SCOTCH ANCIENT AND MODERN

THE ORIGINS of distilling are much argued over. The science first entered Western literature in the fourth century BC with a brief mention in Aristotle’s Meteorology as a way of desalinating seawater. At the same time the metallurgists of southern India were isolating zinc by distillation, while the Chinese were distilling medicines and cosmetics from botanicals. None of these societies existed in isolation, but how or even whether knowledge of distillation was transmitted between them is unknown.

There is no doubt, though, that by the late eighth century AD the scientists of the Islamic Enlightenment had realised that liquids of different densities have different boiling points and can be separated by careful heating. The earliest known writer on the subject, Jabir Ibn Hayyan (died 815), was actually experimenting with wine, which, as he was a devout Muslim, was otherwise of no value to him.

The principal use of araq al-nabidh (the sweat of wine from the droplets running down the condenser) was in the manufacture of inks, lacquers, medicines and cosmetics – especially kohl, which gives us our word alcohol. But it was also enjoyed as a drink by many. The Muslim empire was peopled by millions of vanquished Christians, who ran a vast wine industry. The Muslims, being teetotal but tolerant, let them get on with it; and some of them weren’t above straying into Christian-run taverns, in one of which the ninth-century poet Abu Nawas drank a wine ‘as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand’ – arak, or, as it was sometimes called, ma’ul-hayat: the water of life. But it was as a medicine rather than a beverage that this water of life, aqua vitae, came to Christendom.

Abu Nawas, the poet who first described the joys of drinking brandy. This statue is in Baghdad, a great centre of medical and scientific learning during the Islamic Enlightenment.

Romantics like to make a mystery of how this happened, but actually it was very straightforward. Salerno, on the cusp of the Christian and Muslim worlds, had – and still has – the oldest medical school in Europe. By the eleventh century it had amassed a vast collection of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic texts. Its teachers included the foremost physicians of the age, many of whom, such as Constantine the African, were from Muslim-controlled North Africa; its undergraduates, most of whom were monks, came from all over Christendom. Part of the curriculum from at least 1100, when a text was published on the subject, was the role of spirits in medicine; and, sadly for the Scots and Irish, this knowledge seems to have come to England first. As early as 1130 Adelard of Bath added several encrypted recipes involving aqua vitae to his copy of the tenth-century recipe book Mappae Clavicula. There is a hint in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Topography of Ireland that Irish monks were distilling in the 1170s: an Anglo-Norman knight, Hugh Tyrell, looted a ‘great cauldron’ from a convent in Armagh and, back at his headquarters at Louth, it set fire to his lodgings and half the town. Could this have been a still? Perhaps. Less equivocal is the routine recording in the Red Book of Ossory – the late fourteenth-century account-book of Bishop Richard Ledred – of the distillation of wine, presumably as a base for medicinal tinctures.

Constantine the African, a Christian doctor and writer from Carthage, studied in Baghdad and came to the medical school in Salerno in 1077, bringing with him the medical knowledge of the Islamic Enlightenment.

The simplest possible pot still, comprising boiler, stillhead, worm and wormtub. Stills like this are still manufactured by artisanal coppersmiths throughout Southern Europe – this example comes from Albino Vieira Filhos of Aveiro, Portugal.

Then we come to one of the most oft-quoted bills of sale in the history of the liquor industry, which is an entry in the Scottish Exchequer Roll for 1494: ‘Eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aqua vitae’. This record is generally taken to mark the birth of the Scotch whisky industry, in which it is a little premature, for the next record - the grant in 1505 of a monopoly over distilling in Edinburgh to the Guild of Barber Surgeons – still places spirits firmly in the pharmacy. But these two records are nevertheless hugely significant for two reasons. First, the sale to Friar John is the first mention of the distillation of ale rather than wine in Britain. Within a few decades this innovation was to create the whole family of northern European white spirits: gin, schnapps, vodka and, in its earliest period, whisky itself. Second, the 1505 grant shows that the practice of distillation had jumped the monastery wall; and once the skills and equipment were out in the secular world they could be operated by anybody who brewed ale.

Examining a patient’s urine at the medical school in Salerno.

But what can it have been like, this proto-whisky? Well, pretty much indistinguishable from other malt distillates of the time – unaged, and therefore clear; double-distilled, or it would not have been potable; and suffused with medicinal herbs and spices. As late as 1755 Dr Johnson, in his dictionary, defined usquebaugh as being ‘drawn over aromaticks’. He could easily have been describing gin.

It would also have been far too strong to dose anyone with unless it was watered down; and perhaps it was the watering down that persuaded people that this was not only a medicine, but a beverage. Its medicinal efficacy was nevertheless not forgotten or ignored: in the much-quoted words of Ralph Holinshead’s Chronicle of 1577, ‘it cutteth fleume, it lighteneth the mind, it quickeneth the spirits, it cureth the hydropsie, it pounceth the stone ...’ and so on. Particularly useful was that ‘it kepyth ... the stomach from wamblying’.

James IV of Scotland, during whose reign (1488–1513) the distillation of aqua vitae from malt liquor was first recorded and the barber-surgeons of Edinburgh were granted a monopoly over distillation in the city.

Not only was aqua vitae, to Holinshead, ‘a sovereign liquor’ against sickness; it was also easy to make. The household washing copper, with the addition of a tight-fitting hood and a coil of copper tubing (the only expensive item), was all the equipment required. And small-scale distilling was a boon to farmers: it meant that in good years they no longer had to sell surplus barley at glut prices but could process and store it almost indefinitely against the lean years.

It was the storage that transformed raw spirit into whisky. In oak barrels the clear spirit took on colour and flavour from the wood, and mellowed through evaporation. And the longer it was kept, the better it became. By the mid-sixteenth century distilling was essential to the farmer’s household economy wherever barley was grown. So widespread was it that it had to be temporarily banned following a failed harvest and consequent grain shortage in 1579 (although naturally the ban did not extend to the gentry).

In 1642 civil war broke out in England, and in 1643 both rebel and Royalist parliaments introduced excise duty, as did the Scots in 1644. Duty was ostensibly a temporary measure to pay for the war; but as with income tax 150 years later, it proved too bountiful to be repealed. In England and Wales an efficient collection service rapidly evolved; it’s unlikely that, in the very different conditions that prevailed in Scotland, the authorities there were equally well served. There were duty-paying distillers: in fact, the very first distillery to be recorded by name – Ferintosh near Dingwall – was one such. It was burnt down in the 1689–90 Jacobite rising in support of the exiled James II, and as compensation its owner was exempted from duty, which implies that he was paying it in the first place. But he seems to have been an exception.

One of the first actions of the merged government after the 1707 Acts of Union was to make the collection of duties as efficient in Scotland as it was south of the border. This was hardly controversial, but what happened next was. In 1713 the government proposed to extend the malt tax to Scotland, which was expressly prohibited by an article of the Treaty of Union. The Earl of Findlater and Seafield introduced a bill to dissolve the union; and with support from the Whig opposition and anti-union Tories, he lost by just four votes.

The next 110 years were to be a prolonged series of clashes between competing interests. Ranged against and occasionally alongside each other were Westminster, which just wanted money; the English landed gentry, who were making fortunes growing barley for the London gin distillers and wanted to protect their profits; the landed gentry of the Scottish Lowlands, who wanted access to the English gin trade; the landed gentry of the Scottish Highlands, who wanted to protect their legal distilleries against small-scale competition; and finally the Scottish tenant farmers, especially those in the Highlands, who just wanted the same income from distilling as their sires. Last and definitely least, these may have been in political influence; but they were not in as awkward a position as their landlords, who had mutually exclusive goals. On the one hand, they wanted their own distilleries to flourish, and would have loved to suppress their tenants’ untaxed enterprises; on the other, the same tenants depended on the income from their stills to pay their rent.

To complicate matters further, there was always Jacobitism, the continuing support in Scotland for the disinherited descendants of James II. With well-armed clans always ready to rebel, it was no time for government blunders; and in 1725 a blunder duly came. Because the malt tax cost more to collect than it raised, the government proposed to increase it by 3d a bushel. Although the new rate would still have been only half that charged in England, it provoked riots in all the major Scottish towns. In Glasgow the rioters burned down the MP’s house and drove out the garrison. It took four hundred dragoons to retake the city; eleven Glaswegians were shot dead.

It should be noted that the rioters were not distillers but consumers. For the farm distillers were not racketeers like Prohibition bootleggers, nor armed gangs like the smugglers of the English coastal districts. Later on, illicit distillation (called bothie distilling after the bivouacs in which it was conducted) became a full-time occupation for many; but at this stage the distillers were still for the most part ordinary tenant farmers. All they wanted was to carry on converting the surpluses of good years into a commodity that would see them through the bad, in which they had the support of their communities and even, though perhaps not unequivocally, their landlords. Most of them, given the times, were surely God-fearing and devout; at least one of them, Magnus Eunson of Orkney, was a cleric. They didn’t see distilling as criminal; and they wouldn’t pay tax if they could avoid it.

The Loch Ewe distillery at Aultbea in Wester Ross has been constructed to evoke the illicit ‘bothie stills’ of the eighteenth century.

The wild country around Loch Ewe, like much of the Highlands, was almost impossible for excisemen or ‘gaugers’ to police effectively.

In the memoirs of excise officers – called ‘gaugers’ because of the dipsticks they carried – there is an undercurrent of tension and the threat, sometimes the fact, of violence. But in the folklore of the times the relationship between gauger and smuggler (as illicit distillers were often described, since transporting the ‘peatreek’ was as big a part of their job as making it) is portrayed more romantically as the loveable rogue versus the easily fooled and ineffectual official. Wily smugglers are always outsmarting the gaugers by concealing kegs in funeral cortèges, or drilling a hole through a ceiling into a confiscated whisky keg that the gaugers are guarding in an upstairs room; and afterwards the rueful gaugers always congratulate the smugglers on their coup. If there really was anything of this sporting spirit in the struggle between lawbreaker and law officer it can only have been because, by the standards of the times, there was very little at stake. The penalty for being caught – confiscation and a fine, when in London a child could be hanged for pickpocketing – was not hazard enough to trigger the desperate vendettas conducted between revenue officers and smuggling gangs in Kent and Sussex. And in any case, no matter what loss or inconvenience the gaugers might cause, there were never anywhere near enough of them to police the vast and rugged land under their supervision and seriously disrupt the traffic of whisky from glen to township. ‘There are many thousands’, reported the Commissioner for Excise in 1758, ‘who openly transgress.’

Oban was one of the planned towns built by Highland landowners in the eighteenth century to increase the value of their estates. A distillery was very often included in the plans.

For it was the towns that the smugglers principally served, and the affluent bourgeoisie were their best customers – which, in an age of privilege and entitlement, added another layer of complication to the problem of policing. Even at the time it was widely acknowledged that the Highland product was vastly superior to the Lowland, and for a very good reason. Although the Lowlands did have its bothies, the region was dominated by great landed proprietors who wanted only to join their English counterparts in the gin-distilling gold-rush, and sent great quantities of raw spirit south to be rectified. To match the efficiency of the vast English malt distilleries, they built big shallow stills that could process huge volumes of wash very quickly; the wash was as alcoholic as they could make it; and to avoid the malt tax, they mashed in as much unmalted cereal as possible. Highland whisky, by contrast, was meant for drinking, not for rectifying, and was made in much smaller stills from a weaker wash of pure barley malt. It also generally spent time in oak in the purchaser’s cellar. The better-off drank it openly without fear of arrest; and in the early nineteenth century some of it even started finding its way to London, where the Prince of Wales was a particular admirer.

This state of apparent equilibrium, however, could not last; and it was the success of the Lowland distillers in the London market, where in 1785 they sold 800,000 gallons of raw spirit, that broke the peace. The English distillers, who had considerable political clout, demanded protection, while the jealous Highland lairds wanted a level playing field. The latter were very enlightened landlords in the late eighteenth century, founding new towns to improve the condition of their tenants (and to boost the value of their estates). Oban, Grantown-on-Spey, Keith, Fochabers, Tobermory and Fort William were among dozens of settlements planned and constructed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; many of them came equipped with legal distilleries. These the developers generally rented to foolhardy entrepreneurs, many of whom were so undercut by the bothie distillers that they soon went out of business. Some of them promptly went back into business – as bothie distillers. The Highland lairds did what they could to protect those of their tenants who operated legally, which included exerting political pressure, and in 1784 they secured the passage of the Wash Act. This set the minimum legal capacity for stills in the Highlands at 20 gallons, with a licence fee of £1 per gallon capacity per year. It also drew an artificial line to separate the districts where the concession was in force from the Lowlands, where the much larger stills were licensed at £1 10s per gallon capacity.

The distillery at Oban, intended to provide respectable employment for the people of the new town.

Incensed, the Lowlanders fought back and in 1785 got the minimum size of still increased to 40 gallons and, crucially, persuaded the government to ban the sale of Highland whisky outside the concession zone. This did nothing to stop illicit distillation and smuggling, which went on as before until war with France broke out and the government’s sudden and urgent need for money brought all negotiations and compromises to an end. In 1797 the licence fee in the Highland region was increased to £6 10s per gallon capacity, which, even though it was still much less than that paid in the Lowlands, was high enough to ensure the continuation of smuggling and the ruin of even more of the duty-paying Highland distillers.

But conditions in the Highlands were changing in the favour of the lairds. Since the brutal quelling of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s uprising in 1745, the region had been experiencing gradual depopulation as small (and potentially rebellious) farmers were evicted from their arable patches to make way for livestock. The great wave of forced clearances, when crofts were simply burnt down and populations were exported wholesale to Canada, came between 1790 and 1820; but by then the process of resettling country people in new towns such as those mentioned above was already well under way. Gradually the supply of surplus barley dwindled, exacerbated by a series of crop failures in the last years of the eighteenth century; the market – or at any rate the local market – dwindled commensurately; and the social pattern that ensured a smuggler could either trust or intimidate his neighbours was disrupted by urbanisation. Secret distilling in towns and cities continued – Edinburgh was reckoned to possess four hundred illegal stills in 1777 – but with potential informers only the thickness of a party wall away, it was a much riskier business. At the same time, following a Royal Commission of 1797–9 to which Lowland distillers complained loudly, with perhaps a touch of exaggeration, of being severely undercut by Highland smugglers, the gaugers’ numbers and powers were increased, and Highland magistrates were directed to show less leniency.

Tobermory was another of the planned towns built by Highland lairds.

Finally, though, it was a Highland landowner – and one of the greatest of them at that, the Duke of Gordon – who set off the train of events that fatally wounded the tradition of smuggling. The Highland lairds were stung into action by the successful lobbying of the English distillers, who in 1814 persuaded the government to enact new regulations that, said a contemporary, amounted to ‘a complete interdict’ on distilling in the Highlands. As well as imposing a substantial increase in the licence fee, the new regulations outlawed stills of below 2,000 gallons capacity in the Lowlands and 500 gallons in the Highlands and also increased the minimum permissible strength of the wash. The result would have concentrated distilling in the Highlands in the hands of the few proprietors who could source enough malt and fuel to fill and fire such prodigious stills; and even then they could have produced only spirit for rectifying. Two years later the Highland lairds succeeded in procuring the Small Stills Act, which effectively reversed the 1814 regime. Then in 1820 Gordon made a stirring speech in the Lords in which he promised that the lairds would suppress illicit distilling if legal ventures were allowed to trade profitably. Yet another commission of enquiry – the fifth – spent three years deliberating; and in 1823 the Excise Act was passed, sharply reducing both the malt tax and excise duty; confirming the smallest still capacity at 40 gallons; and, crucially, allowing the Highland distillers to ‘export’ their product outside the concession zone.

Glenturret, near Crieff in Perthshire, claims to be Scotland’s oldest distillery. It was licensed in 1818, but illicit distilling had been taking place since at least 1775. It is today the ‘brand home’ of The Famous Grouse.

The Emigrants by sculptor Gerald Laing at Helmsdale, Sutherland, commemorates the thousands of small tenant farmers expelled from their land during the Clearances of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Glen Garioch, established in 1797 and another of the remaining pre-Excise Act distilleries.

Strathisla, Keith, licensed since 1786 and one of Glenturret’s rivals for the title of Scotland’s oldest distillery.