Benrinnes 23yo Signatory
Cask Strength #11715, Bottled 2020 | 52.6% ABV
Score: 8/10
Something special.
TL;DR
Big cask backed by beautiful distillate and maturity
The Black Box
Whisky making, like everything, is a balance of theory and application. With this premise, I fancy a chat about whisky expertise, and how that relates to all of the above. Before we get into the nuts and bolts, I have a question for you, the dear readership: Who knows what a black box is?
No, not that thing that we all hope never becomes useful on our aeroplane flights. Rather the logical black box, often utilised in computing, apparently.
For those who are familiar, I’m about to butcher the explanation, wielding razor sharp oversimplification (pun very much intended), so you informed folk can all skip this paragraph and save yourselves a headache, eh?
Very basically, a black box is something for which you understand and control a range or variety of inputs, “Magic” which you can’t see or don’t understand happens inside the black box, and it spits out a range or variety of outputs.
Let’s take a car for example - what type of car hardly matters - but let’s say it doesn’t use a clutch, just for simplicity’s sake. If you know literally nothing about car mechanics, then you can view the car as something of a black box. You, the operator, vary a few key inputs; firstly, you can pick a mode of operation: drive, reverse, park, neutral. Then, assuming you picked one of the modes that lets you move the thing, you can push on the accelerator to make the car move more quickly, the brake to make the car move less quickly, and turn the steering wheel to determine which direction the car goes in, more or less. Voila, you’re a driver!
Well, kind of. There’s other stuff to learn, like gauging momentum and forces in moving frames, being aware of your surroundings and road conditions, apexing, judging braking distances and so on. Note that absolutely none of this deals with the actual workings of a car; at least not directly. If you know how your car works, then perhaps that can inform some of your driving decisions, but there is no inherent need for mechanical understanding to drive the car; the driving can be learned simply from experience and practical demonstration, both your own and mimicking others. This is a fair approximation of pure application.
On the other hand, you have the theory. In this example, that would be all the stuff that a mechanic must know to be able to work on the car. You could be the world’s best mechanic, capable of disassembling and reassembling vehicles blindfolded, picking the correct coolant by taste like some kind of vehicular-sommelier, but still not know how to drive the car to the end of your street and back. This isn’t quite as good an analogy of pure theory as we had for pure application, given mechanics still need to have excellent hands on skills, but hopefully it highlights the difference in requisite knowledge of the theory. Please don’t taste your coolant by the way; it should go without saying, but that’s silly goose behaviour, not to mention very toxic and potentially fatal.
Anyway, If we extend this tortured example to its logical extremes, you might end up with something like F1 racing; on one hand, you have some of the most talented and hard-working drivers on the planet representing application, and some of the most knowledgeable, skilled mechanics working in the race pits. Again, one might note that a driver is likely to know a few things about car design and mechanics, and the mechanics are likely to know a bit about driving cars, and perhaps even the intricacies of race car driving; this overlap aids in communication, diagnosis and maximising racer performance. We’ll come back to this.
TL;DR: we can see there’s a big, important difference between the people who can use black boxes well (whether that be a tool, an idea, process etc.) and people who understand/develop knowledge about the inner workings of things.
And now, we can finally talk about whisky.
Some of the people working at distilleries contributing to the production of brilliant or in-demand whisky are what we might call “Black Box” operators. These folks tend to know their roles well, and can generally execute their tasks with consistently high quality outcomes, largely due to their significant experience. Take a mash operator (using either a traditional, semi or full lauter in a low-tech, traditional distillery for example. The mash operator’s job is both simple and specialised. They need to know exactly the right rates and ratios to be adding grist and hot water to the mash tun to achieve saccharification temperatures, gelatinise starches, prevent the formation of dough balls, and hit target gravities for their extract, be that from discrete waters or continuous sparging.
They need to be able to keep their numbers incredibly tight to maximise brewhouse efficiency, as well as keep the process within specific operational timelines to turn over the mash tun as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality or batch yield, such that total extract for that shift is maximised.
What does this look like in operation? It means being able to eyeball the water and grist flows into tun, and know when they need adjusting. It means keeping an eye on the mash for lumps and other consistency issues, preventing excess grist floating on the surface of the mash without being included or wetted, looking at the temperature probe readout to ensure the grist temperature is within operational parameters. It means testing pH to make sure saccharification enzymes are operating optimally, and ensuring starch conversion is sufficiently complete within time constraints. It then means ensuring wort clarification, if desired, runs smoothly, and knowing whether the grain bed is properly set for lautering afterwards.
All of this is process and equipment dependent by the way; you can quickly and accurately check grain bed compaction using a manometer or a pair of Bourdon gauges to determine the differential pressure across the bed. If this kit isn’t installed though, it might mean using a mash paddle to poke and prod the bed checking for bed stiffness by hand, or watching runoff rates over the course of lautering to ensure flow hasn’t dropped too low. There are dozens of fine details I’m skipping over by the way; balancing pump flows and underback levels, iodine testing for residual starches, maintaining sparge water depth and temperature of grain beds (during continuous sparging at least); the list goes on.
And again, as with our driver/mechanic analogy, a great mash operator can do all of this without any underlying knowledge of the biochemistry, physics or other science at play. Somebody can simply demonstrate the job, tell them the key numbers they need for certain processes, and they’re off to the races. Does an understanding of all those variables help them to do their job? Absolutely! Being a black box operator is all well and good, right up until something goes wrong, at which time the lid of said box must be opened so the problem can be diagnosed and rectified.
“Why is this mash the wrong pH? I followed all the regular steps, all’s going smoothly, but we’re at 5.9 rather than 5.4; we’re going to lose time waiting for conversion!”. Now this is hardly the end of the world; altering pH is easy enough. But how does the operator stop it from happening again in future? The logical thing to do is run a few tests, and assuming they know what to look for, some value will more likely than not be incorrect indicating a process parameter that’s gone awry.
There are similar “Black box” operators in many roles within whisky; distillers, blenders, warehouse management etc. The larger producers (might we say “Big Whisky”) are generally more emphatic about employing people with some baseline qualifications, which reduced the tendency to operate in a black box mindset, but it exists to varying degrees throughout the industry.
The opposite of this is someone that’s up to their gills in the weeds of theory relating to brewing and distilling, but has little to no practical experience in doing the actual brewing or distilling; the pure academics of the subject. The academics are deeply important, and we’ll come back to this, but a digression first.
You see, there’s something frustrating for the folks who work on the theory side of things; the understanding of how a black box works more often than not lags behind the use of a black box, because discovering a mechanism is much harder than investigating its underlying mechanisms. One of the saddest examples of this trend was Dr Ignaz Semmelweis. If you’ve not heard the story, I recommend reading more thoroughly on the subject.
To summarise though, Semmelweis proposed hand washing as a means of reducing postpartum infections in new mothers in 1847, and apparently was able to reduce mortality rates of mothers following birth from 18% to <2%. Despite this, a lack of theoretical foundation for hand washing and indignation from his contemporaries saw Semmelweis under such pressure and ridicule that he suffered a nervous breakdown, for which he was institutionalised by (allegedly) the same contemporaries, and died shortly thereafter (1865) of a gangrenous wound, likely sustained after his institutionalisation.
It wasn’t until germ theory was established and proliferated (largely in the 1860s by Louis Pasteur, but also through the works of the English surgeon Joseph Lister and German physician Robert Koch from the 1860s-1880s) that a theoretical justification developed to support Semmelweis’ idea.
The strange thing about Semmelweis’ sad history though is that generally, we place more importance from a broad societal perspective on application than we do for the underlying theory. The understanding and skill to use a thing, regardless of its operation, generally sees more weight than the understanding of its operation. But in this instance, it was a lack of theoretical explanation that presided over the adoption of a new technique; perhaps a historical example of academia’s shall we say “Rigid” philosophy.
Review
Benrinnes 23yo, Signatory Vintage Cask Strength Series, 2020 Bottling, 1996, Cask #11715, 287 bottles from a single hogshead, 52.6% ABV
£115 paid. Secondary only.
This isn’t my first Benrinnes review, and those that have read my Cadenhead 18YO piece will know some of the production elements that lend it my favour (at least for the pre-2007 - partially triple distilled - distillate). This bottling shares some of those characteristics, though globally the oak influence is quite a bit bigger, so the overall composition takes on a different tone. Let’s dive in.
Score: 8/10
Something special.
TL;DR
Big cask backed by beautiful distillate and maturity
Nose
Very nice maturity out the gate. Melon rinds, both green and honeydew, plus some rather solid musty maltiness, mild waxiness and age induced esters; ripe peach, subtle papaya, mango, kiwi, pineapple bordering on light cheese (potentially indicative of some tails/isovaleric character in the distillate that has since been partially esterified over time) plus a sense of oxidative/oak derived ethyl acetate, which adds a nice quasi-rum aspect in the context of the other esters. With air comes good florals a la frangipanis, which segue most pleasantly into the creamy vanillin and lactone cask elements. A surprising absence of significant sulfidic elements here, but they may be buried within the ester melange, adding hints of the aforementioned tropicality and/or mustiness (though the latter character is generally due to carbonyls).
Overall, there’s an almost well-matured-Clynelish vibe thus far; high praise from this reviewer.
Palate
Ooft, nice. The estery character translates well, and there’s some good richness, both in that waxy character and in the cask extract, which approaches being a bit heavy, though that’s probably splitting hairs. Nice cask sweetness, a bit of a custard cream aspect moving in now along with some baking spices and fairly light tannic grip. The fruits are more tropically aligned, adding in a wee touch of guava and passionfruit (potentially some of those pleasant organosulfur tones absent on the nose), but generally in the same overarching styles from the nose. A bit less of the overt EA character too perhaps, plus more frangipani in support through retronasal. This could all build up to be almost too decadent for this taster, but a little of that mustiness and green melon character swoops in to balance it out with poise. Beautiful stuff.
The Dregs
A bit of vacillating for this one, as I’m prone to; I’m reticent to give high scores flippantly, but I must admit this hits a bunch of the notes that I want it to, and the purchase price was very good (about 35% off retail from memory), so there’s no score modifier detracting points IMO. Great distillate, well presented in a luscious and decadent tone, but not lacking complexity or signs of maturity; winner winner. Had I paid the retail for this in my area (equivalent of about £165) then it would certainly get knocked down to a 7 factoring value in. As it is, I’d happily buy another bottle at this price.
Score: 8/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. TK
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