The Balvenie Tradition

This Wednesday in Woodbridge, we're welcoming the Balvenie Roadshow for a Scotch Tasting and Seminar. (Details can be found at jcanals.com - click here!)

The Balvenie is unlike all other single malt Scotch whiskies, thanks to a unique combination of human craft and natural alchemy. Balvenie is unique: Nowhere else will you find a distillery that still grows its own barley, still malts in its own traditional floor maltings and still employs a team of coopers to tend all the casks and a coppersmith to maintain the stills.

Balvenie is the only single malt Scotch whisky distillery that still grows and malts its own barley. Each year they sow barley on their 1,000 acre farm Balvenie Mains just as they always have. These days they don’t collect and sheathe by hand: they use a combine harvester. Apart from that, it’s pretty much exactly as it was in the beginning.

Balvenie has the only traditional working floor maltings in the Scottish Highlands. After steeping in local spring water, they spread the grains across the malting floor. The barley warms up as it starts to germinate and needs to do so evenly. Four malt men turn it up to four times a day until it’s ready for the kiln. Here it is dried using anthracite and a carefully judged amount of peat, which adds further complexity to our whisky.

THE BALVENIE keeps a coppersmith on site to keep their stills just so. Of all the things that affect the taste of The Balvenie, the shape and size of the stills are two of the most important. No-one has pot stills exactly like theirs, with the ‘Balvenie Ball’ to concentrate and sweeten the flavors. Employing their own coppersmith means that these crucial (and rather large) craftsman’s tools are kept in peak condition.

If maintaining a still is an undertaking, it’s nothing to introducing a new one. Thanks to our coppersmith they don’t do it all that often. Each time they do, he cuts an armful of juniper branches and makes sure they’re the first thing boiled inside, in a process known as ‘sweetening the still’.How much juniper, and for how long? A good handful, and a good long while. As the coppersmith says, “there’s nae science to it” - but he’s convinced that if one day (heaven forbid) someone should forget, twelve or more years later a different spirit would emerge from the cask.

The Balvenie Malt Master is the longest-serving in the industry. His unmatched expertise ensures that each expression in their range makes the absolute best of the complex alchemy of spirit, wood and time. For all the skill required to ensure consistency in The Balvenie, the Malt Master looks forward to the future as much as to tradition: it’s he who pioneers new ways of bringing out the mysteries that hide within each cherished drop. Understanding the traditions of his craft like few others, he retains a passion for experimentation, using different cask types and ages of spirit to add new expressions to The Balvenie range.

We hope you can join us this Wednesday as we explore the Balvenie tradition and taste the fruits of their labor!