Walker has over 50 years experience in whisky making, but says he is having more fun than ever at The GlenAllachie. — Photos: Glenallachie/AsiaEuro Malaysia
It is not every day you get to meet a legend in the whisky world, and so when I was given the opportunity to interview Billy Walker, the master distiller of The GlenAllachie, there was no way I was going to say no.
Walker not only has over 50 years of experience in the Scotch industry, he was also responsible for some truly memorable creations over the years in some iconic distilleries, including The Glendronach, BenRiach, and of course, The GlenAllachie.
Walker was recently in Kuala Lumpur for the 25th anniversary celebrations of AsiaEuro Malaysia, the local distributors of GlenAllachie. During an exclusive interview at Gordon Ramsay Bar And Grill in Sunway Resort, Petaling Jaya, he talked about the defining moments of his career and his plans for GlenAllachie.
Originally a chemist by profession, Walker’s whisky journey began in 1972 in Scotland at a company called Hiram Walker & Sons, where he was involved in almost all aspects of whisky production. After following that with stints at Inver House and Burn Stewart Distillers, he formed The BenRiach Distillery Company in 2004 with two other business partners, and purchased three Scotch whisky distilleries: BenRiach, GlenDronach and Glenglassaugh.
Walker was recently in town for the 25th anniversary of AsiaEuro Malaysia.
For Walker, who turns 80 this year, the first really defining moment of his career was when he got the opportunity to buy BenRiach.
“It was a game-changing moment for us because it allowed us to take ownership of it and have the freedom to start engineering the kind of structure and flavour profile we wanted,” he said.
Subsequently, his work on GlenDronach was what really sealed his legendary status in the industry, as he helped take a distillery that had been closed, to the producers of one of the world’s most famous sherried-style whiskies.
“In many ways, GlenDronach was an amazing purchase, because it was a sleeping superstar that had never really been allowed to showcase its real potential and personality,” he said.
“We had the freedom to create the kind of personality that we wanted to create from GlenDronach. That was quite a big challenge, because it had been closed for a period of about six years, so there was actually an inventory management challenge there.
“Our objective with Glendronach was to recover the personality it had under a previous owner, which was quite a richly sherried style of single malt. And I believe over the period we had it, we did a really pretty amazing job there.”
In 2016, he and his partners decided to sell the company to global consortium Brown-Forman, despite his personal feelings that there was still some unfinished business yet to be done.
“I felt that, particularly with Glenglassaugh, we weren’t really allowed to take a very special story that we had done very special things with, to the marketplace. And that was the kind of driving force in terms of what we wanted to do at the time,” he mused.
The GlenAllachie Distillery is located on Speyside in Scotland.
The chosen one
When Walker got a phone call in 2016 offering him the opportunity to buy The GlenAllachie, it was a no-brainer for him to say yes.
“We were very fortunate that the planets aligned, and the opportunity came up to acquire GlenAllachie, a classic Speyside distillery with beautiful location between the Spey River and Ben Rinnes (mountain),” he said.
“It also fulfilled a need I had at the time. There were things I still wanted to do, and GlenAllachie ticked a lot of my boxes. It was a distillery that had never been showcased, was under the radar, and I was familiar with it from a blending point of view.”
Walker explained that it was always their intention to create GlenAllachie as primarily a sherried-style whisky.
“We have a lot of wood management knowledge, and we use that very efficiently and cleverly, to create the kind of flavour profile that we’ve achieved,” he said, adding that it took them seven years to examine the already-matured stocks that came with the distillery.
The GlenAllachie recently launched a special bottling for the Year Of The Snake.
“We inherited something like 50,000 casks, and we had to look at these casks from scratch and ask, ‘what are they saying to us?’, ‘what is the DNA of these casts?’, and ‘how do we move it in the direction we want to do?’. It was a big job!” he said.
“In truth, the first four years, we probably did a reasonable job. But we’re now more than seven years into it and I believe we’ve probably achieved 90% of the kind of initial ambition we have. The next 10% is a little bit more difficult,” he said.
The GlenAllachie has now a solid core range of sherry-aged whiskies, including the sessionable 8-Year-Old, the flasghip 12-Year-Old, and the excellent 18-Year-Old; as well as limited editions that go up to 35 years old. In 2021, The GlenAllachie 10-year-old Batch 4 was named the World’s Best Single Malt, just one of the many accolades the distillery has achieved since Walker took over.
The distillery also recently released a special edition whisky for the Year Of The Snake – The GlenAllachie 11-year-old Year of the Snake Edition, which is an 11-year-old matured in premium Pedro Ximénez and Oloroso Sherry casks from Spain, as well as toasted and charred virgin oak barrels.
Walker had always envisioned The GlenAllachie's personality as a moe sherry-styled whisky.
The peated one
Another ambition Walker had with GlenAllachie was to produce a peated Speyside single malt, and he finally achieved that with last year’s release of the Meikle Toir (pronounced: “mee-kuhl tor”) range. The name means “big pursuit” in Gaelic, and refers to Walker’s longtime ambition to “craft and cask-perfect a peerless peated single malt at our Speyside home”.
Although the range is produced at the GlenAllachie distillery, they decided to create a whole new brand for the peated expressions to set them apart from the core GlenAllachie whiskies.The peat in these whiskies are sourced from mainland Scotland, and is a sweeter, oakier style of peat, unlike the heavier, more medicinal ones in Islay.
Meikle Toir is the peated range from Scotland’s GlenAllachie distillery.
“We wanted to demonstrate that a Speyside facility could, in fact, produce a very successful peat style whisky. We wanted to differentiate it between an Islay style peat and a Mainland style peat,” he shared.
Islay has essentially a powerful, medicinal iodine-like peat, but on the mainland, the peat is a much sweeter experience and has no medicinal nose at all, he explained further.
“We don’t apologise for it being a five-year-old malt, because the reality is, no matter the source of the peat, is the best possible experience, and the full impact of a peated whiskey, it has to be somewhere between five and eight years old.
“After eight years, the peat influence begins to fade. It doesn’t make the whiskey less good, in fact, it continues to improve, but the real punchy impact of the peatiness begins to drift down along the way,” he said.
Even at 80, Walker says he is having a lot of fun with the GlenAllachie right now.
If it sounds like Walker is having a lot more fun working on GlenAllachie than he used to with the other distilleries he’s developed, that’s because he is.
“That is absolutely the case!” he said laughing. “I have a controlling say in everything, and that makes life easy. It sounds a little bit pretentious, but it does make decision making quite easy. It also opens up the freedom to do things.”
Ultimately, his ambition for GlenAllachie is to be the best whisky facility in Speyside, even though he admits that there are one or two quite formidable opponents there.
“Private ownership gives us a real degree of freedom to be creative. And even though along the road, we make mistakes, but we can recover that and continue on. We don’t pursue consistency, we pursue absolute perfection. Sure, it’s been a challenge, but it’s been fun!” he concluded.
Michael Cheang still treasures his GlenAllachie 10 Year Old Batch 4. Follow him on Instagram (@mytipsyturvy) and Facebook (fb.com/mystipsyturvy).
