ADVENTURES IN FLAVOUR
Tea or coffee with your whisky?
As members of The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, we’re all driven by a passion for flavour. But having an open mind, a refined palate and a scrupulous nose means we’re curious about sensory experiences beyond our whisky glass. Richard Goslan met some Society members who have taken their love of whisky and expertise in flavour in different directions, with coffee matured in whisky casks and the perfect pairing of single cask whisky and loose leaf tea
COFFEE CASKS
So what do you do when your passion for flavour encompasses the worlds of both whisky and coffee? In the case of husband-and-wife team and Society members Grant and Georgia Fraser, you find a way to combine them in one product.
The whisky side comes from Grant, who grew up in Kinross-shire and whose grandparents were Speyside farmers whose barley provided malt for the local distilleries. Georgia is from London and has an Italian mother who imparted a passion for excellent coffee.
“When we met I told Georgia she had to try whisky, but she was already a convert,” says Grant. “I didn’t like the taste of coffee though, probably because I grew up with my mum drinking instant with milk. Then Georgia introduced me to good coffee, and I thought: this is brilliant!”
When they were both living and working in the coffee (and whiskey) hotspot of Seattle, that shared passion led the couple to create an American malt whiskey infused with Colombian coffee. It was a hit, but when they relocated to Edinburgh, the whisky and coffee combination took a different turn.
“It didn’t feel right, to mess with good Scotch whisky,” says Grant. “And under regulations here if we added anything to Scotch we’d need to call it a liqueur and not whisky, which we didn’t want to do.”
Georgia remembered drinking a bourbon-rested coffee in Seattle and that sparked the idea of creating a range of coffees with beans that had matured in Scotch whisky casks.
PICTURED: Georgia Fraser filling gren coffee beans into an ex-bourbon cask
She did a course in roasting and collaborated with Santu in Edinburgh, which imports its beans directly from farms in Espirito Santo in Brazil, to source the coffee. They also got hold of a variety of casks and have been experimenting both with different forms of maturation as well as resting times.
“We measure the moisture of the green coffee beans before filling the cask,” says Georgia. “Then we rest them and the beans start to absorb flavours from the cask. Once they get to a certain moisture level we make a call on when to roast. That could be anywhere from weeks to months.”
As Grant says, the variables in the process are similar to the world of whisky production and maturation.
“It’s not as easy as setting your timer for three weeks and then saying, let’s roast it,” he says.
ABOVE: Roasting reveals the whisky aromas in the coffee beans
“Like whisky, a lot of this is part science, part art – it comes down to a certain feel and smell.”
The coffee is the only constant, with the couple using different cask types to mature the beans. At the moment that includes an ex-sherry Highland cask, an ex-bourbon Islay and an ex-sherry Speyside, as well as a decaffeinated coffee in an ex-rum Speyside cask.
“We try to have three options available at any one time, but we’d like to have casks from all of the whisky regions,” says Grant. “Within that you might have different cask sizes and variety in terms of what was in them before they were used to mature whisky, whether that’s sherry, bourbon or something else. A bit like whisky, there are enough iterations to keep us going quite happily for the rest of our lives.”
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PICTURED: Adam and Isabelle Rosevear at their tea shop on Clerk Street in Edinburgh
TEA TIME
Adam and Isabelle Rosevear have been fanatical about tea since they met as students in Edinburgh 35 years ago. Now they operate three shops in the city that specialise in leaf teas that they source from around the world.
They are also passionate Society members, who see a crossover in their focus on flavour first – whether it’s in their whisky or their teas.
“That’s really the point of commonality between the SMWS and Rosevear Tea – everything for us is about flavour,” says Adam. “We choose our teas through blind tastings, rather than on reputation or price. It’s all about taste, and we’ve gradually built up our range of about 200 teas.”
Isabelle sees another point of interest in the worlds of Society whisky and loose leaf tea.
“Once you try loose leaf tea there’s no going back – a bit like once you try a Society single cask, cask strength whisky, you can’t believe how incredibly good it is compared to a whisky you’ll be offered anywhere else,” she says. “And once you start to explore loose leaf tea you uncover a whole world of flavours. Chinese tea may be smoother, a bit more honeyed, with less astringency. From Sri Lanka, you have notes that are a little bit more spicy and lemony. From India, you have different notes depending on whether you are in Assam or in Darjeeling.”
Regionality is only one factor that affects flavour, however, as Adam explains.
“Once you have the tea, then it’s a question of what you do with it, whether it becomes black, green, what the Chinese called blue or oolongs – dark teas that are fermented – or white teas and yellow teas. Everything that happens to those leaves has a flavour consequence, so your variety of flavours is just enormous.”
And like the constant variety of single cask bottlings that the Society offers, variety for Adam and Isabelle is key.
“The least interesting tea is also very cheap to produce because it’s grown in the plains of Kenya with enormous fields, able to be harvested by machine every 16 weeks non-stop,” says Adam.
“The machine cuts off a large portion of the plant and doesn’t really care about which are the best leaves. By comparison, I’d say that 99 per cent of our teas are hand harvested.”
Adam and Isabelle have already collaborated with the SMWS on a tea and whisky tasting at The Vaults, conducted by ambassador Olaf Meier, which explored a variety of pairings. Those included the Sweet, Fruity & Mellow flavour profile Cask No. 19.90: Chilled toddy alongside a Wuyi Rock oolong tea noted for its sweet, savoury and earthy notes, as well as the Lightly Peated Cask No. 66.240: Nuts and belts and engine oil with a Lapsang smoked black tea with the scent of a wood-burning fire.
ABOVE: Tea and whisky share the same purpose, according to Adam and Isabelle – to bring people together
Beyond the focus on flavour, for Isabelle the ultimate reward in bringing people together to taste tea is exactly the same as the Society’s founding principle – the joy of sharing the good things in life.
“There’s a sort of jubilation about talking about this thing you can share,” she says. “It brings people together because you have something in common, but beyond that you have the pleasure of knowing you’re honouring them by giving them something good.”