Glenfarclas 12 Year Old

The Glenfarclas operation is large, boasting the biggest stills in Speyside and the biggest mashtun in the industry. Great care has been taken, at the expense of forgoing more cost-effective modern technologies, to ensure that the whisky’s flavour remains consistent over the decades. Their stills are some of the few that are heated in the traditional manner by direct fire (from gas burners) rather than internal electric elements. The distillery experimented with elements the early 80s, but found that this method changed the flavour of the spirit and the experiment was canned, the spirit being sold off to blenders.

Very early on the distillery replaced their wooden mashtuns with steel, and later stainless steel when the steel ones kept rusting through. The move away from the traditional wooden tun came from the need for consistent wash. Wooden mashtuns are favoured by some distilleries because an element of yeast remains in the wood after cleaning and can give the wash interesting flavours, but lacks the consistency of stainless steel, something that Glenfarclas values highly. Nowadays whenever a new system is trialled it’s run alongside the old and is only implemented once an identical result is achieved and current chairman, John Grant, personally oversees all barley and barrel purchasing.

Glenfaraclas has substantial onsite warehousing facilities with 28 traditional dunnage warehouses, some more than 200 years old, holding a massive 52,000 casks, the majority of which are traditional Spanish sherry casks. This is of course because, above all, Glenfarclas whisky is a traditional old style Speyside malt, unpeated and synonymous with sherry casks. In the early days sherry was the cask of choice for all Scotch whisky, but as the demand for whisky matured in these casks outgrew the amount of sherry that the world drinks, the resulting shortage drove the price up. This coincided with the expansion of American whiskey, where a law dating back to 1935 prohibits American distillers from reusing bourbon barrels. Suddenly there were vast amounts of affordable American oak barrels on the market, and with their very attractive vanilla and caramel influences, the Scots snapped them up. Such has been the popularity of the cheaper American oak casks that today around 97% of all Scotch whisky is matured in American oak bourbon casks. Glenfarclas and a handful of distilleries including Glendronach and Macallan resisted this temptation, remaining true to sherry casks despite the fiscal advantages of American oak casks. It is precisely this kind of long-term thinking that has ensured that the Glenfarclas that you taste today is identical to that which you would have tasted fifty years ago.