Anthony Gladman

What does fermenting for 120 hours or more do for your dram? Anthony Gladman finds out

As signs of the year’s turning go, it’s hard to beat a good conker. The first glimpse of that
deep burnished brown flesh gleaming up from the grass or pavement never fails to draw out a childhood thrill. They fall from the trees over three or four weeks then they’re
gone again. We see the signs too on our plates and in our glasses. As September ends, Oktoberfest swings around with its Festbiers. And after that, for some drinkers at least, thoughts begin to return to pints of cask ale in a cosy pub.

As drinkers question the impact of their favourite tipple, Anthony Gladman looks at the
innovative ways some distilleries are cleaning up their act.

Imagine finding out the scraps you’d been feeding to the pigs for years were actually full of fifty quid notes. Bucketful after bucketful of perfectly good money turned into
bacon and shit.

The whisky industry produces 2.6 billion litres of waste water per year in Scotland alone, plus about 530,000 tonnes of spent grain, which distillers call draff. Much of this ends up as animal feed, or is simply discarded. Isn’t that a waste of… well, waste?

Whisky legend the late Dr Jim Swan once described organic barley as an expensive waste of time. That was almost a decade ago and he was talking mainly about distillery economics. But did he have a point?
We know organic farming increases biodiversity and improves soil health. ‘If you’ve ever visited an organic farm and a non-organic farm, you can see the difference in those fields,’ says Liam Hirt, co-founder of the Circumstance Distillery in Bristol. ‘One is very much more alive.’

There’s a pecking order among barrels. Mizunara casks sit at the top, unassailable on their lofty peak. After those come the pipes and puncheons that once held fortified wines: Pineau, Port and Pedro Ximenéz. Then there are the massed ranks of lowly ex-Bourbon casks, a staple of the barrel-ageing starter pack.
I rank them like this based on their rarity and the effects they can have on the spirits they contain. A barrel’s former contents can give a spirit a boost. So too can the type of wood ...

It is June 2024. Six months ago we thought we’d lost the Burton Unions for ever. But now, in the Peak District, six silent and silky streams of yeast foam pour from gleaming swan neck pipes into a trough of krausen. A Union set is fermenting again.

Meet the distillers putting a gallic spin on gin

Whisky and other spirits aged in mizunara casks command high prices and are adored by collectors. But what exactly is mizunara oak and is it worth paying more? Anthony Gladman finds out.

Picture Sandy Hyslop, a jovial chap in comfortable middle age, bent over to thrust his nose into an empty wooden cask. He has travelled 32km just t...

The distinctive flavours of Japanese gin are driving its popularity around the world. Anthony Gladman heads to Kyoto to hear more about the botanicals that give the country's premium gins a sense of place and selects five of the best gins to try
11 April 2024
Uji, a city to the south of Kyoto, is the birthplace of Japan’s tea culture. At its height, during the Ashikaga shogunate, it had seven tea plantations. Of these, only the Okunoyama plantation remains. Growers have cultivated tea here fo...

How distillers can make a smaller carbon footprint by working with alternative raw materials.

I want you to picture a drinker. We’ll call her Georgie. She’s in her early 20s and has clubbed together with her friends to buy a bottle of spirits to share at their ‘pres’ in the evening.

She’s only vaguely familiar with the bottles on the shelf in front of her. How can you make sure yours is the one that makes it into her hand?

“A lot of my favourite beers have massive contradictions when you start trying to describe them,” says Michael Wiper, co-founder and managing director of Bristol’s Wiper and True. “I feel the same about this beer.”

Technically speaking, Orchard Ale is a graf: a beer-cider hybrid that sees both wort and apple juice blended and fermented together. (The name ‘graf’ actually comes from a fictional beverage invented by author Stephen King in The Dark Tower series of novels.) Wild yeasts do their work with as little intervention as possible from the brewers.

If you’ve any tartan in your wardrobe, now’s the time to dig it out and fire up that cèilidh playlist. The 25th of January has rolled round once again and it’s time for Burns Night, the annual celebration of the poet Robert Burns.
This usually involves a Burns Supper of haggis, neeps and tatties, accompanied by poetry addressing said ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race’ and a recital of the Selkirk Grace. If you’re enjoying the traditional meal, you may also want a dram or two of whisky to a...

Richard Lock, who runs Retribution Distillery in Somerset makes three times as much whisky as he does rum. It costs him more to lay down a cask of rum than one of whisky, but it sells for less. “I guess that’s what you get for using raw material from the other side of the world,” he says. “The numbers don’t stack up.”

Gin has enjoyed its boom time for a good few years now. For almost as long distillers have wondered how long it would last. Rum has been touted before as gin’s heir apparent. So far, so thwarted. Could it be gearing up for another go?

Calvados is one of the ‘big three’ French brandies along with Cognac and Armagnac. Like its southern cousins, it matures in oak barrels and comes out bearing VS, VSOP and XO labels at two, four and six years, respectively. But where Cognac and Armagnac are based on grapes, Calvados begins life in the orchards of Normandy as apples and pears.
Its 300 producers make about 6 million bottles each year, half of which head overseas. Given this, it might seem odd that the UK doesn’t see more of it. ...