Talisker

Region: Highlands (Skye)

Owner: Diageo

Founded: 1830

Talisker is one of those wonderfully quirky Scottish distilleries. On Skye they tend to do things a bit differently, in fact, you could argue that they do things backward around these parts, bear with me and I’ll elaborate!

The process stats quite ordinarily with moderately peated barley (18-20 PPM) which is milled and fermented for minimum of 65 hours and leaves a clear wort, however, after that, things get rather interesting. For most distilleries the first distillation, in the wash still, is essentially a simple process of taking the wort and increasing the alcoholic content to around 45% abv. Of course, some flavour development takes place during this first distillation, but it is in the second distillation, in the usually smaller spirit stills where the flavour refinement takes place. That is not to say that the spirit stills don’t refine the Talisker spirit but here most of the hard work is done by the wash stills.

The two wash still are very tall and feature boil balls, however it is the unusual kinky lyne arm that catches the eye here. The lyne arm features an exaggerated U-shaped bend with a purfier pipe at its lowest point which refluxes the heavier spirit back into the still, leaving the lighter vapours to rise up the other side of the U bend, through the wall to end in a cold worm tub which is situated outside of the building. The collected low wines are distilled for a second time in the smaller spirit stills which although plain they too feature external worm tubs.

The end result of this is a lovely spirit which mixes fruit, smoke, honey and a dollop of sulphur in the new make. Those worm tubs are responsible for the oily/ honeyed weight of the spirit and that sulphur note after maturation is, allegedly what gives Talisker its distinctive pepper note. As the distillery has a tendency to use a fair amount of both first and refill ex-Sherry casks in all of their release the only way to taste the spirit ‘unfettered’ is to get hold of an independent bottling. Thankfully there are a number on the market, but this leads me to the first issue I have with Talisker, or to be more precise with the independents that bottle it. For the life of me I can’t understand why they and to be more precise Douglas and Hunter Laing have a fetish for bottling American oak aged Talisker at a young age (i.e under 10 years of age).