300 points of view. There's probably five or six points of view. And being able to identify these is quite important."
"We were able to take expert tasters of any type of food, and we could look at the relationship between the sensory characteristics of the products and what people liked. So if you think of these different kind of liking segments, you can build a separate mathematical model for each liking segment, and then you can tell you clients how they should change the sensory characteristics of their product to make it liked more."
David and MMR applied the "algorithm", as David calls it, to whisky. And they identified a flavour profile for peated and unpeated whisky which no-one else was doing. David gave the two profiles to his long-time friend Dr Jim Swan, the so-called "Einstein of Whisky", and asked him to design two whiskies that matched the profiles.
After several iterations, Jim did just that. And in 2014 Annandale Distillery was back in production, producing its first new spirit in nearly 100 years.
Join John as he chats to David about the rebirth of Annandale Distillery, guided by sensory science and data modelling. And discover how Scottish actor James Cosmo became the inspiration and face of Annandale's Storyman blended Scotch Whisky.
Slàinte!
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Socials: @C2GWhisky | @JohnRossBeattie
Creator & producer: David Holmes
Art work & design: Jess Robertson
Music: Water of Life (Never Going Home)
Vocals: Andrea Cunningham
Guitars: John Beattie
Bass: Alasdair Vann
Drums: Alan Hamilton
Bagpipes: Calum McColl
Accordion: Gary Innes
Music & Lyrics: Andrea Cunningham & John Beattie
Recorded & mixed by Murray Collier at La Chunky Studios, Glasgow, Scotland
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