the art of blending

Maturing whisky might sound easy. Pour some malt spirit in your cask, add time and your whisky will mature to something really nice. All this work is done by the cask itself, you don’t have to add any manual labour (except filling the cask, and the occasional tasting once every year).

But, there are a few choices you need to make as different casks give different characteristics to a whisky.

Firstly, you should choose which oak to use. The most popular being American oak as it gives a lot of nice, sweet notes – vanilla, caramel and toffee flavours. French oak is known for a bit more subtle spicyness, cinnamon and dried fruit while Swedish oak (which we use a lot) comes with a slightly different set of tastenotes – strong, dry, and fresh wood, butterscotch caramel and crisp apples. New oak gives a sharper, woody taste and a lot of tannins that takes time to wear off. To make it sweeter and smoother it is widely popular to use casks which used to hold bourbon. If you want a heavier and darker taste with more dried fruit, roasted coffee and spicyness then you can use a sherry cask. Some distilleries also experiment with wine cask, dessert wine, rum, calvados, cognac and other to give it a unique character.

Then of course you can try something different than oak, chestnut for example. We have used toasted wooden staves of cherry, apple and sugar maple in small batches. And also our own oak tree from Bunge, Gotland. With great results!

Adding to the taste equation is the toasting or charring of the inside of the barrels (or the staves). The harder you toast them, the thicker and richer the whisky will feel in your mouth. The char also acts as a purifier and takes away unwanted sulphuric taste. If you go for a lighter toasting it will give the whisky more of a vanilla, floral and fruity touch.

Then comes the fun part, when it’s time to blend your whisky. Now, some people think a blended whisky is a cheaper, less tasteful whisky – and in a way, that’s true. When we generally talk about a blended whisky, we mean a mix between malt whisky and grain whisky. Grain whisky (wheat, rye, oat, corn) is usually produced in a column still, and uses a continuos process that makes it more efficient and a lot cheaper. Buut it doesn’t give the whisky the same richness in flavour as a traditional double distillation pot still procedure does, using only malted barley. (This is how we make our single malt whisky)

So a ’blended’ whisky is cheaper and tastes less than a malt whisky, yes. But, a malt whisky is also blended, a blend of different casks – still all with malt whisky. A ’single malt’ whisky is a name for a whisky from one distillery – but not from just one cask. That is called a ’single cask’ whisky, no blending at all involved. But apart from those, all whisky is blended, one way or another.

If you use malt whisky from different distilleries it’s called a ’blended malt’ whisky. And that’s what we’ve been doing for a few years now. Maturing and blending whisky from different distilleries, mainly from the Swedish distillers Agitator and Tevsjö. We have bought new make from them and poured it into our casks, and matured them in our military bunker.

When it is time for blending, we start with an idea of what we want to achieve, take samples from different casks and start the blending process. In the end when we are happy with the result, we make the finished blend. So far we have done four different ones (and a few bespoke ones).

When our own single malt is ready for drinking, we will probably blend different casks of that too. The reason for that is that we want to make it a great tasting whisky for you to enjoy!

YOUR OWN BLEND

We now welcome you to our bunker for a tasting event, where you can create your own recipe from our casks. We have whisky that has matured in American oak, Swedish oak, oak from the island, ex sherry, ex bourbon, ex rum. We also have both peaty and non peaty whisky.

When you’ve found out what you like, leave us with the recipe and we will blend, fill, label and pack your bottles and then deliver to your local Systembolag. We label with our beautiful label that has Bräntings Bränneri printed in silver foil and the name of your whisky added to the label.