- 13 minutes ago
Man of Many shares a glass of Glenmorangie Harrison Ford Limited Edition with Dr. Bill Lumsden, Head of Distilling & Whisky Creation at Glenmorangie.
Decades of historical legacy culminate in this unique release, created in direct collaboration with Hollywood legend Harrison Ford. This no-age-statement single malt breaks traditional market positioning by utilising heavily toasted European oak and ex-Portuguese wine casks to deliver a structured, complex flavour profile with a distinct bite. It
Decades of historical legacy culminate in this unique release, created in direct collaboration with Hollywood legend Harrison Ford. This no-age-statement single malt breaks traditional market positioning by utilising heavily toasted European oak and ex-Portuguese wine casks to deliver a structured, complex flavour profile with a distinct bite. It
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Glenmorangie's Harrison Ford Single Malt Scotch Whiskey.
00:11Nice. Glenmorangie's Harrison Ford Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. It's very nice.
00:21Well good day. I'm Dr. Bill Lumsden. I'm the master distiller for Glenmorangie and Artvake
00:28and it's my pleasure to be back here in the Australian market first time for a few years.
00:34Right so that was certainly quite it's quite a challenging project to work on when you're
00:41trying to second guess someone else's taste of whiskey but I the very first time I met him in
00:47Scotland I took him through a tasting of a range of single cask samples of Glenmorangie I'd drawn on
00:55and just got a feel for it and I said okay Harrison so you like this and you prefer it
01:01to this tell me
01:02what's going on and it turns out that he knew the Glenmorangie brand he was a drinker of Single
01:09Malt Scotch Whiskey anyway but while he appreciates the smoothness of our original he likes something
01:17with a bit more structure and a bit more bite to it so that immediately took me on a particular
01:23direction and thinking of different cask types and while he was there the week in Scotland filming
01:30I had my entire team up at the distillery with me and we had hundreds of samples of whiskey and
01:37I put
01:38together three or four prototype recipes and presented it to Harrison towards the end of the week
01:44but I knew which one I was going to choose just from that first meeting I mean there was no
01:50disagreements at all and no he wanted to be working with us we wanted him to work with us and
01:58there was
01:58a huge degree of mutual respect but you know like myself he's actually quite a relaxed person and very
02:06easy to talk to and was perfectly happy to talk to me about anything like any of the films he'd
02:13done
02:13yeah he'd even told me how much he got paid for some of his very early films so it was
02:18the whole
02:19experience was really fun and relaxed so that that would that was the big challenge was to try and
02:26incorporate elements that existing Glenmorangie lovers would recognize in it but give something that
02:33would satisfy what Harrison was looking for and after he left Scotland for the filming of the first series of
02:42films I kept in touch with him I mean one day the CEO said to me oh Bill you're probably
02:49going to get
02:49a phone call from the states this afternoon and I said yeah really fine and I said who he said
02:56Harrison
02:56that's not quite so I sure enough Harrison phoned me and just asked how I was getting on and I
03:05said look
03:05I'm working on this prototype whiskey and I'm going to send you some samples out so I sent samples out
03:11he gave me some feedback and I tweaked the recipe based on that and then eventually said look Bill
03:17I really like it I'm happy let's go so so when when he talked about liking a bit of structure
03:24a bit of
03:25backbone and a bit of bite in there I thought right that's probably going to take me down a path
03:31of using
03:32European oak rather than American oak because American oak has much less tannin and it's softer
03:39and creamier which is kind of one of the hallmarks of Glenmorangie so that that was the kind of
03:45dichotomy there the challenge if you like and so I sat I knew I had quite a lot of stock
03:51of the kind of
03:52age range I was looking at was which was basically between 12 and 18 years old in different types of
03:59wine barrels and I had one parcel in particular that always made me think of really sort of bitter
04:06Seville orange and this is these ex-Portuguese wine casts that had been re-toasted
04:13and I'd done a I used them in a different form previously and I thought I think this is going
04:20to
04:20give me what I'm looking for here and on their own they were far too intense so I blended it
04:27together
04:27with more classic Glenmorangie and an almost 50-50 ratio and just took it from there
04:32right I think that the reason we decided to do that was that we wanted this to stand apart from
04:40the rest of
04:41the range and the rest of the range so we've got a 12 year old we've got a 14 year
04:46old in the Portcast
04:47we've got a 15 year old in the Sherrycast 18 year old and the new 25 year old which has
04:52just been released in
04:53Australia right now so I think we felt that if we put an age statement on it it might detract
05:00away
05:00from the fact that this was specifically developed in conjunction with Harrison Ford so you know
05:05there is no age statement in the whisky but what I can certainly reveal is that the two whiskies
05:12front of me the Harrison Ford one has older whiskies in it okay so so I'm a highly trained scientist
05:20and
05:20a PhD biochemist I've got other degrees after that I've done all sorts of studies and the science
05:28unquestionably helps you understand the process but for me personally I would say it's 80 art or craft 20
05:38percent science if if you're going to be empirical about it and you know if you want to make something
05:44but that's good and has your own personality in there but you have to be passionate about it so I
05:51would say that the art and the craft thing is much more important than the science and I still study
05:57the science I do all sorts of measurements on the whisky but I'm really doing that just to make sure
06:02nothing's gone
06:04awry in the process I this is going to sound strange Ben but um sometimes when I'm working
06:11in things that I'm not even thinking about it it's more that I feel it I try to train someone
06:16else up in
06:17my team into that way of thinking is not always easy and I think it just comes with fears of
06:23experience
06:23it doesn't happen every day I knew my success rate my strike rate is very high and again you know
06:33I've
06:33been in the industry for 40 years so I kind of know what I'm doing um I've tried one or
06:38two things which I
06:40felt would not deliver anything I wanted to bottle but I just tried it anyway and you know the prime
06:48example of that is I had some barrels made out of brazilian cherry wood and I knew I couldn't bottle
06:55this as a Glenmorangie because it contravenes the scotch whisky regulations it has to be oak
07:02I just wanted to see what would happen and the taste profile was terrible as I knew it probably would
07:08be but as I say I it was a very small scale thing and I had no intention of ever
07:13bottling it there so um
07:15basically what happened was that the conditions of microgravity altered the rate of extraction of
07:25flavor from the wood and it gave a different taste profile there and you know I'd really love to
07:31repeat that experiment by sending a full-size panel up into space but there are challenges with that
07:39basically the way it worked Ben was that um NanoRacks who are the company that carry out contract
07:46research on behalf of NASA up in the International Space Station they were all fans of Ardbeg and they
07:53just phoned the company up out of the blue one day and got put through to me and they said
08:00Dr Bill we've
08:01read a lot about you we like your work and they said would you like to send something up into
08:06space
08:07and I said yeah I'd quite like to send our CEO up into space on a one-way ticket but
08:12then I resisted
08:13I was joking and they said look we've got they explained the experimental platform they had and
08:21they said we're up against a time-wise bill and any experiment that you think you might want to do
08:28we
08:28need to have the materials with us in Houston within three to four days I thought right it doesn't give
08:35me
08:35much time to plan so I actually had a set of barrels which had come in from the United States
08:42classic ex-bourbon barrels at a Speyside Cooperage and they were about to be shipped out to Ardbeg
08:50distillery so I got in my car drove to the Cooperage and got the guys to scrape the wood out
08:57inside of
08:58one of the barrels it locked the heads out and I had a big bag of oak shavings basically and
09:05I sent
09:05that along with one and a half litres of Ardbeg new spirit out to Houston and they packaged that up
09:15into their little vials which they call mix sticks on one half of the mix stick it had the wood
09:22and then the
09:23other half it had the spirit and at a pre-arranged time after it was packaged up set to Kazakhstan
09:29to
09:30go up with the Brewster rocket when it got to the International Space Station at a pre-arranged time
09:35the scientists on the station snapped all the mix sticks to mix the two sides together and I did the
09:42same on earth that Ardbeg distillery so that's how it worked unbelievable because you know a full
09:49barrel of whiskey is bulky and heavy and not easy to send up so um in terms of the future
09:58of the industry
09:59uh we we are quite excited by some of the new markets that are opening up and I'm for particularly
10:07for single malt scotch and I'm talking about markets like Latin America so Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
10:15Colombia in particular and some of the markets in sub-Saharan Africa are starting to open up like
10:25Kenya and Nigeria and places like that and you know it's well documented that Generation Z
10:35maybe have a wider range of interests and aren't necessarily always drinking alcohol or trying
10:44other things and so I I'm positive about that since I joined the industry which was in 1986
10:53in these days single malt scotch accounted for I think it was either six or seven percent of global
11:02consumption of scotch whiskey the rest being blended scotch single malt has grown and grown and grown
11:08and grown since then it's now I think around about 20 to 22 percent I think that trend will continue
11:13um one of the other things that has excited me is that um single malt scotch is no longer viewed
11:22as an
11:22old man's drink now old men like myself still drink and enjoy it but I'm seeing a lot of younger
11:30people
11:30and particularly a lot of females enjoying it and I know it's it's interesting to me but in a lot
11:36of
11:36the Asian countries like Japan Taiwan China it's almost 50 50 at these whiskey fairs these things like
11:43that I think we'll also continue to see a little bit of innovation but we're almost going full circle
11:50back to doing things in a very bold-fashioned very traditional way
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