Whisky People Dr. Bill Lumsden
40 Whisky Magazine | Issue 161TASTING THE SPIRIT
GLENMORANGIE ALLTA (51.2% ABV)
Nose: Crème pâtissière, poached
pear, iced buns, heather honey,
elderflower cordial. Almost straying
into sweet Sémillion territory.
Palate: Creamy. Honeydew melon,
bittersweetness of green apple flesh
and core, orange blossom water,
vanilla. The honey note becomes more
prominent with addition of water.
Finish: Medium length. More crème
pâtissière. Ends on earthiness of
apple skin and core.
Comment: Very delicate considering
the age (<10 Years Old) and ABV.
Nowhere near as sweet on the
palate as the nose suggests. Though
matured differently, worth tasting
alongside Glenmorangie Original.wonderful theory that the distillers
would take ears of raw barley, dip it in
the mash and inoculate it that way. It’s
the most obvious way of them doing it,
because guess what? In the 17th and
18th centuries, there would not have
been the National Collection of Yeast
Cultures in Norwich, which could send
them batches of the yeast!”
Bill believes that local cereal crops
would have been the most likely source
of inoculation yeast and he has a side
project on the go that’s attempting to
prove it, “I can't see any other place
they would get it from. They might have
kept a little stock pot culture growing,
but again I have my doubts about that.”
But what about a distillery’s ambient
microflora, couldn’t distillers have
simply taken the lead from brewers
of lambic beer and left their vats
open to the elements? “Monsters in
the mash, there!” he exclaims. “The
most obvious place for me to find wild
yeast is on the very fields of barley
right next to the distillery, so that's
what we sent down to Lallemand,” Bill
continues. The new strain isolated and
cultured by Lallemand was christened
Saccharomyces diamath, where
‘diamath’ is the Gaelic approximation of
‘God is good’.
“The ancient Egyptians, who are
largely credited with first discovering
alcohol, didn't know what was causingit. And so they thought, 'God is good,'”
adds Bill.
To my surprise, despite the change
of yeast, he notes that Allta is not that
far away from the usual Glenmorangie
profile. Indeed, he took pains to
keep as much of the process through
mashing and distillation the same, in
order to highlight only yeast-derived
differences. It was for this reason that
Bill eschewed the 60:40 split of first fill
and second fill Bourbon barrels that he
usually uses for Glenmorangie Original,
instead only utilising refill barrels to
mature the Allta spirit. “Otherwise I
would just have lost that little nuance
of difference,” he says. What’s more,
according to Bill, there’s more unusual
whisky from Glenmorangie on horizon.
“We've got some other pretty funky
stuff up our sleeve, and I'm choosing
my adjective very specifically. Allta was
wild. The next one is funky.”
But what does he make of calls
for the industry to shift away from
high-yield distiller’s yeast in favour
of less efficient, but arguably more
characterful, strains? Bill is not
convinced this would have a meaningful
impact in the long run. “As someone
who has experimented with various
varieties of yeast and strains of yeasts- not just saccharomyces – at the end
of the day, getting good fermentative
performance to give you enough to
actually distil is not easy, depending
on what organism you're using,”
Bill explains. “You can buy a dozen
different strains of saccharomyces from
Lallemand, but, after 10 or 12 years
of maturation, how much of it are you
actually going to find in there?”
Nevertheless, the release of Allta was
clearly a milestone for Bill; one that was
made all the more meaningful off the
back of the recent industry chatter on
the subject of innovation. “You know
the James Bond film Thunderball? And
the wonderful theme tune sung by Tom
Jones? There's a line in that and it says,
‘He acts, while other men just talk.’
That's what I like to think we do. We act
while others just mouth off about it.”
This page, left
to right:
The launch event for
Allta; the Allta pack.036-040-BillLumsden-WM161.indd 40 26/06/2019 12:37