At its core, whiskey is distilled beer. Whiskey is spirit made by distilling an alcohol, called wash, that is itself made from grains — beer.
And yet, other than selecting grains and their proportions — barley, corn and wheat are the most common — few distilleries think of themselves as brewers or approach washmaking in the same way brewers think about beermaking.
Holyrood Distillery is changing that.
Holyrood is the first new whiskey distillery in Edinburgh in over 100 years. Located in the literal capital of Scotland and the figurative heartland of malt whiskey, Holyrood is honoring the long history of the national drink while taking an innovative approach to whiskeymaking.
“Test, learn, improve, repeat.” said Calum Rae, distillery manager, in a video interview.
What that means is experimenting with beermaking techniques in making wash, including using heritage barley varieties and specialty malts, and using different yeast strains. These are that things that brewers use to make beer styles, from amber lager to saison, different from each other and Holyrood is unique in seeking to understand how this will translate into aged whiskey.
“Holyrood is the home a fresh, creative approach to Scotch,” says Rae. And the distillery is uniquely situated for this.
While Scotland is famous for making whiskey prized round the world, Edinburgh has a rich brewing history due to underground wells supplying water perfect for beer making. Holyrood is located within Edinburgh’s “Charmed Circle” which was once home to over forty breweries. So, Holyrood is perfectly placed to marry the beermaking and the whiskeymaking arts. Rae himself has a background in brewing and works with a team of distillers many of whom were trained at the nearby famed Heriot-Watt University.
At craft breweries, a spirit of experimentation is welcomed and Rae has brought that ethos to Holyrood. “We just have a bigger feedback loop,” says Rae, talking about how the results of experiments in distilling take years to materialize, rather than the weeks it takes to see the outcome of new beer recipes.
By regulation, distilled spirit must be aged a minimum of three years before it can be called “Scotch.” To date, Holyrood has only released two expressions — Arrival and Embra — so consumers have only been teased with the fruits of Holyrood’s vast database of flavor experiments. “We are only on the very, very baby steps of the journey,” says Rae.
But eventually, Holyrood’s tasting room will also take a page from the craft beer world. Similar to brewery tasting rooms, Rae envisions a tasting room with 20 or so limited-release drams so that people can taste the cornucopia of flavors they have created. And once the whiskey is gone, it gets replaced with another flavor offering.
Rae insists that, like other whiskey distilleries, Holyrood will have a house character running through all of their drams. “We just have a lot more colors to paint with,” he says of their ability to blend from the seemingly limitless supply of spirits made from different beer recipes, fermented by different yeast strains and aged in different casks. Says Rae, “There’s room for both new and old in the world of whiskey. That’s what’s exciting.”