INDUSTRY INSIDER
Craig Johnstone
From East Lothian to Tasmania and back to Scotland, Craig Johnstone has worked across the whisky industry for the past 20 years. Today he works for Edrington as master blender for The Famous Grouse, a role he came to via a stint as a distillery tour guide, a distillery manager and a few years behind the bar at the Society’s Members’ Room at 28 Queen Street. Mads Schmoll caught up with Craig at the 106 Sample Room to find out more about his whisky journey
“Chris taught me how to think about whisky from a structural perspective, from a leadership perspective and from a values perspective as well.”
Craig Johnstone grew up in East Lothian with a passion for physics and a fear of public speaking. It was his desire to conquer this fear that saw him take on a role as a tour guide at Glenkinchie distillery during the weekends while studying astrophysics at university. Before long, he was firmly entrenched in the whisky world, a place he felt right at home, due in no small part to the people he worked alongside. “Isobel, Andrena and Mary [from Glenkinchie] were vital in showing me that Scotch is a people business,” he says. “Our industry is a people industry. We’re making incredible liquid, but without people to enjoy it, talk about it, share it with, and get excited about it, it’s just chemicals in the glass.”
Craig would eventually start looking at the liquid quality and production side of the industry, a journey sparked by a job working behind the bar at the Society’s Queen Street Members’ Room. “Seeing a couple of hundred bottles of single cask whisky for the first time was maybe a little bit daunting but extremely exciting,” he says, “and I got to see a completely different world, coming from essentially a brand and distillery name-driven marketplace, in to one that was all about flavour and all about single casks.”
LESSONS AT LARK
In 2014 Craig moved to Tasmania and kicked off his production career learning how to make single malt whisky at Lark distillery. “I was handed a paddle, 400 kilos of barley, I was told where the hot water tap was, shown the yeast fridge and then I was asked to essentially put a brew together and come up with a single malt,” he says.
While there, he met Chris Thomson, now head distiller at Lark, who celebrates 16 years at the distillery this year. “Through the eight years I spent down there, my partner in crime, I could almost call him my brother these days, was Chris Thomson,” says Craig. “Chris has been driving the quality and consistency of that business, and he taught me how to think about whisky from a structural perspective, from a leadership perspective and from a values perspective as well.”
Those learnings have shaped much of Craig’s thinking about production, blending and quality today, providing knowledge and solutions for his work with The Famous Grouse. “When I went down to Tasmania we made 100 litres a day three days a week and when I left we were churning out 600,000 or 700,000 litres of spirit a year from three different distilleries,” he says. “So that gives you an idea of the meteoric rise of that brand and industry, and it showed that our philosophies were working.”
BEHIND THE BLEND
When asked about how he became interested in the blending side of the business, Craig goes back to his first time on a Society Tasting Panel as the moment he became intrigued by sensory evaluation. He worked with the Society for six years, taking part in the Tasting Panel as a panellist and later as a chair, an opportunity he calls “one of his proudest achievements”. This was the catalyst for his move into the sensory side of things. “Getting to sit and learn how other people think about whisky was an eye-opener. People like Robin Laing, Charlie MacLean and Elspeth Murray were quite formative in my thinking,” he says. “The Society opened so many doors for me. I saw some quite incredible things, from both sides of the bar!
“I’d spent the distillery time at Glenkinchie learning how to tell stories and market and sell the product, but this was the first time that you actually got to analyse it and start to look for not only the things that were incredibly amazing and fantastic about it but start to see if there was anything wrong with it, start to explore the balance, the complexity, how those whiskies are formed,” he says. “Taking that knowledge and then going to see the distilleries where the product is made; to work out how that particular whisky was put together was hugely influential in my sensory journey.”
Time spent at Bruichladdich as a brand ambassador further reinforced this. “I got to pop in and out of their warehouses and see Jim McEwan and Adam Hannett. They were always offering glasses to you so you could learn what was happening there.”
At Lark distillery, he worked with Chris Thomson to establish a tasting panel. “We moved that business from a single cask business to a single malt business, where we were blending casks together, and watching how the structure changes, trying to shape a house style. Every part of our production process was driven by sensory evaluation. I used the SMWS Tasting Panel structure as the perfect method to start these quality control systems. And the one golden rule we learned during this time: adding whiskies together is always fascinating and often throws up unexpected results.”
THE FAMOUS GROUSE
Today his blending bench is at Edrington’s historic 106 Sample Room in Glasgow, where Craig was appointed master blender for The Famous Grouse in 2022. His focus on quality and consistency continues, right down to each cask that makes up Scotland’s biggest-selling blended whisky, which moves 45 million units a year globally.
When asked to describe a typical week at the 106 Sample Room, Craig says: “In a typical week here, I’ll see three or four batches of The Famous Grouse. These are received here at the Sample Room as single cask samples. Every single one of our casks that go into any blend, including the grain, are nosed for quality before they’re tipped…so that’s about 80,000 samples a year just for The Famous Grouse finest. We evaluate the malt casks for The Famous Grouse here. The grain casks are nosed at their distilleries.”
Much of the day-to-day work is focussed on futureproofing, to ensure that there is enough of the right kind of stock laid down to continue delivering the Famous Grouse finest that customers know and love. “If we don’t have enough stock laid down, what part of the recipe is in jeopardy? And then what do we have in stock that could potentially replace that?” asks Craig. “I would say the most fun part of the week is when you’re looking at those problems to solve.”
There is also a big push ahead on blending sustainably and what that means for the brand. “We see huge potential in what we can do,” he says. “[We are actively] looking at ways of maximising cask usage without changing quality, lowering the carbon footprint of the whiskies that we use in the blend; and making sure that the movements of stock from site to site is as efficient as possible. This means using fewer truck movements to move our whisky around the country.”
“If we don’t have enough stock laid down, what part of the recipe is in jeopardy? And then what do we have in stock that could potentially replace that? I would say the most fun part of the week is when you’re looking at those problems to solve.”
“Every job I’ve had in whisky has involved coming into work and receiving energy from the positivity and vibrancy and excitement of my colleagues”
FULL CIRCLE
In many ways, Craig’s sensory journey has come full circle. “What’s really surprised me is the way that my mind and whisky philosophy has evolved. When I first came in, I was looking at every single cask and I was treating them all like single casks, blending them was a foreign concept, but flavour, structure and complexity was king.
“We still look at our stock as single casks from a quality perspective, but today we think of each single cask as a flavour component as opposed to as a single destination or an origin, actually, that flavour focus is probably more similar to the Society’s philosophy than I first thought.” Also important in his current role? The people – the original reason that inspired Craig to continue working in the industry. “Every job I’ve had in whisky has involved coming into work and receiving energy from the positivity and vibrancy and excitement of my colleagues,” he says. “I’ve never worked for a brand like The Famous Grouse, one where we get so many handwritten letters from our fans. We probably see a couple of them a week. To take the time to reply to the fans of Grouse is extremely satisfying. It’s, I would say, one of the most important parts of the job, even though it’s not necessarily a traditional responsibility of a master blender.”