Scotland · Dandaleith · Coleburn · Dallas Dhu · Findhorn · Blair Athol
THE BIRTHDAY TRIP TO SCOTLAND
Fourteen Years of Patience – and Then Scotland
Some trips you plan. Others announce themselves quietly, over many years, working away in the background. This one began without my knowing it, on my 40th birthday.
Somewhere in Speyside, a Linkwood distillate was flowing into a cask. It didn’t know who it was waiting for. And I didn’t know that fourteen years later I would travel to Scotland to bottle it myself.
What I had in the meantime were Nils Hermann and Florian Scherzer.
Nils and Florian from Arcanum Spirits have been far more than business partners to me for years. They are taste buddies from the very beginning. We have tasted our way through countless virtual tastings together, swapped samples back and forth, debated casks, and philosophised about whisky when we should long since have been asleep. At some point you know the other person’s palate as well as your own and at some point it becomes clear that you have to go to Scotland together. This trip was that point.
Our route took us through Speyside and beyond – from the Dandaleith Craft Bottling Hall to the warehouse of the silent Coleburn Distillery, on to Forres and Dallas Dhu. An evening on the coast at Findhorn and finally to Blair Athol in Pitlochry, each stop had its own character. Together they made a journey I won’t forget any time soon.
What Scotland does to you is hard to describe. The air in the warehouses smells of time. Every conversation about casks and maturation carries a weight in those places that it simply doesn’t have at home. And the landscape between Speyside and the hills of Perthshire has a stillness you won’t find anywhere else.
We tasted whisky, assessed casks and made decisions that will shape Arcanum Spirits in the future. We saw the inside of a bottling hall, visited a distillery that has been silent since 1983 and personally test of an 37-year-old whisky from 1970 with Dean.
But in the end, this trip was above all one thing: a birthday spent with friends.
My 54th birthday. in Scotland, with a whisky that went into the cask on my 40th and with two people who know exactly what they gave me.
Slàinte mhath, Nils. Slàinte mhath, Florian.
