Talking Rebirth and Barley with Bruichladdich’s Frazer Matthews

Bruichladdich is arguably the poster child for the renaissance in Islay single malt over the last two decades. It caught the whisky world’s attention in 2001 after a group of investors led by Mark Reynier resurrected the mothballed distillery and gave an eager Jim McEwan in the prime of his career free rein to push the boundaries of Islay single malt.

The distillery retained many traditional production methods with the aid of Victorian-era machinery, but at the same time it was one of the most cutting-edge, exploring variations in peat levels and introducing unique cask maturation among many other innovations. They even simultaneously started one of my personal favorite gin brands, The Botanist. Under the ownership of Remy Cointreau since 2012, Bruichladdich continues to embrace Mark and Jim’s founding ethos: to promote and support Islay agriculture and the island community while making world-class whisky.

Earlier this summer, I had the chance to visit the distillery and see in person how Bruichladdich has evolved from shuttered to upstart and now an Islay standard bearer. With the help of Frazer Matthews, Bruichladdich’s Global Brand Ambassador and an Islay native himself, I was able to get up close and personal with a few of the distillery’s 100,000 casks and learn more about what makes this single malt so unique.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for readability. 

Drinkhacker: Congratulations on filling your 100,000th cask. It’s a big milestone, especially for a distillery that almost disappeared completely. How was Bruichladdich able to find its footing?

Frazer: The distillery was originally founded in 1881, but it went through a lot of hardship over the years. We closed in 1984 as a result of the whisky loch (term for the excess of whisky inventory). We were taken over in 2001 by an independent group who didn’t have a huge amount of whisky industry experience and wanted to do things in a completely different way, but they supplemented that with people like Jim McEwan who knew the industry really well. They wanted to focus on barley and provenance of ingredients on the quality of the final product. They brought in all sorts of different casks that had never been used before for Scotch whisky. It was a new mindset that I think in hindsight the industry needed. It had become quite stale.

Drinkhacker: A lot of Islay distilleries age their whisky on the mainland. Where are your 100,000 casks sleeping?

Frazer: One of the big things for us is making sure that every whisky we have is matured its full life on Islay. So, there’s 100,000 casks within 2 miles of the distillery. Only us and Kilchoman mature entirely on the island. It’s good because it means we can keep a better eye on things as they progress. The team we have here is constantly checking on things. It means Adam Hannett, our head distiller, is only a five-minute drive away from any cask.

Ultimately, it means jobs and career opportunities for people on the island. That was another thing when we reopened the distillery was not to repeat the sins of the past when distilleries were just satellites worked by a skeleton crew. We wanted to incorporate Islay – the community, the people, the land – into what we were doing. I’ve benefitted from it as much as anyone. We’ve given people like myself the opportunity to stay on the island when we leave school.

Drinkhacker: What types of casks are you using to age your single malt?

Frazer: We want to have as wide a range of things as we can in the warehouse. We’ve got over 300 different types of casks, which is quite something. For our head distiller, it makes things challenging, but it means his opportunities to experiment are almost endless.

We source the best casks that we can. I think the best example of that is the sherry casks that we bring in. We have an exclusive agreement with only one sherry producer in Jerez, Fernando de Castilla. They’re quite like us, similar to us in size and they’re quite experimental. They want to make the best sherry that they can. There’s a lot of sherry seasoned casks being used today. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we want to be using casks that have been used for actual quality sherry production. It means we get top quality casks, but it also means the supply isn’t guaranteed. We’re dependent on what they can give us.

Drinkhacker: Let’s talk about what’s inside those casks. Bruichladdich makes three distinct styles of single malt based on peating level. What’s the proportion of each in the overall production?

Frazer: As a distillery, we’re an anomaly on Islay for a lot of reasons. One of the big differentiators, is that we’re an unpeated distillery with about 60% of our production being the unpeated Bruichladdich. Then heavily peated Port Charlotte is roughly 30% of production, with a final 10% the super heavily peated Octomore.

Drinkhacker: The distillery is well-known for experimenting with peating levels, but what about the grain itself?

Frazer: Around half of the distillery’s production is now made up of barley grown here on the island. For us, that was a way to reconnect Islay the place with the whiskies that are produced here. We got in touch with one local farmer in 2004 and asked him to grow barley for us. He actually told us no, because at that point there hadn’t been any barley grown on Islay since before World War II. For generations it hadn’t been done, and the risk to the farmer was too high. He eventually agreed, and we’ve gone from one farm in 2004 to now 20 that grow for us, which we’re really proud of.

We’ve also distilled unique barley varietals. Bere barley is one of the many examples we have here of innovating and trying new things. We put a lot of emphasis on the origin of the barley, how it’s been grown, where it’s been grown, the variety. Most people don’t know that there are varieties of barley. It’s not quite like grapes in wine, but there are differences between barley varieties that give their own unique characteristics to our spirit. Bere is the oldest domestic cereal known to man. It can be traced back to Viking times. It was probably used for the very first distilled spirits.

Drinkhacker: Why don’t we see more distilleries producing spirit with Bere?

Frazer: It fell away as a variety because of low yield. We yield about 20% less spirit when we distill Bere compared to conventional barley. But we don’t make whisky because it’s efficient. You don’t pick up your glass and say that smells really efficient, do you? We emphasize flavor over yield.

Our Bere is grown for us on Orkney at the Agronomy Institute of the Highlands and the Islands. They know barley better than anyone on the planet. At one point, we were the market for half of the Bere they were growing. We’ve invested heavily into preserving what is historically a massively important cereal and one that could have easily fallen off the face of the earth. And it tastes delicious, too.

Drinkhacker: Is it difficult to distill compared to conventional varieties?

Frazer: Yes. The Bere actually broke our mash tun a few years ago. It has a very fine grain of flour, so when it mixed with the water and we left it for a bit too long, it set like concrete. Our rake and plow snapped. That was back in 2014. We were out of production for a while waiting for the repair. It’s also difficult to grow. Conventional barley grows on a two-row head, but Bere grows on a six-row head, so the grains are smaller. It’s also very top heavy but grows on a long straw, so it can fall over easily and snap. So, it really doesn’t make sense for farmers, and it really doesn’t make sense for distillers either. But we don’t really care because it tastes good.

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