Our Philosophy is fairly simple – it’s all about the taste. Hence why we’ve chosen a stylised taste bud as our logo. We want to bottle good whisky (and rum) that people will want to drink, at a fair price. In fact, we want to bottle what we like to drink. When we are literally putting our name on the bottle it needs to be something that we really have confidence in.

In doing that, we want to be as transparent as we possibly can and will always try to give as much information as we can about what’s in the bottle. Anyone that has been to one of Mark’s tastings will have heard him state ‘Chill filtering is evil’ so obviously we won’t be doing that! Nor will we add any caramel colouring or other additives.

Ultimately as much as we will always take what is inside the bottle very seriously, we very much want people to have fun and enjoy themselves when they are drinking our whiskies. We won’t take ourselves as seriously as we take our cask selection!

Synaesthesia: noun /ˌsɪn.əsˈθiː.zi.ə/

a condition in which someone experiences things through their senses in an unusual way, for example by experiencing a colour as a sound, or a number as a position in space.

I have a very mild form of Synaesthesia which is basically when one of your senses triggers a response from another sense receptor – so in my case when I smell things I smell in colour, I visualise the smell as a colour. We therefore decided that grouping our whiskies by colour, instead of the usual regions, could be quite interesting. We have come up with 9 different colours of taste buds with 3 colours in each, so 27 different colours to choose from.

If I smell olive green on the nose of the whisky that will be reflected on the lower label of the whisky. The theory being that if you like one of our whiskies with a green label then you will possibly like others in the same colour spectrum. However this is completely untested! It is by no means a scientific way of categorising things as not all smells give me logical colours, and to be honest it is not something that I have taken any notes on before. It will be interesting to see if any similarity in styles does emerge when whiskies are grouped under their smell colour or if it is all quite random.

I plan to write a blog post soon to explore this a bit more and to give examples of whiskies you may know and where they would sit on our smell colour range. All in all it is a bit of fun but something that I am looking forward to exploring further.

Mark