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Region: Speyside (Speysdie-Glenlivet)
Owner: Inverhouse Distillers (Thai Beverages Plc)
Founded: 1897
Right, hands up who has heard of Speyburn? I’m guessing the show of hands isn’t exactly huge. Speyburn, for all its sales success, mainly in the USA it is still relatively unknown on this side of the pond. One could argue that it gets quietly goes about its business without any fuss or fanfare. It does have a ‘fan club’ of sorts called the Speyburn Clan, but you get the impression that these members are less obsessive and more genteel than Ardbeggians, for example and less likely to crash the distillery website in their mad rush to get hold of the latest Clan only bottling! I also get the feeling that members of the Clan rather enjoy the fact that its club is probably a bit more exclusive and not as popular as some others.
Anyway, the distillery was one of Charles Doig’s creations and sports his trademark pagoda roof. It was also the first distillery in Scotland to build a dark grains plant, which turns waste grain into animal feed and the first distillery to install a drum malting on site, which was in use up until 1968, but after that it appears to have sort of shrunk back into the shadows.
Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with quietly getting on with producing a lovely spirit and Speyburn definitely does that. The process begins with a relatively short 48 hour wort fermentation, although that was lengthened to 72 hours in 2015 after the distillery went through a £4 million expansion. Prior to the expansion the distillery sported one pair of stills, which were both connected to wormtubs. Just like at its sister distillery Knockdhu I believe the distil slowly in order to maximise reflux and they run cold water through the wormtubs to ensure that the tubs give the spirit a bit more weight but not too much sulphur, so the spirit doesn’t take as long as Dalwhinnie for example to shed that sulphurous character.
Having tasted their no age statement, entry level bottling the Bradan Orach, which I would guess contains spirit that is a lot younger than 10 year’s of age, I can attest to the fact that it is far from a sulphur ruined mess and therefore backs up my assumption. Certainly, by the time the spirit has reached 10 years of age that weighty sulphur has metamorphosed into a lovely, honeyed richness. The spirit unsurprisingly matures rather well too. The 25 year old, which was released in 2012, but currently unavailable is absolutely gorgeous. Just like at Knocdhu Stuart Harvey is very judicious in his use of ex-Sherry casks and although the spirit can certainly cope with sherry, this balanced usage means that the sherry never overwhelms the spirit.
It occasionally appears in the independent bottling companies lists and so far, I have not had any issues with them. The Speyburn spirit appears to be pretty consistent and although one or two bottlings may have been a little on the simple side, you definitely can’t argue about the quality of the juice!
After the 2015 expansion, the distillery converted the wash still into a second spirit still and replaced the wash still with a much larger one that is connected to a shell and tube condenser. How much impact that will have on the character of the spirit is unknown and it’ll obviously be a few more years yet until we find out for definite. It’s possible that a longer fermentation may well result in a more estery character in the finished spirit, but either way I can’t see these changes having a detrimental effect.
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