Halfway through our interview, John Glaser walks away from the table, leaving me alone with the tools of his trade: graduated cylinders, conical measures, tasting glasses, water and several flasks of Scotch whisky. At his urging, I'm going to create my own personal Scotch. I measure out 10-milliliter working tastes of each whisky, dilute them precisely from cask proof to 40 percent strength, and take a stab. Glaser makes it sound easy, but I'm not so sure. Maybe a few exploratory tastes will loosen me up.
It's a beautiful, sunny afternoon in Chiswick, London. The energetic Glaser, a forty-something Minnesotan whose ready grin mitigates his piercing gaze, is the sole whiskymaker of Compass Box, the boutique company he founded in 2000 after quitting his job as a marketing director for Johnnie Walker. At Compass Box, he's introduced some of the first innovations in decades to the craft of making and blending Scotch -- and in so doing, has won both accolades and brickbats from the conservative guardians of the whisky industry.
Although the brand sells only some 6,000 cases yearly, Compass Box's independent ways have made an impression on the whisky world. The blends have won a disproportionate number of awards, but also raised the hackles of the Scotch establishment.
I'm visiting Glaser here at Compass Box headquarters, a single large room whose angled ceiling and steel shelves of bottles give the impression of a warehouse. But the apparatus of whiskymaking that surrounds us is limited to desks, computers and some glassware -- Compass Box doesn't do any distilling.
John Glaser founded Compass Box in 2000.
Photo: Compass BoxIn a role that Glaser compares to that of a wine négociant, the company buys casks of whisky from some 15 Scotch distilleries, chosen for their wide range of characteristics, and assembles them into blends of Glaser's own careful design. He takes, for instance, Caol Ila whisky, which has all the smoky savor of a barbecue, tempers it with an equal amount of Ardmore, whose likewise substantial peat is mellowed by delicate, complex fruity notes, and adds just a splash of uniquely peppery, briny Clynelish. (Among today's treats for me is tasting these components separately, then together.)
After the disparate liquors marry in a barrel for several months, the result is bottled under the name Peat Monster. It has a mouth-filling, sweet balance that's more than the sum of its parts.
In 2005, Compass Box developed a Scotch called Spice Tree, which he aged in used bourbon casks, as is standard in the industry, but with an character-adding innovation borrowed from the world of wine. Glaser, who is quite a connoisseur of wood, fitted the casks with "inner staves," planks of new French oak toasted to order and inserted inside the barrel, which gave the whisky a unique richness and spice.
"You cannot make great Scotch whisky without great oak," Glaser says. The staves in the Spice Tree casks were "a quality of oak that is never used in Scotch whisky." Jim Murray's Whisky Bible called the whisky "beautiful ... an entirely different whisky in shape and flavour emphasis."
But the Scotch Whisky Association took a different view. The industry association asked Compass Box to stop selling Spice Tree, threatening a lawsuit based on their judgment that the use of inner staves is "not permissible," simply because it is not part of the traditional Scotch-making process. After trying unsuccessfully to negotiate, Glaser discontinued Spice Tree.
Besides awards and cease-and-desist orders, Compass Box has garnered a host of mimics, both for its products and for its accessible, youthful image (Flaming Heart, a new Compass Box blend, is probably the first Scotch named for a rock song). The brand paved the way for blended and vatted malts -- mixes of whiskies from different distilleries, traditionally disdained as mass-market fare -- to enter the prestigious upper shelves dominated by single malts. A number of these new malts copy Compass Box's decidedly unstodgy style, such as Glenfiddich's Monkey Shoulder blend and Jon, Mark and Robbo, an ostentatiously irreverent brand owned by the Edrington conglomerate that failed after a few years.
But for all his maverick style and his willingness to point out the whisky world's shortcomings, from artificial color to hypocritical marketing, Glaser isn't terribly estranged from the establishment. He freely admits that his good relationship with his former employer allows him unusually privileged access to buy the whiskies he blends; it would be much harder for an outsider to do what he does. And he talks about his business as a productive part of the industry, benefiting whisky as a whole.
"The central irony of Compass Box," he says, "is that I could make more difference with my own tiny company than with a budget of millions of pounds as head of marketing at Johnnie Walker."
While working for Diageo, the giant, multinational producer of Johnnie Walker and dozens of other beverage brands, Glaser's job was to reverse slowing sales of Scotch, whose stodgy reputation was detrimental to its popularity.
"It's an old man's drink, it's boring, it tastes like shit," is how Glaser characterizes the popular opinion. But "for a big company to change its image, to say 'We're cool, we taste good,' isn't going to work," he decided. Heading out on his own, with strength of conviction, he did what Diageo couldn't: He awakened new interest in Scotch among the young drinkers whose allegiance has been largely commanded by vodka.
Compass Box has won Whisky magazine's Innovator of the Year award four times in six years, which may say less about the recipient of the award than about the very conservative industry, in which even little innovations make big splashes. The innovations that earned the awards sound innocently simple to a novice: fillips like the new-oak staves; or selling a 100-percent grain whisky.
What impresses me, tasting his products and listening to him talk, isn't that he's breaking new ground but a simple, unpretentious dedication to his craft. The unifying style of the Compass Box blends is "sweetness, softness, richness," which Glaser achieves through rare attention to details like wood quality ("60 to 70 percent of Scotch whisky's flavor comes from the wood"), as well as skillful blending.
And that brings me to my blending assignment, as I sip the array of whiskies in front of me.
Glaser has instructed me to keep it simple, to pick no more than three ingredients for my blend. Having tasted all the possible components, I'm starting to get a sense of where I want my blend to begin: With one particular zesty beauty, which gets both a gorgeous mahogany color and an enticing bloom of spice from the new French oak with which it was aged.
As a bourbon fan, I want my final product to have all the round spice of that new oak, but I bear in mind another of Glaser's rules: to consider the occasion when the whisky will be drunk. I'm sure I'd appreciate the malt's Christmasy warmth in a few months, but for drinking now, at the end of summer, the thing to do is to lighten it. I have two candidates for that job: an oceanic, soapy Clynelish and a light grain whisky with a sweet hint of citrus and vanilla toffee. Grain whisky is a standard complement to malt whisky in blended Scotch, where its lightness smooths out the rough edges.
I measure 65 ml of the deep-brown heart of my blend into a tall graduated cylinder, and painstakingly add in 20 ml of grain whisky and 15 ml of Clynelish. It's a little fruity, so I adjust the proportions till it pleases my exigent palate. The final ratio I settle on is 70-15-15.
I call John Glaser back to taste the fruit of my effort. He sniffs and sips with professional panache, spitting the liquor out his back door into the bright afternoon, and nods his approval, as I decant the stuff into a bottle to take home with me. It's not so hard. Perhaps I have a future in this exciting whisky business.
