The art of blending

During my first trip to Scotland back in 2019, I really wanted to bring a piece of the country back with me to Ukraine as a wee gift for my parents. The obvious choice was whisky. Back then, I thought I’d have to spend hundreds of pounds in a specialized shop to get myself a bottle until I stumbled across a whisky aisle in Tesco.

To my surprise, and to my wallet’s relief, I faced a pretty decent choice of whiskies for a reasonable price. That evening, a bottle of The Famous Grouse was carefully packed away in my suitcase. Little did I know that it was the number 1-selling whisky in Scotland, and number 6 blended whisky worldwide.

At that time, I had no clue what blends or single malts were. Now, with a little bit of knowledge under my belt and one attempt at creating my own whisky blend, I can say with certainty that it’s hard work.

Nowadays, blends seem to have a bad rap amongst the whisky connoisseurs. However, the lighter and sweeter character made this particular type favorable amongst the wider audience, who might find single malts “too strong” on the palate.

The rise

With the invention of the Coffey Still back in 1831, the continuous process of distillation allowed the production of grain whiskies that became an integral part of the blends. In the early 60s, a son of a spirit dealer, Andrew Usher, perfected the making of blends, earning himself the name of the first whisky blender.

By taming often raw and fiery malts, Usher created gentler and lighter whiskies that quickly became popular all over the world, particularly in the US. Blended Scotch became the drink of choice of many Hollywood A-listers throughout the years, featuring in movies like Scarface, Moonstruck and Goodfellas.

The blending process

Blending whisky is like combining a number of instruments to create a complex, elaborate symphony. It sounds fairly easy – just take a few bottles and blend them together. Let me tell you, it does not work! Each whisky has its own character that may not be “compatible” with some others.

Blended Scotch is a combination of grain and malt whiskies. In a blend, which can consist of as little as 4 and as many as 50 different whiskies, it’s crucial to make sure every component works in harmony and brings out the best of each other.

But how do you know which whiskies to use? How to marry the flavours? How do you create a balanced and well-rounded dram? How do you maintain the consistency of the final product?

To learn more about the art of blending, I set down with a whisky maker and co-founder of Woven, my dear friend, Pete Allison.

The interview

How did you end up in the world of whisky?

When I first left school, I got a job in a cocktail bar on George Street. It was about 2004 and at that time, it was all about the bottle and the marketing that big vodka brands were doing. Everybody in Scotland was drinking vodka or a little bit of gin, but not really whisky. So whisky companies started to invest time in educating bartenders.

We received quite a lot of attention from whisky brands and they brought distillers and blenders. People like Dave Broom, he’s a great whisky writer, came and spoke back then.

I feel very fortunate that I came into bartending then because I went: “Oh, whisky’s really good and that’s something aspirational, and I’m Scottish, I should really like it.” I didn’t like it, by the way, I thought it was horrible, I preferred vodka and rum. I thought whisky was great because it was Scottish, but I didn’t like the whisky, it took me a long time to enjoy it.

Anyway, I went down to University in London and then got a job back up here, in Scotland, with the beer company Innis & Gun, who aged their beer in whisky casks. That then led me in a strange direction into sherry. I worked for a wine company making sherries and focusing a lot on the casks and that led me into a lot of conversations with whisky producers. After I left Gonzalez Byass, the sherry producer, I work for Edrington and The Macallan, who worked a lot with sherry. So yeah, I got into it that way.

Why whisky blending?

I’ve always loved blends. When I was a bartender, myself, Duncan and Nick (the 3 of us, who started Woven), we were bartending at the same time, and at the end of every shift (this was when I started to enjoy whisky), we would buy a dram and discuss it.

Dave Broom did a really cool thing, he lined up all the single malts from Diageo - they were incredible, good spread, and he had something in a brown paper bag at the end and he wasn’t gonna show us and that was his special dram, just for us.

And he took us through, we had Clynelish, we had Caol Ila, we had Glenkinchie probably, and then this special one in the end..and we tasted it and we all got: “ Wow”. It must be a Port Ellen or something because it was closed and it was something special. And we were nosing it and going: “No, it’s a distiller’s addition, this must be a single cask”! Anyway, he took it out and it was Johnnie Walker Black Label.

To me, it was this moment: “Blended whisky is actually really good.” Blended whiskies are good if you take away the negative connotations around them coming from the price in comparison to single malts, but also what we’d call the market positioning, which is when you’d go to a supermarket and you’d see 5 blended whiskies so it becomes a common denominator. You’d get blinded by so much blended whisky that in your mind it goes from being something special to being not special, and it goes to being bad because you’ve got the rarity, scarcity and price of single malt whiskies.

But I thought blended whiskies were cool and started being really interested in them and collecting old blends from the 60-70s when single malts didn’t exist. They are kind of uncatchable by single malt standards, that’s beautiful whiskies, objectively. I don’t care what people say about, you know, every flavour is subjective..yeah, but try a beautiful blend from the 60s or 70s and that’s, objectively, yummy.

So yeah, I started working in the whisky industry, in the sales and marketing, not a blender, and I would try and hang out as much as possible in the blending labs to learn, to listen, to understand what they are doing and then the opportunity to start Woven came and we decided it was a good idea.

It’s interesting how back in the 70s, blended whisky was the drink, and single malts were considered “too challenging” on the palate, and now everything has changed. Maybe after 30-40 years, we’re going to come to a place where blended whisky would be the top dog again.

Yeah, I’d like that. I think blends are coming back, I think there needs to be more people to say that blending is good and that there are really beautiful blends in the world.

How did you start blending?

I’ve been blending little bits for family and friends forever just as gifts, no money.

What was the first whisky that you really liked?

Caol Ila 12-year-old on a boat. I was sailing on the west coast of Scotland, somebody brought out whisky and I went: “Oh no, I’ve got to pretend I like this!” But I think it was a sense of occasion (in Woven we call all our whiskies experiences) and I really think that the experience of having a whisky can be very different from one situation to the next. I actually really love that.

What I do for a living is sitting here with samples and nosing them and having to write down tasting notes is a very different experience to sitting inside of a boat when it’s been cold and raining all day and you’re tired and wet but with friends. We had flickering oil burning lamps and jazz was on the radio and we tried this whisky and it turned from being something strong, hot, smoky and unappealing to being the most intoxicating thing I’ve ever had.

Have you tasted it after that experience and did it feel the same?

Oh yeah, that’s a go-to whisky. If you said to me: “I’ll get the next round, what whisky do you want?” and I can’t see the bar, I’ll ask for that.

What was the first blend that you created and what was the meaning behind it?

Ah, talking of Caol Ila, it’s got it in it. It’s called Number 1 Levels. It was myself and Duncan, we had decided to do Woven, and we had put off our money into buying some casks. We wanted the first whisky that we put together to be representative of some notes we really loved and it was kind of a riff on Johnnie Walker Black Label. We wanted smoke, but not too much, we wanted sweetness but not claggy, we wanted it to be perfectly balanced, but you can add water to it and it develops. We wanted to be able to sip on it and have those levels of complexity that come through.

Do you have any funny stories connected to whisky?

Number 3 was quite funny. We blended a beautiful whisky: Benrinnes, Campbeltown, Girvan – really fruity, almost like tropical fruit, yummy. We put it in a cask because all of our whiskies have to be married so they go back into a cask as a blend and hang out in a cask. In that time, the flavours of whiskies come together, mellow out and become one.

How do you know when it’s ready?

By tasting it regularly. So I don’t taste it for like a month and then keep it going. Actually, only after this Number 3 story, we’ve been doing that because we decided that it was so good that we didn’t want the cask to impart any flavour, so we didn’t put it into a sherry cask or a new cask. We put it into a very old cask of commerce, which is what they call them. We just wanted the flavours to come together.

Anyway, the cask wasn’t inactive and so it gave a lot of wood, almost like a very oaked chardonnay. So you have this fruit and then quite harsh green wood flavour coming through, and it jarred quite a lot so we had to fix it after marrying by blending back through some initial components to bring it back, but, yeah, it was an interesting moment.

So how would you fix a blend?

You can do it in a number of different ways. First of all, you panic, a lot. You breathe very heavily in and out. And then, once you calmed down, it depends on what you’ve got. You can’t fix something by reversing time, you have to add stuff. So you’re adding some of the components that you blended with already that’s in it to, essentially, dilute some of the bad flavours or to try and fix them. So in that story, it was a very harsh wood and lead flavour that came through from the cask and so we added some more older grain, and I think that brought it down and chilled it out.

What was the hardest blend to create?

Number 8. We knew we had to make something that is smoke-led and that was difficult because I’m not a big smoky whisky guy so it was really hard to make it. Like I said, I’m not a blender, and I didn’t know how to blend around smoke. Starting with this peated whisky was really difficult because everything just tasted like peated whisky and something that doesn’t really work with it.

It was like having a piece of liquorice, really really strong flavour, and trying to make a dish around liquorice – very hard. But what I found out after a long time is that you build a whisky with a robust character and then you add into it, and that’s how I’ve done it. I think we did about almost 200 iterations of trying to make a whisky that didn’t taste very nice and then I did it this other way and it came really quite naturally after that.

What helps you in the blending process?

I’m one of those people who get distracted very easily, so I really have to turn off my phone, turn off everything, and then I follow a pattern, a rhythm to blending that I’m quite used to now: to blend, then dilute, then to wait, then to nose, then to wait and then come back to it. Then, if it’s good, re-blend it at a higher ABV - you nose it, you leave it, you come back to it, you nose it and you taste it - it’s just a process.

What comes first, the idea or the product?

That’s a really good question because it’s kind of both. We have a spreadsheet that has a lot of ideas, like themes and names that we think would be a good idea for a whisky, and when I’m blending, I’m going through it and think “that sort of fits that, this fits that, nothing will fit that”. But we also have ones that we really want to be this (certain) word.

So we have some that theme or the concept or the experience comes first, and we have others where whisky comes first and then it’s paired with an existing theme or name.

How do you choose whiskies for your blends?

We receive lists of casks from brokers, distilleries, and large groups. We have to make a decision on what we buy without tasting anything. A cask of whisky can be a lot of money, and without tasting it, you don’t know what yo're going to get, do you?

How do you make that choice then?

I know there’s an answer I should give, which is you know what they taste like because you’ve tasted them before or you know what the distillery characteristics are like or you know what the cask is like and you know how old it is.

Can you get samples to try?

No. You can get them but that slows down the process so the sellers prefer you to buy before you try, generally. But remember that whisky is a commodity so you can sell it if you need to. We’ve made a decision quite early on that we won’t going to be a cask trading business, there have been occasions where we’ve gone: “Damn, this whisky does not work for us.” So we sold it back to the original supplier at the price that we bought it for. So they are getting an older whisky back, which is more valuable than when they sold it, and we’re able to build that relationship with them.

But generally, we’re trying to look for interesting casks that are undervalued. Ones that, perhaps, are a part of a large parcel, so they might have released 1000 casks and we’d buy a couple. That 1000 casks parcel is a lot of money but a couple of casks from them isn’t so much. But yeah, it’s tough trying to figure out how to buy which whiskies. Loads of spreadsheets.

How do you come up with names?

Duncan McRae, my business partner. He does the marketing.

What is the meaning behind the name Woven?

Weaving is the process of putting fabrics together. So you have threads and when you weave them together you get a fabric and that fabric is strong, but the threads themselves are weak. And the idea is that you are combining things together to make them greater than some of their parts and that’s what blending is for us, that’s weaving, and that’s Woven.

We also love the word because it’s a warm word. We have quite a cold esthetic. We’re relatively minimal, we have a pharmaceutical bottle. We have frosted amber glass, you’re not able to see the color of the whisky – cold, cold, cold, but the word “woven” is warm and it brings people in.

It’s also a blend in itself, isn’t it? A warm word and a cold esthetic.

Yes, exactly.

Blending whisky is considered to be an art, how long one should work on it to get good at it?

I don’t know. I need a lot of practice. I don’t think anybody’s good. Nobody’s innately good at blending. Each one of our whiskies is a hundred attempts and hundreds of hours - they are good. You can take a beautiful picture by taking a thousand pictures. But I don’t think I’m good, I’m putting in a hard effort. I think we release good products, I think we release really great blended whiskies, but I think it comes down to persistence over talent.

I find shortcuts now. Whiskies quite often have like a gap in them so they taste really beautiful in the beginning and really nice and long at the end but they have a flat middle bit. How do you bridge that gap? I’m now finding ways to be like: “Oh, if I did a little bit of that, like I did with that last one, would that be good?” So you stick a sticker on that in your head and you go: “That’s a trick.” You get tricks, you don’t get good.

I would love to speak to Richard Paterson, who’s a very famous whisky blender and he makes Whyte & Mackay whiskies and The Dalmore, he’s like the closest you have to a rock star. He’s done it for 50 years, a lot longer than I’ve been alive, he’s been blending whisky every day. I’m sure that he doesn’t need to do anything that I’d have to do, so I think you need to ask him that question, how long did it take him to get like that. I’m on the first rung of the ladder.

How many whiskies do you usually add to your blends?

Blended whiskies, The Famous Grouse, Johnnie Walker – big names, they would have anything up to 70 whiskies in them and a malt content of about 30%-40%, the rest being grain whiskies aged between 3-4 years, predominantly, and then they add caramel colouring, and they chill-filer it. We don’t do any extra processes and what I want to do is to make minimalist blends. That’s my vibe.

What I’d love to do, is to take 1 whisky and fix it with another one. That’s my dream – where I’ll be able to take whisky that’s really good and then add something else and go: “That’s unreal!” That would be the best minimalist blend, where you’d be able to taste the two parts together and say: “That’s that and that’s that, but together they are stunning.” I’ve not been able to do that yet. But, I think, that we generally use between 4 and 10 whiskies, which is pretty good, pretty low.

I always think about it as you know a computer screen has got these pixels, and if you’ve got 70 pixels in 1 sm and a red pixel was out, this is the same blending at a big scale. So if you are a blender with 70 whiskies, but you don’t have a Lagavulin or whatever distillery, then you can replace it with something quite similar so you can replace the red pixel with a dark orange pixel and we, looking at the screen, won’t be able to see the difference.

Whereas, what we do, we are almost like old-school computer games that had 8 pixels, so if you take 1 pixel and replace it with something else, you’ve got a different image altogether.

So the base of each blend is a grain whisky?

No, the base of each blend is a grain and a malt whisky together.

Is it just in general or just for your blends?

Just for us. We start off by combining grain whiskies and malt whiskies together and finding the combination that we like. Then, we refine it with other malts and grains, like adding salt and pepper.

If you are able to get a whisky that’s got your nice base, got your nice middle, but missing a couple of pieces, you’re able to add some whiskies just to give it a bit of an edge, like a bit of sherry, smoke, fruitiness, creaminess – whatever you think it needs.

What happens after you choose the whiskies? How do you blend?

We work with a production partner that does our large-scale blending on our behalf. I send them a recipe, I call it a composition. So they have all of our casks in big warehouses and they have to find these casks, take them all down, put 300 liters of this, 100 liters of that, 6 liters of the next thing and so on into a big tank. They then give it a stir and then it goes into marrying casks for the final part of its journey.

Maybe some additional flavours, we're using a lot of quarter-casks that had sherry or white port in them. I’m trying to source a few. Can somebody find me, please, Scottish virgin oak casks? I’d love one.

After marrying, if it’s just 1 cask – easy, it goes pretty much into a bottle. If it’s multiple casks, then it goes back into a tank, mixed up again before bottling.

How long does it take for you to create a blend you’re happy with?

Quite a long time. I tried to work it out, it was about 100-200 hours per whisky. It’s blending, tasting, going: “It’s rubbish,” and then coming back after 2 weeks and going: “Oh, it’s actually quite nice.”

For how long do you leave your whiskies to marry?

Between 30 and 120 days.

Do you put the age of the whiskies on your bottles?

No, we don’t put any ages on our products. If you look at our branding and our bottling, we are all about taking away the information. We don’t want to give the consumer two paragraphs of text about what they are going to taste. We don’t want them to be like: “Oh, this is a 20-year-old whisky so that’s gonna be good but this one that has 3 on it, it’s gonna be bad because it’s got young whiskies in it.”

We actually tend to use a broad spread of whiskies from young to old. In fact, some of the very premium whiskies that we’ve done, about £200 a bottle, have some young whiskies in them. If you are buying an older whisky, you’re buying the flavour of the cask, you’re not buying the flavour of the spirit, or, I suppose, you can argue that you are buying the flavour that the cask gives you the older it gets.

If you want a more spirit-led flavour, and by spirit-led I mean the actual liquid that comes out of a still, then you need a younger whisky, and that’s good. Be under no illusions that it’s a bad thing. The spirit that comes out of a still can be stunning and interesting, and complex. It doesn’t always have to be a hot fire-water, it can be really charming.

As a blender, to ignore that, it means that you are turning off a whole spectrum of colour you can work with. Peated Bunnahabhain, Staoisha it’s called, at 4 years old, is one of the most beautiful whiskies for a single malt that you can get.

We want the Woven consumer to experience whisky without necessarily worrying about age. However, if you go onto our website, you’d be able to see the age and the distillery. So you’re able to go through it if you want.

But that’s what blended whisky is - you don’t need to have an age statement, you don’t need to name the distilleries, which I love. I think it’s very freeing. I don’t want people to buy a bottle of Woven because it uses a distillery or an age or something, we want people to drink it because it’s Woven, if that makes sense.

What do you think is the biggest difference between a single malt and a blended whisky?

If you asked about a generic blended whisky, I think generic can be quite one-dimensional in character, a little insipid on the palate. With single malts, we’ve got quite the inverse of that, they are able to go deep on that. Whereas, blended whisky is designed for a broader audience. So it’s got a slightly more acceptable flavour. Single malts generally have a bit more depth and a bit more complexity.

With Woven though, I think we are able to outstrip that complexity and create what single malts can’t do and that’s balance. We are able to take that complexity from single malts and balance them against something else equally as complex and rich and temper it with grain, and that’s what we do.

If someone wanted to try a blended whisky for the first time, which one would you recommend trying?

I’d go for Johnnie Walker Black Label - it’s great, totally consistent, beautifully made, legendary for a reason.

Is there any whisky you want to add to your collection?

No, I don’t think so. I don’t collect whiskies, I think I’ve got a little bit of most stuff in Scotland. There are some world whiskies I like. Yeah, maybe some world whiskies! There are some cool distilleries cropping up in places like Taiwan (Kavalan is really beautiful), Paul John in India, Three Ships down in South Africa. If I’m adding something to my collection then I’m definitely looking outside of Scotland. Not that I don’t love Scotland, I love it, and there are some new distilleries that I don’t have. So some new distilleries, the stuff that’s coming in now I really like. But there’s no unicorn that I’m going: “Oh, I wish I had that.”

What do you drink at home?

Tea, wine, and smoothies (because I’m surrounded by whisky all the time). No, wait, Woven, I have a lot of it.

What’s your wife’s favorite blend?

I made one for her. I made “Joy in Nature” Number 5. We live in East Lothian, next to the beach and we have a forest outside. We went for walks during lockdown and the whisky was made about that experience. I don’t know if that’s her favourite, by the way, but that’s what I made for her.

That’s so romantic! What was her reaction?

I actually forgot to tell her it was launching so it came out and she was like: “You never told me this is coming out today! Why did you not tell me?” And I was like: “I just did.” Her reaction was “excited” but maybe could have been more harnessed because I forgot to tell her.

What does she like to drink?

We both like wine, we are trying to get into them. We want to go to France this year, if possible. Young family though… don’t know if 6-month-old can take the trip.

You have two very young children, how do you balance your career and personal life?

I don’t think I do it very well, haha. I try to, I do as much as I can. I do the mornings for Poppy, the eldest, to get her to school, and then I come back for her bedtime. At the weekends, I try to give as much time to my family as possible, but there are some evenings when I have to work late.

I think having your own business, it’s very challenging. You have to do a lot more. What’s interesting is that, it’s a cliché but it’s true, if you stop working, the business stops. It kinda sucks. But the ultimate goal is that I won’t have to do it forever. I love Woven, I love doing what I’m doing, but it’s a choice at the sacrifice of some family time.

If you’re in middle management at Diageo with a company car, 6 months of paternity leave full-pay, if you decide to take a couple of days off during a week because you’re sick – the whole business goes on, nothing changes. But I really believe, and Joy supports me on this, you have to take some risks in life or else you’re going to be stagnant.

Would you like your kids to get involved in the business when they grow up?

I know lots of family businesses where the kids have to be involved, because, you know, they’re cheaper, haha. I don’t want that, I would love my kids to get involved because they had a passion for it and we had a business that could sustain them comfortably.

I think it’s one of the reasons why we are doing it. There are 5 of us: Alistair and Ed from a banking background, and Nick, Duncan and myself – we’ve all got kids. We all want Woven to be around when they’ve grown up and it’ll be wonderful if some of them or all of them wanted to be a part of it at a business level but I would never put any pressure on them.

What’s the ultimate goal for Woven?

I think the ultimate goal for Woven is to change the perception about blended whisky from a negative to a positive and to grow to the size where that can happen.

What is someone getting into whisky blending need to know? What would be your advice?

Do it. Get whiskies from a supermarket, see what’s on your shelf, put it together, make some shit whiskies, make some yummy whiskies. Come to your friends, let them try and see what they think, take feedback.

Go into it thinking whisky doesn’t need to be a pure single malt. Single malts are boring. You’ve got one colour, maybe it’s the most beautiful color in the world, but if you’ve got an entire palette to play with, you can make a lovely picture.

Get blending, everybody should do it. Blend everything as well, blend tea. Tea is great, blend it. Wine – lovely, blend it. Get some paint, blend it. Everybody should be blending, this is a revolution.

My conclusion

In 2022, my parents finally cracked open that bottle of The Famous Grouse. Not big whisky drinkers, they were charmed by the pleasant sweetness and warming qualities of the spirit.

Perhaps, blends can be a good introductory experience. It’s like meeting your partner’s family for the first time - you’ve got to ease up and practice with friends first, before meeting the parents. But there’s no denying that there are some extraordinary blended whiskies that deserve to be known, tasted and talked about.

On my journey, I embrace the world of whisky with an open mind. I’m witnessing how it involves and grows, still honoring the past, but looking directly into the future; and I’m excited and grateful to be a part of it.