When you pour yourself a dram or someone hands you one, what’s the first thing you notice? Maybe it’s the glass it’s poured in, maybe it’s the smell if it’s particularly strong. But most likely it’s the colour.
Is it a classic amber, expected of most malt whiskies? Maybe it’s a deeper red, or perhaps it’s fainter, with just a tinge of colour to it. Or maybe it’s something unique, like a Loch Dhu, a distinctive “black” whisky from Mannochmore, and its dark brethren, the Beinn Dubh from Speyside Distillery. A whisky’s colour can tell you plenty about it, what cask it was in, what flavours to expect, but it can also be deceptive. So how much do you know about the colour of whisky?
Let’s start with the basics, where does the colour of a whisky come from? The alcohol that is formed during the distilling process is clear, almost spring water like, so it comes later in the process. In fact, it comes from the wooden casks that the whisky matures in. To be a Scotch whisky, the barrel has to be made from oak, and the spirit has to spend at least 3 years in there. Most commonly this will be either American (Quercus alba) or European (Q. robur) oak, although there is developing interest in other species of oaks but that’s a different topic all together.
So we’ve got our oak cask, what next? Well the factor that gives a whisky it’s colour is what the cask has been used for previously. Almost all Scotch whiskies will have been matured in a cask that has lived an eventful life and been used to store another alcohol. On a rare occasion you may find a Scotch that has been matured in what is known as a virgin cask, that simply means it hasn’t been used for anything before. American bourbons tend to come from virgin casks, a holdover from the Great Depression where virgin casks were required to create additional business as the US tried to restart its economy. But for Scotch, it’ll have more than likely been used for something else and so we reach the crucial point. What was in the cask before and what does this do to the colour?
When choosing a cask to mature their whisky, distillers will be primarily basing it on what flavours it will impart. The secondary impact is the colouring, but it’s having an increasing influence on cask selection because have how much it is valued by whisky drinkers, especially those with a more casual approach.
The most commonly used casks for Scotch maturation are ex-bourbon. These casks tend to give the more amber tones we associate with a good, classic malt whisky. In recent years, there’s been a growing appetite for malts matured in sherry casks, which gives the whisky a deeper, auburn colour, that has proved popular with younger drinkers. Beyond that, we see casks that have held red wines, port, beers, ales, tequila, champagne…you name it, someone is out there trying it! These will produce different hues, and give different flavours, and is part of a growing interest in different, unique varieties of malt whisky.
But it’s not just the previous use of the cask that has an impact. The number of uses (or fills) also plays a part. Casks used for the first time will have a bigger effect on both the colour and flavour, than those that have had multiple previous uses. Most casks will be reused just the once, as the impact will start to wane after this, but it’s not totally unheard of to use a cask more than this. Also playing a role is the char intensity. Very often, the inside of a cask will be charred or toasted to add additional, often distinctive, flavours, and often gives a whisky very deep colours, maybe like a deep mahogany. And finally, time has its say too. The longer a whisky is left to mature in a cask, the more of it’s colour it will pick up. That’s not a hard and fast rule as all the previous factors are often more important, but generally, an older whisky will have a darker, or more intense, colour.
So there we are, the main factors that make up the colour of that dram you’re now dying to drink. It’s not all (there’s a curveball on the way) but all of the above are where your whisky likely got most of its colour from. What role does it play though?
I’m somewhat late to the whisky party, but I found that once I got hooked, I much preferred a dram which had come from a sherry cask. It was the flavours I liked, and so that’s how I developed my appreciation for whisky. I began to associate the auburn, red, colours of a sherry whisky to a whisky that I was very likely to enjoy if I picked it up at a bar. This happens to us all and is to be embraced. But I found it made me more uneasy about whiskies that didn’t have the same colour. I tended to shy away from lighter, or even more amber, whiskies as an unconscious bias. Give me that sherry one every day. But that stunted my development as a whisky drinker. A friend bought me a bottle of light-coloured whisky one day, and I was very sceptical about trying it. It was far from what I’d usually pick, and I was not particularly keen on telling him he’d wasted a decent wad of cash on a whisky I wouldn’t enjoy. But I couldn’t let him down, so I opened it one evening to at least give it a go, and of course, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And so my snobbish attitude to lighter whiskies has lessened (for those interested, it was the Arran Barrel Reserve).
It’s a common story for many new whisky drinkers, and as such, it should be appreciated that for lots of developing enthusiasts, they might just follow their eyes. That’s no bad thing. The colour of a whisky can tell you a lot about what it might taste like. If I see a red, auburn whisky, I immediately think sherry cask, so it might be one I’ll enjoy. If it’s amber, maybe it’s worth having a nose. I’ll take it from there.
So what if the colour doesn’t tell you about the whisky? We come to the fly in the ointment, and that is artificial colouring. Under the regulations that cover the creation and marketing of Scotch malt whisky, using an artificial product that changes the flavour of the whisky is not permissible, but it can be used if it only affects the colour. While it’s not commonplace, there are a number of whiskies out there (that I’ll not name but it’s not hard to find out) that use artificial colouring in the form of E150 caramel colouring. Why is that allowed when there are so many other strict regulations? It’s apparently to help improve consistency, but it feels slightly open to wide and varied interpretation. So even if it has no impact on the flavour and is meant to be to improve consistency from cask to cask and bottle to bottle, is it a problem? That probably depends on who you ask, and everyone will have a different opinion. It does feel like it undermines the maturing process a little if corners can be cut, and it can throw out your judgement of what the profile of the whisky is going to be, but should we really be basing our like or dislike of any whisky just on the colour alone?
The colour of a Scotch malt whisky tells us so much about it on a glance or after a longing stare. And yet there’s so much we can’t discern from just looking at it. I’ve learnt that getting a basic understanding of what the colour might be able to teach you in terms of casks used for maturing, potential flavours you’ll experience and how it was created, can really enhance your experience and enjoyment of getting into the whisky game. But there’s a danger of only sticking to what you know, and I for one, have been guilty of this. Like everything in the magical world of whisky, experimenting to find what you do and don’t like is half the fun, and the colours can be a great way to get the ball rolling, just don’t stick to it rigidly!
Sean black - Freelance writer 