Distillery Info
It is true to say that no day is quite the same at The Balvenie, but the story of some particular days can be more memorable than others. One such day, in the long wet summer of 1992, a very special batch of barley was bought in, and mixed with our traditional malted home barley, ready for our signature Balvenie mash. Turning a deep, dark burnt black-brown, this unusual one-off batch of barley was part of an experiment undertaken at The Balvenie at a time of significant change.
As long-time Maltman Robbie Gormley says, the experiment came about after ‘listening to the folk, people coming up from other distilleries, thinking “maybe I can change something?” Whisky’s longest-serving Malt Master, and The Balvenie’s own, David C Stewart, agrees:
"We did the roasted malt trials to see if we could change something at the point of distillation rather than in the cask. These things do take time – you need patience."
The malt arrived at the distillery quite suddenly one day, catching the team off guard. “Panic stations at The Balvenie! We weren’t ready for it yet, so finding a place to store it was tricky, in the end, the only place was the barley loft, which caused quite a commotion when it came time to carry every single sack back down again,” chuckles Brian Webster, Mashman at The Balvenie.
Robbie remembers handling the over-roasted barley. “You know where barley’s at by feeling it in your hand, in your fingers – you can normally crush the seed in your fingers, split it with your nails. The roasted malted barley was hard – brittle. When our barley’s in the kiln, it’s hard, but it’s nae brittle. And this was hard hard. You could smell it had been roasted. You could smell the dryness.”
Brian vividly remembers the mash process: “When we started to mash it in, all went well… It was used like any other malt, transferred from the maltings into our malt bins, ground through the mill, mashed in, then pumped to the wash back. It was here that you could see the difference – it was black as tar, or treacle! As one of the other guys said ‘just as well there was only one batch of this stuff.”
This unique whisky was originally released in 2006, as The Balvenie Roasted Malt Aged 14 Years. It was the first single malt Scotch whisky to be made using a batch of dark roasted malted barley, more commonly used in the production of stout. Brian explains:
“After 14 years of maturation it had developed a characteristically well-matured Balvenie flavour profile, with honey and oak notes, and an accompanying toastiness and hint of roasted malt.”
"We always keep some back – we didn’t know then how long we’d keep it back for."
“After we released it first in 2006, the question became – how would the whisky mature? What would it become? The oldest Scotch whisky made using over-roasted barley, the end result is for devotees and new Balvenie fans alike. David continues: “It still has that honey, vanilla, citrus flavour from the first fill Bourbon casks – but you’re also getting something a little bit different, too. There’s a smokiness and an oakiness. It’s a heavier note, with more wood influence. Extra depth.” Distillery Notes
