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Spirit of the 60s

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society was born out of a cultural movement that gained momentum in the 1960s, which gave Scotland a new sense of confidence and pride in the country and our produce – including whisky in its purest form. SMWS founder Pip Hills reflects on the ‘risorgimento’ that took place and how the Society emerged from it with a sense of ‘gleeful iconoclasm’

PHOTOS: MIKE WILKINSON

INSET AND ABOVE: Pip Hills, founder of The Scotch Malt Whisky Society

I hear that some distillers are bent on reviving what they believe to be the production values of the 1960s, as a means of conferring some distinction on their product. If this is the case, one hopes that they will be selective about their resurrections. One of the cardinal rules of bodysnatching (an old Edinburgh custom) is that the resurrected should be either very fresh or very ancient. Anything in between was likely to be pretty nasty.

There is a long-established tradition in the Scotch whisky industry of looking back to an imaginary golden age as a means of validating the practices of the present. It occurs roughly once a generation: long enough for there to be few people around who have personal experience of the supposedly idyllic past – and most of those few dependent for their pensions on not interfering in the latest promotional wheeze.

From where I’m standing, 1960s revivalism looks suspiciously like an outbreak of this golden-agery.

I’m old enough to remember the 1960s as a young adult, and I can tell you that they were not one of the nation’s gastronomic high spots. Food in Scotland was dull indeed and beer – all young men then drank beer – was strong, gassy stuff whose carbon dioxide content served mainly to disguise its miserable flavour.

Whisky then was a drink mainly for old men and not something whose flavour was even a matter for consideration. It got you drunk even more quickly than the beer, which was what mattered; if you combined the two, each stimulated the other’s tendency to procure an altered state of consciousness – and, psychotropic drugs being almost unknown, were the only commonly available means of doing so.

Pip at home in 2018

Malt whisky was feedstuff for the blenders, little else. In Scotland, malts were known to few folk outwith the industry: elsewhere only to a handful of cognoscenti. For a balanced and kindly account of Scotch whisky at the time, David Daiches’s Scotch Whisky, its past and present is easily the best. At the time there were few books about whisky and distillery owners and managers were evidently bemused at having a request from a most distinguished scholar, to visit and learn about how the stuff was made and matured. A generation later, David was delighted by what we did at the Society. I remember one evening in the Members’ Room when, over a dram, he described how his research had taken him to an Islay distillery which, out of decency, I won’t identify.

The people at the distillery were most obliging and keen to show him everything to do with the making and maturing of the spirit. At the end of the tour he was taken to the sanctum sanctorum, the Sample Room, where the owner himself (the distillery had for generations been in family ownership) offered him a dram of the finest. To David’s surprise, the dram he was offered was of a well-known blended whisky in whose makeup the malt was prominent.

When David asked if he might try instead a glass of the malt itself, the owner expressed surprise. A glass was produced, a sample poured and a little water added. When David said it was lovely stuff, the owner, astonished, confessed that it had never occurred to him, for mere pleasure, to drink his own whisky as a single, unblended, malt.

Such is the power of belief. Not only were blended whiskies dominant commercially, but they embodied a system of values and beliefs which was so powerful that people close to the stuff could remain in ignorance of their own product.

And this was a microcosm of how people in Scotland saw themselves – as inferior partners in things British and beholden for their self-esteem to a fabric of myths and legends.

But by the 1960s, a change was underway. A reappraisal of what it was to be Scottish was led by cultural historians and folk singers, playwrights and television producers, journalists and poets. The Scotland we have today is the outcome of a risorgimento which got underway in the 1960s. The changes have been so profound that they are unrecognisable to most folk today. When that renaissance met the Britain-wide foodie revolution, it affected even Scotch whisky.

Looking back at the beginning of the Society, it’s not difficult to see us as part of the wider movement. Our confidence and gleeful iconoclasm, our willingness to take on an establishment as huge as the Scotch whisky industry, were made possible by the way things were already moving in wider spheres.

The change in whisky took some time, of course, for nothing to do with whisky ever happens quickly. But the attitudes we find today, attitudes shared by producers as well as consumers, were formed then. Whether it’s altogether a good thing is up for discussion, of course. And, like all revolutions, it’s vulnerable to corruption. Where whisky is concerned, the best defence against that is to maintain our objectivity in appraisal of the spirit – what matters is the flavour, the rest is of little consequence.

The effects of the revolution are obvious in any airport duty-free: glossy packaging proclaims the superior quality of many whiskies. Sometimes it’s true – for the revolution was real and what we and some others did then, had beneficial effects. But sometimes it’s not and we are, if anyone is, entitled to say so.

Looking back at the beginning of the Society, it’s not difficult to see us as part of the wider movement. Our confidence and gleeful iconoclasm, our willingness to take on an establishment as huge as the Scotch whisky industry, were made possible by the way things were already moving in wider spheres.

PIP HILLS