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[pensive music playing]

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[film camera rolling]

[Dave] Whisky is boiled beer. It's simple as that.

You take the cereal, you grind it up, you add hot water to it.

That converts starch into sugar.

You add yeast to that sweet liquid.

That ferments it into a beer.

And then you boil it in a copper still.

Alcohol boils at a lower temperature to water.

So all the flavours you've created during fermentation

and the flavours from the cereal itself end up being concentrated.

Then you're going to take that,

and because it's still fairly rough around the edges,

you're going to age it in oak casks.

And the oak casks mellow it out, add more flavour itself,

because it's coming out of the oak,

and it softens out, and boom, there you have it.

That's whisky.

[pensive music playing]

[Dave] I'm biased because I'm Glaswegian.

And, you know, I haven't lived there for a long time,

but, you know, where's home?

Glasgow's home.

It's incredibly friendly, it's incredibly funny,

it's working class, it's an architectural splendour.

It's been at the heart of incredible movements in art and design,

and music, and whisky-making, and trade and industry.

It's been a place of incredible poverty.

It's frustrating and it's tough at times, but, yeah, that's life.

And it's where I was brought up.[laughs]

That's it, you know.

And you've got to accept it in all its kind of messy contradictions.

That's kind of Scottish, I think.

My dad was a whisky drinker.

He would have one dram every night when he came home from work.

I got to a certain age.

I suppose I must have been like 10 or 11,

and I was allowed to add the water to his whisky,

and he was very particular about it.

You know, the tap had to run for a certain amount of time.

You had to judge exactly the coldness of the water.

And exactly the right amount of water had to go into the whisky,

just enough to kind of cloud the dram,

so you get that viscometry going on in there.

And it would just be that one dram of a blended whisky every night,

unless his family were around.

And at that point, all my uncles and aunts would arrive.

And all the men drank whisky, apart from my Aunt Mary.

My Aunt Mary drank whisky and soda.

She was considered quite racy for doing that.

There'd be music, there'd be… there'd be fiddles.

Uncle Tom would have a fiddle out, my Aunt Jean would be at the piano.

Everybody'd be singing songs, you'd be doing your party pieces.

All my cousins would be around.

All the adults smoked in those days, so you'd find yourself…

It was a bit like an Ivor Cutler scene.

You'd find yourself kind of on the carpet underneath this layer of smoke.

So, I suppose even from an early age,

I was aware of whisky's ability to pull people together.

It was part and parcel of being a community,

part and parcel of being a family.

And I think when you look at whisky from a historical point of view,

you realise that once you cut through all the business

and everything surrounding whisky, that that's what its role has been.

Somehow, whisky has a greater function,

and its greater function is this sense of being part of an environment,

part of a culture.

And because it's part of an environment, it's an expression of that environment,

an expression of who you are.

Therefore, there's a direct link between that and art and literature.

It's gone beyond just this thing in the glass,

and it's somehow rippled out across the whole of Scottish culture.

[pensive music continues]

[ocean waves crashing]

[Dave] Islay is this wee island off the coast of Scotland.

It's a hundred miles due west of Glasgow.

And it has everything you need in one place to make great whisky.

It's a great example of how the rock and the climate

bring barley into life and bring farming into life

and allow the possibility of whisky to be made.

And you've also got just remarkable people

who understand how to manipulate all these things

to make something which is compelling.

And they're also quite thirsty,

so they've been doing it quite a long time.

You've got to have a bit of fun with whisky.

[man] Of course you have. That's what whisky's all about. Fun.

[Dave] Do you think people are a bit too serious about it?

[Iain] Well, it's good to be serious.

We wanna be serious ourselves when we're doing it,

but it's nice to get a wee bit of fun.

-Aye, because you kinda… You miss that. -Oh, definitely.

You know you guys. You're there to put smiles on people's faces, aren't you?

[Iain] Hopefully.

[Dave] How long has the family been here on Islay?

How… How do you date it back?

Well, we can date it back a long, long time.

I think… Definitely over 200 years.

[Dave] What was it like growing up on Islay? Was there whisky around?

[Iain] Yes, there was whisky along.

My grandfather liked whisky, and my late dad liked whisky too.

My late dad worked on Laphroaig for a long time.

And he would enjoy a dram.

They weren't big drinkers, it was just when they were going out,

special occasions, having a few drams.

And what would he have drunk then, your dad and your granddad?

-[exhales] Anything they would get. -[both laugh]

[Dave] But it seems to me whisky-making, when you were growing up,

was much more like the old ways of doing it,

-like the old farm way of doing it. -[Iain] Yes.

[Dave] You know, you would close down in the summer,

you… you would cut your peat, you would distil over the winter,

your cattle would get the draff and etcetera, etcetera.

Distilleries in the old days were only going for so long.

In the summertime, they used to stop, go out to the peat moss,

cut the peats, lift them and take them home.

[Dave] So what you're cutting now is what, hundreds of years…

[Iain] Yes. Thousands of years old, yes.

[Dave] Tell me what the difference between the top peat and the bottom peat is.

[Iain] Well, you see there, the top peat is very stringy,

and the bottom peat looks more like coal.

The top peat's giving you the smoke, whereas bottom peat is burning like coal.

So, the distilleries want the top peat because…

-Yes, to get smoke. -Right.

[soothing music playing]

[Dave] There's a distinct possibility.

that Islay was where distillation made its first footfall in Scotland,

thanks to the arrival there of a family of doctors called the Beatons.

And they began distilling from beer,

a drink which became known as "uisge beatha", water of life.

The Beatons were the loyal doctors to a household in Ireland,

and that household married into the McDonalds,

and when that sort of alliance

was done about the 1300s at that point,

then, you know, that aqua vie, uisge beathaproduction

then would have come to Islay as medicine.

[Georgie] It would have come into the royal household, into the court.

It would have been used as medicine.

Of course, we know as well it's not just medicine it was used for,

and then it would be, as you would see in story and song,

that it was actually used before going to battle and celebrations,

things like that as well.

But that's where the sort of secret of distillation would have journeyed in.

So Islay was important for so many different levels,

but, actually, the people and the type of people

that were actually living here and ruling huge swathes

of Ireland and Scotland from Islay

would have actually brought that here to the royal household.

-[Dave] So it had strategic importance. -[Georgie] Absolutely.

[Dave] And then something which was, you know, able to be produced

because of the conditions

and something which was of high quality and using the herbs

and everything which was growing because of these conditions.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, everything came together for being a perfect place.

[wind blowing]

[Dave] I seem to have spent a bit of time wandering around graveyards.

[Claire] I think that's the thing when you're interested in the past and…

-It happens to me a lot. -[both laughing]

This is a dedication to the Beaton physicians of Islay.

I mean, it's an… an example of the stature that they had

and how highly esteemed they were at that point in history.

And these two doctors, it's believed, are linked to the Patrick Beaton,

who was Robert the Bruce's head physician.

It's interesting to see that distillation is first found, you know,

around about the time the Beatons arrived in Scotland, it's first documented.

It's hard to think where else it could come from at that point in history,

because they brought so much skill and knowledge with them.

I suppose, these days, you say, "Well, they're doctors".

But in those days, they're… they're quasi-magicians,

they're druids, they are… they are possessors of incredible facts.

-[Claire] It was very dangerous times. -[Dave] It started in the century, yes.

[Claire] And Neal Beaton, in fact, was accused of witchcraft.

The accusation was based on him admitting

that he could tell the properties of plants

through taste, and by colour, and by smell.

And that's an early form of chemistry.

I mean, that's how… that's how we discovered chemistry.

You know, he was a pioneer at the time, but he was accused of witchcraft for this

because it was not something that his society understood.

[pensive music playing]

[Dave] Storytelling is cultural history.

Sometimes it seems fantastical,

and it might just be a poetic way of describing a truth.

So the… the potential origins of distillation

and, you know, why… why distillation was a secret guarded

primarily by women for a long time

becomes part and parcel of that great story about the Queen of the Sidhe,

the fairy queen in Fairy Hill on Islay,

summoning the women of the islands to Fairy Hill,

where once they had arrived and the doors on the hill had opened

and… and all the women of the islands entered,

she poured them, into their scallop shells, a liquid,

and the liquid was knowledge.

You know, there… there's, you know,

the knowledge of distillation encapsulated.

And there's wise women, there's… there's power, there's information,

and it's rooted in the landscape, it's rooted in the place.

It's a story of… of incredible beauty,

but there's a real… there's an abiding truth at the heart of it,

and the abiding truth is, you know, women had this knowledge.

But it's a much more interesting way of saying it

rather than, you know, actually your great-granny, you know,

picked these herbs off the rocks.

You know, you take it off into this… this mythic realm,

and it just, it creates even greater power.

Fantastic.

[Claire] Yeah, I think so. I think if we went for the…

That's super nutty. That's got the macadamia nut…

-Yes! -…kind of thing going on.

Now that you've said that, I can totally get that nuttiness.

[Dave] We had this mad idea that if uisge beathawas made in Islay,

we might as well recreate it.

So we went around the island and picked a whole number of different herbs,

for their curative and aromatic purposes.

So there's angelica, there's wild thyme,

there's hog seed, creeping thistle, and meadowsweet.

All went into our brand-new, yet ancient recipe.

-[James] So we just… load it up? -[Claire] Yeah.

This is really hubble-bubble toil and trouble. [laughs]

[Dave] We have, of course, taken out a licence for this.

[James chuckles] Yes.

Just in case anyone from HMRC is watching.

[Claire laughs]

-Honest folks. -[Claire] All above board.

No excise man to be chasing us.

[Dave] So just kinda coming back to the principles of this…

I mean, Scotland has the right terroir,

the right conditions for growing barley, for growing oats,

and therefore people began to make spirit from what grew around them.

Presumably, the people who were here originally, you know,

if they were making medicine or uisge beathasor whatever,

you know, they're still only going to be using what grows around them.

The old adage is, medieval times,

you never made it seven miles from home, so it would have been…

These days, there's such a focus on provenance and local, and…

You know, that-- You had little choice in that, I suppose, back then.

Each region, each village, each family would have had their own little take,

everyone's mum's clootie dumplings

are always the best there's ever been, so… [laughs]

[James] You know, very often, it's the most everyday plants

that are giving you such fabulous--

I mean hogweed.

You'll find precious few folk around

that realise the… the massive explosion of flavour

you'll get out something as basic as hogweed, hog seeds.

Here are people who are living within a landscape, you know,

and actually know every nuance.

You know, they understand the movements of the deer,

they understand the seasons,

they understand the plants, etcetera, etcetera.

And it… it filters through into the poetry and the song.

But it's also here.

You know, it's also here in distillation, and it's here, presumably,

you know, in some tangential way,

in the flavours that they're going to be producing in their whiskies.

[seagulls squawking]

[Georgie] It's a communal thing, really, isn't it?

I think it would have been very much around the,

"this is the grain that we have", you know,

within a family or a small community.

And they would be making it communally, for sharing communally.

It was never about selling whisky.

It was always about sharing whisky

and always about sharing stories and times together.

And I think that's very much, you know, a part of the culture on Islay is that,

because you are more isolated,

that what you have belongs to everyone within your community,

and everyone is there to help each other.

I think that that probably hasn't changed.

I think that's the way that's always been.

[Niall] But also a long, dark winter.

-[Dave laughs] -[Niall] You know…

And there wasn't an awful lot.

You know, the crops were in, the peats were cut,

the animals were back in from the sheilings.

They've distilled their spirit and they're sitting there,

it's dark at half past 4:00.

It's not light really until nine o'clock in the morning.

There was a really rich oral culture of stories, and tales and traditions.

They had to do this, because if they didn't, what would they do?

You know, and whisky would have played a large part in that as well.

[liquid trickling]

[Claire] Oh, hold on, we're coming.

That's sweet.

That's really sweet. [chuckles]

That's the… That's the angelica.

Oh, yeah, wow.

-[Claire] I think it's angelica. -That's extraordinary.

It's really come through.

-[Claire] Yes, it really, really did. -[Dave] It's really, really intense.

[Claire] Oh, my goodness.

[Dave] That's fantastic. I can live with that.

[Dave] Traditionally, with uisge beathas, they ended up being coloured.

So we might colour this one up.

I think we'll just kind of experiment and see if…

You know, just to give it a tiny little bit of colour.

I love it. Love it. [laughs]

[sniffs] Yep, really nice.

-[Dave] We have uisge beatha. -[Claire speaking in Irish]

-Oh, yeah, it's all coming together there. -[Dave] Yeah.

You do get that orange back from the angelica.

It's fantastic. You know, it takes you right back

to the early days of… of distillation.

This is what it would have been like, you know.

-Yay! -[all laughing]

["Mo Thruaigh Leir Thu 'Ille Bhuidhe" playing]

♪ Mo thruaigh leir thu ille bhuidhe ♪

♪ 'S ann an duigh tha'n deigh ort ♪

[Dave] From a historical point of view,

how important was song to… to the Gaelic-speaking community?

[Rachel] Every task would have a song to go along with it.

A good example is like a waulking song, not a walking along the road,

but waulking the tweed.

So women would sit around a table

and sort of beat the tweed to shrink it and make it water-tight.

And so this would have a kind of specific kind of beat and a rhythm,

and… and they would sing these waulking songs.

For me, even though, like, a lot were eventually written down,

Gaelic poetry is, in fact, lyrics.

There's a turn of phrase that I really like, that people often use,

which is, "so-and-so gave me this song".

You know, there's sort of people giving these songs,

passing them on through, you know, the generations,

which is a lovely… lovely thing.

♪ Mo thruaigh leir thu ille bhuidhe ♪

[Rachel] So, the song, "Mo Thruaigh Leir Thu 'Ille Bhuidhe", it's called.

"'Ille Bhuidhe" is the blond-haired boy.

And I didn't know this, it was the great Kenna Campbell

who told me once that the blond-haired boy was actually the whisky.

And the verses sing about smuggling whisky from Ireland over to Scotland.

It's got a lot of momentum, the song.

It kind of just sort of chugs along, you know.

[Dave] Over the past two days,

we have indulged in something which is quasi-legal…

[people laughing]

[Dave] Umm, to recreate an uisge beatha.

So this is what we're going to be drinking.

["Mo Thruaigh Leir Thu 'Ille Bhuidhe" continues]

[Dave] Martin Martin, whose name keeps reappearing,

wrote this account of… of drinking in the islands of Scotland

when he was travelling, stravaiging around the beginning of the 18th century,

and it goes something like this.

The manner of their drinking was called a "streah a 'round".

[Dave] And a cup would be passed from one to the other,

and the cup would be drained,

and the drinking would go on 24, sometimes 48 hours.

-[people laughing] -[Dave] You're here for a while, guys.

Until all became drunk.

And there were men stationed at the door with wheelbarrows, taxi firms…

-[people laughing] -[Dave] …to carry them off.

Then you look at it a bit more closely and you say,

"Actually, this is an important moment in the history of whisky,

for this is an account of whisky actually becoming part of us".

It's not-- It's a community gathering together.

And automatically, even these days, we gather together in circles.

It's democratic. Nobody is sitting at the head of the table.

And you can imagine just the cup getting passed from one to the other,

and the conversation starting,

and it's going to be about crops or it's going to be about marriages.

It might be about war or whatever, but it's a community coming together

and it's whisky sitting there at the heart of it.

And for me, that account is whisky becoming part of us.

So here's to whisky being part of us.

-[people speaking in Irish] -[Dave] And I hope you like it.

[pensive music playing]

My official first dram was just after my dad died.

And my Uncle Tom took me to the pub

and went up to the bar, and he just ordered two whiskies.

And it was--

I remember thinking at the time, you know, this is an important moment,

because this somehow was a confirmation that things had changed.

I was a man. Something had happened.

And it was a way of perhaps getting over grief,

it was a way of him in his own really lovely, quiet ways of saying,

"All right, boy, you know, you've grown up".

[indie music playing]

[singing indistinctly]

So you probably don't have a clue who's gonna walk through the door next,

because, suddenly, you've got an international audience,

you've got locals coming in, you've got students coming in,

all different age groups, etcetera, etcetera.

I had a guy in last night who had 20 minutes before his train at Central,

and so he was in for one dram, one last dram before he left Scotland,

which was really nice, but he put us under a bit of pressure.

[Frank] You know, I'm going, "All right, okay,

so how long have we got to pick this? Would you like…"

"No, I just want one dram now". I was like, "All right, fine".

There's more people talking about it, and there's more people talking about it

in ways that people who are not natural whisky drinkers

might get on board with more.

Once you're in the door, once you've got a dram in your hand,

you have something you're drinking, something you like, you don't like,

you can express an opinion on it,

and you might end up talking to the guy next to you and asking what he's drinking.

Are you drinking the same thing or are you drinking a different thing?

And you'll end up chatting about it

because you've now got a shared vocabulary.

You've never met this person before in your life,

but you've now got something to talk about.

It's not difficult to make whisky.

It's difficult to make good whisky, but it's not difficult to make whisky.

It was always a simple drink.

Everything else that we've added to it over the years

is just because we like getting into the nitty-gritty of something.

You get people who have more of an interest in provenance,

about who's making it, where it's made, and what it's made from.

And that then plays right into whisky's real house.

That gives them a chance to talk about everything

that's ever gone on in Scotland.

[Dave] For it's such a humble drink.

You know, you think of it. You know, it's what?

You know, barley, water, yeast, and oak.

Boom, there you go. Thank you very much.

[Frank] It's guys making it in a cave by a bong.

You're not talking about a château in France surrounded by vineyards.

-[Dave] Thanks a lot, man. [laughs] -It's good to see you.

[Frank and Dave speaking in Irish]

How are you?

[Dave] So one of the interesting parallels that exist between whisky and the arts

is this idea of the continual.

That the artist, the musician, the whisky maker,

is a link in a chain that goes back for centuries.

There's this tradition, but it's a tradition

that continually adds new variants and elements

in order for it to grow and evolve.

It's like singing a ballad.

The words are there, the tune is there, but if you're singing that old song today,

you're going to be putting your own spin on it.

And it's this balance that exists between tradition and innovation

that are the roots of creativity.

And that's what fascinates me about whisky.

And I think that is what roots whisky in the culture.

["Firewater" playing]

♪ How can I ever know you? ♪

♪ How can I ever know you? ♪

♪ I know your way your way of living Till I know your way of dying ♪

♪ And how will I remember Till I taste the nectar of your ember? ♪

♪ Where is the firewater tonight? Where is the firewater? ♪

[Alasdair] I'm always kind of writing, but at the same time,

I'm… I'm also researching traditional songs.

So, you know, while I'm waiting for a new…

a new batch of self-written material to kind of germinate,

I'll be focusing more on the traditional songs.

♪ How can I ever know you? ♪

♪ How can I ever know you? ♪

♪ How can I know you're full grown Till I've known you as a child? ♪

[Dave] You've got traditional songs, but you've got electronics and--

But you've got a 19th century piano.

I mean, how important is it for you

to be constantly moving the tradition forward,

being aware of what's around it without actually losing what makes it special?

I think of what the great English folk singer, Martin Carthy, said,

something along the lines of,

"You know, the worst thing that you can do with these songs is just not sing them".

You know, it's… I think as long as you have love and respect, and…

treat them with care, you can be as radical as you like.

♪ Clear as a firewater ♪

♪ Sky above us, soil beneath us We'll build our library of aethers ♪

♪ Library of aethers ♪

♪ Library of aethers We'll build our library of aethers ♪

♪ Library of aethers ♪

♪ Where is the firewater? Tonight, where is the firewater? ♪

♪ Where is the firewater? ♪

♪ Where is the firewater? ♪

[Dave] My lightbulb moment, my whisky epiphany,

took place in the far northwest of Scotland.

The three of us decided to go to a cèilidh in Ullapool,

which is about 30 miles away.

And knew that a whole bunch of friends

would have a head start on us in terms of the drink,

so we decided we would try and achieve some… some degree of parity,

on the road down to Ullapool.

And two of us began drinking.

The driver didn't, I hasten to add.

And I looked out the window, and there was this landscape,

there was the incredible moorland,

and sudden mountains rearing up and lochans and the sun just going down.

And I took another sip, and I realised that this whisky is from this place.

You know, this is more than just a drink.

This is a manifestation of place.

The people who made this have created it.

You know, it was a spark of creativity.

And, you know, whisky, suddenly, for me, at that particular point,

became something I wanted to learn more and more about.

Whisky suddenly became more than just something

that was made in this kind of obscure thing called a distillery

and actually became part of a creative impulse.

And that was it. I fell in love.

I asked you, as we were wandering here, you know, about your whisky epiphany,

you know, that moment where everything just went "wow".

You said it was Talisker.

My wife and I, girlfriend at the time,

had been picking grapes in France, got friendly with an American guy,

who was also picking grapes.

He was from California. He said, "Oh, hey, I'm coming to Scotland".

So he came to stay with us in my student flat in Edinburgh,

and he said, "Can we go and look at some distilleries?"

So I borrowed my auntie's car, my Auntie Jenny from Lochgelly,

I borrowed her car, and we drove around the north of Scotland

visiting as many distilleries as we could.

-No real plan to it at all. -[Dave] Yes.

But we had some amazing nights.

And one in particular, we were staying in a youth hostel in Uig,

I think, Isle of Skye, way in the middle of nowhere,

and we knew that the local whisky was Talisker,

and we walked into this quite a rough bar, I would say.

You know, the piano player stopped playing as we walked in through the front door.

The barman was kind of polishing glasses, looking at us a wee bit suspect, you know.

Walked up and said, "Two Taliskers, please".

And he went, "Sixty, 70 or 100 proof?"

I went, "Hundred".

-The piano player starts playing again. -[Dave and Ian laughing]

[Ian] I mean, that wee tour I did with my friend was a fantastic adventure.

An adventure in place, an adventure in geography, and meeting people.

You go to Shetland, different people.

People are very different from the people on the mainland.

You go to Aberdeen, people are different from Dundee,

different from Inverness, different from Glasgow.

Go to Western Isles, different again.

So it's this very multifarious small country.

And the whisky's part of that, because every whisky is different.

Every whisky's different, every whisky is particular to that area.

And all the cultures and all the people are different.

The language is different. The way we talk is different.

It's a very insular country in some ways but also a very outward-looking country.

It's a country that's very proud of its past but very fixed on the future.

It's a country that is open to change but is also wary of change.

It's a complicated place, a really complicated place.

[birds chirping]

[Alasdair] I find it helps to make me stupid.

I've got a very active brain, but if I stupefy myself with whisky,

I fall asleep easier.

It makes it easy for… easier…

for intellectually active folk,

who find their intelligence a bit of a pest,

to stupefy themselves.

In relation to Scotland, if you look at it,

you'll see that it is like…

a large collection of islands jammed together.

This was brought forcibly to me by…

a French filmmaker.

The way he put it was that the…

that Glasgow had little to do with Edinburgh,

that the Highlands had little to do with the Lowlands,

and that the Borders were distinct as well.

And you can see it running right through, that…

that the nations that Scotland was eventually gathered together

from all had their capital cities

on a variety of different volcanic rocks.

Edinburgh Castle, Dumbarton.

These different nations

were always squabbling or fighting with each other.

The unifying power that made the Highlands and Lowlands and…

and the other lords and lairds cooperate

was the English attempt to take over,

and the Scots united to prevent that…

for a long time.

When I was at university, there was quite a thing for the Caledonian Antisyzygy,

being where extremes meet.

In MacDiarmid's phrase.

So it's that kind of tension between polar… polarities.

It's in all of us, this Jekyll and Hyde, this…

this tension between doing good and doing-- and breaking the rules.

It's fun to break the rules, it's fun to be Mr Hyde,

it's fun to make up your own rules for living,

and not have to live by society's rules.

Isn't this antisyzygy thing a peculiar Scottish phenomenon?

Or do we just think it is because we're Scottish?

It permeates our literature in a way that I don't see in other cultures.

Specifically in literature, I think that notion of the divided self

is everywhere in Scottish poetry and fiction and drama.

Maybe it's peculiar in some ways to smaller countries

that feel smothered by bigger cultures next door to them.

But I do think that there's a darkness in the Scottish soul.

You've got long dark nights, right?

Long dark nights, when we just tend to sit and brood.

We brood, we drink whisky, and we read books.

[baby crying]

[Ian] It's the man himself, Fergusson, striding with his books.

-Yeah. That looks cool. -Good man. And he's buried here.

-Let's go and have a wee chat with him. -I've not been here for ages.

Yeah, Fergusson is one of these poets that I wasn't aware of

when I was at school.

At primary school, we had Burns drummed into us, by the Burns Club.

And then suddenly, you know,

you became aware of this guy, Robert Fergusson,

who had been writing these extraordinary long poems about Edinburgh

that were very much about the city of the time,

and he'd been forgotten about.

[Dave] But also, he wrote about whisky, which nobody was doing.

Uh-huh. So, I was wondering if, at his grave,

perhaps you could read the first four verses

of "The Kings Birth-Day in Edinburgh".

-The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh. -[Dave] Which ended in a riot.

[Ian] Yeah, quite. Of course.

But, I mean, I'm no poet myself, but I'll give it my best shot.

"The Kings Birth-Day in Edinburgh.

I sing the day sae aften sung Wi' which our lugs hae yearly rung

In whase loud praise the Muse has dung A' kind o' print

But wow, the limmer's fairly flung There's naithing in't

I'm fain to think the joy's the same In London town as here at hame

Whare fouk o' ilka age and name Baith blind an' cripple

Forgather aft, O fy for shame To drink an' tipple

O Muse, be kind, an' dinna fash us To flee awa' beyont Parnassus

Nor seek for Helicon to wash us That heath'nish spring

Wi' Highland whisky scour our hawses An' gar us sing

Begin then, dame, ye've drunk your fill You woudna hae the tither gill?

You'll trust me, mair would do you ill An' ding you doitet

Troth 'twould be sair against my will To hae the wyte o't".

I would change that line.

I would sort of switch those words around, but that's me, you know.

[chuckles] I don't understand all of that, but it's lovely,

and it's musical, and it is about whisky.

It's a lovely thing for a nation to have its own drink.

I mean, whisky has been hugely successful.

I mean, Fergusson was the first to start recording it in literature, really,

and doing it in a way that said, look, this is part of the people,

this is the people's drink, this is part of our culture, our nation.

It's this drink is closely linked in with us.

The Edinburgh he's talking about is an Edinburgh that,

when people come here, now in contemporary times,

they want to see that Edinburgh.

And because the Old Town is fairly intact, or a lot of it's fairly intact,

they can see his Edinburgh, they can see Fergusson's Edinburgh,

they can see the Edinburgh of Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson.

So when you go down these wee alleyways off the Royal Mile

or into a kirkyard, like Cannongate Kirkyard,

you will encounter the Edinburgh that would have been known intimately

by people like Robert Fergusson.

This is what he would have seen, this is where he would have walked around,

and these are the bars he would have gone into.

And there is that myth of the writer, the hard-drinking writer,

which, you know, has always been there.

And you look at the number of great writers who've been done down by it.

And who's to say it didn't play a small part

in the downfall of Robert Fergusson?

I mean, he did end up in a lunatic asylum, he did end up his days impoverished.

And, you know, sometimes a drink brings out the worst in you

as well as best in you, and not everybody can handle it.

[pensive music playing]

[Dave] The song you're gonna be singing for us, can you tell us about that?

[Alasdair] Yeah, the song is called "Johnny My Man".

And I think it was first published around 1850,

and I suppose it's basically a song about the perils of drink.

♪ Oh, Johnny my man ♪

♪ Do you no think o' risin' ♪

♪ The day is far spent ♪

♪ And the nicht's coming on ♪

♪ The siller's a' done ♪

♪ And the stoup steamed the foyer ♪

What I love about this song is that it's, it's the wife

that is the person who is saying,

"your… your babies are crying, your babies are starving,

you've got to come home".

And I think that's what makes it so powerful

and less of a kind of a preachy ballad

and more of something that really gets to the heart of the matter,

which is this absent father, absent husband,

who is basically being kind of ground down by the perils of whisky.

[Dave] Well, you know, it's kind of the emotional impact.

♪ Come in by, my dearie ♪

♪ And sit down beside me ♪

♪ For it's time enough yet ♪

♪ To be gaun awa' hame ♪

♪ How about Johnny my man? ♪

♪ When we first fell a-courtin' ♪

♪ There was naething but love then ♪

♪ To trouble our mind ♪

♪ And we spent all our days ♪

♪ 'Mang the sweet-scented roses ♪

♪ And we never thought ♪

♪ Towards gang awa' hame ♪

I was thinking about it on the train… on the train on the way down here,

like about analogies between the process of making whisky

and then the process of making music and…

And I kind of think of both of them in alchemical ways,

in that you're taking these base elements

and, you know, combining them and processing them,

working intensely and carefully with them

to… to create something new and unique.

And, you know, I suppose every… every whisky is unique.

Every… Every new piece of music

that's been created by this alchemical means is unique.

It's a kind of paradox because you're doing something

that is ancient and has been done countless times before,

you know, with whisky, with music, with any kind of art,

yet you're also… you're also creating something

that's never been created before.

You know, just because of the particular arrangement of the elements

that you're working with.

♪ But thae days are a' past ♪

♪ And will never return, love ♪

♪ So sit down beside me ♪

♪ Nor think o' gaun hame ♪

History is a kind of slippery thing. Everybody's got their own interpretation.

So this is my interpretation of the history of whisky,

in a fairly condensed, distilled form.

If you take the Beatons, the Beatons are coming from a medicinal side,

and at the same time, contemporaneous to that,

you have alchemists looking at distillation

in a completely different way,

in a much more kind of abstract and philosophical way,

including the great mad alchemist, John Damian,

who was the court alchemist to King James IV,

and who decreed at one point that he had learned how to fly

and… and said he could fly from the battlements of Stirling Castle.

And he made himself a set of wings, feathery wings,

and leapt off the battlements

and plummeted into a dung heap at the bottom

and broke his… broke his thighbone.

I think as a result of that,

people look at alchemists as being kind of charlatans,

but they weren't.

A lot of them were actually very, very serious scientists.

So you kinda got two schools.

You've got this kind of medicinal school

and you've got the more theoretical school from alchemy,

and you've got places such as Lindores, where monks were distilling.

Again, possibly for medicine and medicinal purposes,

but also equally perhaps for experimental purposes.

The knowledge of distillation then spreads out across the community,

so that the people themselves began to make a distillate,

probably flavoured up.

And then slowly but surely,

the medicinal side simply disappears completely.

[synth music playing]

[Dave] Distillation was an agricultural activity,

so the knowledge of distillation, the use of distillation,

and the development of this thing that we call whisky

spreads across the whole of Scotland.

And one of the most important areas which began to develop

is what we now refer to as Speyside.

Because what happened at that particular point is that

there's various changes in laws and taxation,

which effectively criminalised small-scale distillation.

And as a result, this kind of smuggling era, as it's called,

begins to… begins to start, begins to commence.

When you think of it in this way,

you know, where is the best place to make illicit hooch?

The best place to make illicit hooch is somewhere which is hard to get to.

Somewhere which is hard to police.

And if you go to the southern part of Speyside,

into the braes of Glenlivet and the southern part,

which is very wild, very rough, lots of kind of hidden little valleys,

they're hard to police.

If you wanna hide away, this is… this is the place, isn't it?

Time to get the hiking boot on, I would say?

[Dave] I think so. Off we go.

[man] Well, it's pretty fertile as well, though.

I mean, it's kinda… It's high up, it's green there.

But it's completely… You're pretty much completely surrounded by hills.

This is a perfectly cut location.

Long winter months where the… the area could be cut off.

You didn't have modern snowploughs.

What a great time to turn that… that summer barley…

Turn that summer barley into…

…into a cash crop that you can sell to the middle men,

and it'll be smuggled away.

[Dave] Tell us about Scalan, then.

[Alan] Scalan is fascinating, because in the 17th century, this was a college.

College of Scalan. And this is where the priests came to do their training.

Remote, because we were after the Reformation.

But these guys went to Rome, they read the classics,

but they also had to farm for themselves.

The burn. Water supply, good, clean water supply,

and lots of springs on the sides of the hills.

So a lot of ale, bread…

And who knows what else. You know?

-Maybe do a bit of brewing. A wee ale. -Right.

-You might just boil it, and it's whisky. -Aye, just by accident, Your Honour.

Yeah. Just, "Oh! Perfect!"

Just dropped it in the soup pot by mistake.

And you've got plenty-- If somebody is forming a lookout,

they've plenty of time to see anybody coming,

because the redcoats would be coming in over that hill there.

[Dave] Because they're hard to police, they begin to specialise,

and you see these kind of centres of excellence beginning to spring up.

So it began to build a reputation. It began to be branded.

People began asking for Glenlivet Whisky, because it was a sign of the good stuff.

[Andrew] The first record of whisky came when the legs of the horses

pulling the coal down from Dunfermline got a bit tangled up

and they were dressed with a dressing of aqua vitae.

[both laughing]

That's… As far as I could make out, that was in 1768.

In the early part of the 18th century,

you had… if you… if you had a still, you had to have it licensed.

And then Lord Bruce,

who was made responsible for collecting the duties…

Whether he collected a little extra as well, I don't know.

It wasn't until 1800

that we built a large shop,

which had everything in it for the men to work.

And by pure chance,

this volume here has survived.

It's from 1824 to about 1826,

and in it is recorded

the amount of whisky that went through the shop in Charlestown,

and it amounted to just under 6,500 gallons.

Now I'm not certain whether they were Imperial gallons

or whether they were Scottish gallons,

but considering there were only 132 houses in the village of Charlestown,

this is not bad going.

-That's a… That's a fair amount. -Yeah.

[indistinct chatter]

[Dave] We navigate our lives by our sense of smell.

And it's remarkable how many aromas are triggered by our childhood memories.

And the smell of vanilla for me was eating ice cream in Millport in the summer.

It was only years later,

when I was walking around Glasgow's Botanic Gardens,

that I found vanilla growing.

And the smell of coconut for me was hot gorse flowers.

Whisky has this ability to take you on a journey into your past

and also into its landscape.

Every sniff, every sip will take you deeper in.

And once you begin to be aware of the aromas around you,

so you begin to consciously engage with the world.

And you know, what is better than engaging with the world?

Gaelic poetry also has this vivid engagement

with landscape and the senses.

Like whisky-making, it's a manifestation of place and creative thinking.

-[water running] -[birds chirping]

[wind blowing]

-[Dave] You know this book, don't you? -[Alan] Nan Shepherd, yeah, yeah.

[Dave] There's a thing in it I wanted to have a wee read of.

This is her. She's walking into…

And as Robert McFarlane said, she didn't walk up a mountain, she walked into one.

-Walked into it. -Yeah.

-So it was all-encompassing. -Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

You know, what's the point of just getting to the top?

[Dave] You know, it's actually getting in and understanding it.

That's… That's more important.

[Alan] I probably totally agree with that, you know, because--

Yeah, let's… let's climb that mountain.

We've bagged a Corbett. Let's get up there, let's get down again.

-What are we missing? -Yes.

I'll tell you what you're missing. See there? Here we go.

"Each of the senses is a way into what the mountain has to give".

"The palate can taste the wild berries, blaeberry,

wild free-born cranberry, and most subtle and sweet of all,

the averin or cloudberry, a name like a dream".

"The juicy gold globe melts against the tongue,

but who can describe a flavour?"

"So with the scents".

"All the aromatic and heady fragrances,

pine and birch, bog myrtle, the spicy juniper,

heather and the honey-sweet orchis,

and the clean smell of wild thyme mean nothing at all in words".

-"They are there to be smelled". -Yes.

And you see, the first time I read that, I went,

"All right, I might as well give up,

for that means, like, whisky-tasting notes mean nothing", you know?

[both laughing]

But then, if you look at it, it's really about experiencing it.

It's about, when you are out and about, you live it, you pick up something,

and I spotted you, as we were walking up the road,

you picked a rose and you smelled the rose.

-Yeah, that's it. -You know? And it's…

it's living and understanding what the aromas are around you.

The sense is, is that it started years ago in this…

Everybody was, "Oh, there are big, black mountains behind

and oh, it's such a barren terrain".

[Alan] No, it's not.

It's fragrant. Today, the mist's down.

There's a bit of moisture in the air. The countryside's very fragrant.

Now, that--

There's a coconut, the whins, the broom and things, it's passed.

But you get that coconut when it's out, and…

It's… It's more than that. And you're right.

She walked into the mountain, yes. Yeah.

[Dave] When you're sitting there

and you're standing there in your library, with all these bottles in front of you

in all the different colours, all the different aromas,

how do you navigate?

What's the process?

I'm looking for what I would describe as weight,

intensity of aroma and defining character.

So it could be that it's really heavy, it's very vanilla,

but there's a spike of citrus in there.

[Sarah] But it could be very vanilla with not so much citrus,

there's a hint of dried fruit coming in there.

But sometimes, you'll find that vanilla with dried fruit, and you go,

"Oh, where does this go?"

"It doesn't fit in either of the places for the whiskies that I'm trying to make".

"Am I gonna make a new product with it?"

And sometimes I'm not sure, so I'll just put it to the side,

and I'll bring it back out at a later day and say,

"Oh, yeah, actually, that's gonna be much better

for 15-year-old or for 18-year-old", and I'll put it away entirely,

or I'll ring-fence it for potential future new products.

[Dave] So, I mean, it sounds…

I suppose it can sound analytical. And it has to be analytical, you know.

That's fitting, that's not fitting, etcetera, etcetera.

How-- Where does the creative process come in then?

If you think about an artist,

everyone's got the ability to paint a picture.

And everyone's got the ability to create colour.

It's just unfortunate some folk will make a muddy brown.

[both laugh]

They can't do purples, they can't make it look beautiful,

but they'll still make a picture.

And it's the same thing for whisky-making. It's… I believe it's artistic.

It's about being able to tell a story through flavour and aroma.

[Dave] So there's 130 distilleries operational in Scotland at the moment.

Each one creating something which is unique to that specific place.

If you talk to the real experts of whisky,

and you say, "Well, why do two distilleries sitting next to each other

make fundamentally different-flavoured spirits?"

They will eventually go, "We don't know".

There is something magic about location.

There is something about specific spot

where a distillery is that will create a flavour that is unique to that place,

and nobody knows why that is there.

And thank God they don't.

Because there is a mystery to whisky.

There is something magical about it.

There is this ability of a distillery or a spirit from a distillery

to somehow literally distil the place in which it's been created.

[upbeat music playing]

[whistle blows]

[Dave] In the 1860s, the railway arrives in Speyside.

And this is good from a whisky point of view,

because it allows the whisky to get out of the region

and also allows coal and casks to come in.

The railway also brings visitors,

because by this time, the Highlands of Scotland are a destination

for middle-class English tourists.

And they're coming up to shoot, and to fish,

and to gaze at romantic vistas.

Because Scotland is hip.

So enter whisky, which now begins to gain respectability.

There's a lovely account

of drinking around this time, which describes how a toddy trolley

was brought out at the end of this rather grand meal,

allowing everyone to make a toddy to his, and it was always his, own specification.

And it speaks of how the aromas of the whisky, and the lemon,

and the honey and the hot water would mingle with that

of the Romanée-Conti and Lafite.

We've moved a long way from Highlanders sitting around

drinking out of scallop shells.

[soothing music playing]

[music stops]

[birds chirping]

[Dave] So Scotland changes in the 19th century.

You know, it ceases to be this kind of scary place,

you know, where peculiar people, hairy people in odd dress were living,

to become something that was fashionable.

[Nick] Queen Victoria made Scotland famous.

She had a distillery on the doorstep of Balmoral.

John Begg, who owned Royal Lochnagar, was known as the Queen's loyal distiller.

And his whisky actually was, for a while, very fashionable and popular in London.

Because London was a window for the world.

It wasn't just about what people in London saw,

it was about all those people who came to London.

[Dave] And who made this happen then?

[Nick] I mean, it's the great sort of Scottish,

mid- to late-Victorian Scottish sense of entrepreneurship.

And this… I think this belief…

Because that's what you see when you really try to get inside

the heads of these people and look at what they were doing.

This belief that you could do anything you want to

if you really tried hard enough, you know.

I mean, just think of saying, "We're going to make a hundred cases",

you know, when all you've been doing is working in a grocery shop,

and then suddenly it goes from a hundred cases to 10,000 cases.

And, you know, by the turn of the century,

these companies are producing thousands and thousands

of cases of whisky, which means raw materials, not just whisky.

It's glass, it's cork, it's closures, it's cases, it's packing, it's transport.

It's never been done before.

And they're just making this stuff up on the hoof.

Running right through this house, underneath where we're sitting here,

is a long corridor, and out of it runs the cellar,

but at the end of the corridor is the nursery.

And when I was four and five years old, I used to hear "tinkle, tinkle, tinkle",

and this was my father coming with the butler

with the keys to the cellar, tinkle, tinkle,

and I went along and helped them.

So the butler heaved it over like this, and I stood underneath…

with this,

and I put it in there,

and I held it, and glug, glug, glug, you'll see it from there.

And as soon as that was finished, I went… [sniffs]

[both laughing]

That was my first Savoy.

-That was your first Savoy? Aged four? -Yeah. Yes.

In the days after the first war,

gentlemen still maintained the discipline

of there being no bottles of whisky seen anywhere in the house.

And instead of that, you… you had these lovely little…

-decanters. -Very beautiful.

Later on,

if you had visitors and it was found

that some of the gentlemen wanted to drink whisky at dinner,

this was produced.

And this was very quietly slipped down beside the gentleman's place,

and he gave himself a dram,

and then, just as quietly, it was removed and put back again.

So never was a bottle seen anywhere near the table.

-So it was discretion at all times. -Yes, yes.

And I think these are rather fun.

[Dave] They're rather beautiful.

The novelist Sir Walter Scott

helped to create this romantic view of Scotland.

By the end of the 19th century, this image had become increasingly

clichéd and sentimentalised.

Scotland had been reduced to this shorthand

of tartan, stags and an emptied landscape.

It's what blended whisky picked up on

as it began to sell itself around the world.

Welcome to Scotch-land.

As a result, by the start of the 20th century,

the close ties between Scottish culture and whisky had been loosened.

It was made here, but it no longer reflected the reality of the country.

There was a rear-guard action to try and reclaim a singular Scottish identity,

and this was fought by artists and a number of writers,

such as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and the novelist Neal M Gunn,

both of whom used whisky as a metaphor

for the state of the nation and Scottish identity.

I was just thinking that if you look at the way

that Scottish literature was in the 19th century, tail-end of the 19th century,

it was all very couthy, it was very sentimentalised,

it was all Kailyard.

And you look at the way whisky was sold 'round about the same time,

it was this kind of Harry Lauder, music-hall "Scotch-land" kind of thing.

In some ways,

I'm just wondering whether whisky, at that point, as literature did,

kind of lost touch with the culture.

[Ian] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I do wonder about that, because that did persist…

That Kailyard Scottishness did persist when I was a kid.

The White Heather Clubon TV and all these kinds of shows

that were just people going "hee yeuch" and burling around in kilts

and then drinking a whisky in between times.

And you're going, "That is… That is a Scotland".

"That is a version of Scotland".

And it's a version that could sell itself quite successfully to tourists.

But as you've suggested, it was another Scotland

that MacDiarmid wrote about in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.

Umm… [stuttering]

-A poem that's awash in alcohol. -Yeah, yeah.

[Nick] The tartan and the heather thing is a bit of a myth.

Okay? And it's one of those things that we hear so much about.

You know, the Scotch whisky industry…

Well, it needs to get away from tartan and heather.

Sure, people used Highland imagery,

and the reason for using Highland imagery was very important.

Blends needed to be seen as being authentic.

They needed to be seen as being legitimate.

So it wasn't as much about tartan and heather,

it was about the authenticity of the product at a time

when, publicly, the authenticity of the product

was being questioned to a great extent.

Scots went all the way around the Empire and beyond, you know,

and they took all of these things with them.

And they took tartan with them.

I mean, whisky didn't take tartan there, they took them there.

All the Scottish soldiers that were 'round the world in the 18th century

were taking tartan there, which was when it first became known.

I remember going to somewhere in South Africa

where there was a tribe who wear tartan as their costume,

because they were beaten in some battle by Scottish soldiers,

and they adopted tartan as a sign of respect for these warriors.

So you can't just pin tartan on to whisky. It's a much bigger thing, you know.

[pensive music playing]

[Dave] The Kingdom of Fife is this fascinating little area of Scotland.

It's kind of Scotland in miniature in many ways.

You had heavy industry, you had mining,

you had leather works, you got fishing as well,

you got agriculture,

you've got seats of learning such as St Andrews.

But it's also home to this extraordinarily new community

of artists, and musicians, and painters and distillers

who are out there creating something

really new and compelling.

Especially the East Neuk of Fife,

which is the extreme east end of Fife.

It… It's a place where thinkers go

to actually work out what they want to do.

It gives people a bit of space.

People are… are making their music

and making their art, and making their beer or whisky

in the way that they want to make it, rather than being beholden to the market.

If you like it, that's brilliant.

If you don't like it, well, that's unfortunate.

But you know what? It's what I want to do.

This is me expressing myself creatively.

[insects chirping]

[Dave] So you've left the high-flying corporate world,

and you're now here in shorts and a t-shirt,

in an empty space in the East Neuk of Fife.

[Stephen] I think I always wore shorts and a t-shirt.

-[Dave] That's true. -[Stephen laughs]

We're gonna make a Lambic-style farmhouse beer.

Up here, we'll have a coolship for cooling down the wort,

and then getting in wild yeasts.

The important thing is we don't… we don't clean the rafters.

-[Dave] Okay. -Which is not,

you know, Environmental Health like you to have everything really clean.

[laughs] So when I… when I…

You know, they were talking about us coating,

painting the rafters,

and I was saying, "No, but we want fruit flies

and we want beasties to come in to spread the yeast around".

-[Dave] You want it to be foosty. -[Stephen] Yeah.

So, through here, we've got your distillery.

Yeah, we're putting a small distillery in.

-[Dave] Okay. -[Stephen] We want to make

farmhouse-style whisky.

So using wild ferments from here,

and hopefully, we'll make quite a kind of heavy spirit.

[birds chirping]

[Dave] Are you going…

Are you just going back to this kind of supposed golden age of whisky?

[Stephen] No, no. I'm not into that.

But I want to make something that's really good quality that I can control.

And because we want to remain a small business,

it doesn't need to be scalable.

We'll fill half a cask a week.

And then after we've filled them, we'll leave the space in there for oxygen.

-[Dave] So just like that? -[Stephen] Yeah.

-Bit of space. -[Dave] All right.

Which, you know, I think people would do, if it wasn't for accountants,

because, you know, you've got to maximise.

That's an accountant's nightmare

that you have space that would be lying empty.

-Yeah. -Umm…

But I think that's a better thing for flavour.

[Stephen] I think that there's so many small producers.

The ones that survive are the ones that do things in a…

quite a stubborn way.

There's a rebelliousness as well.

And you see that…

that's a kind of common link in the people who are trying to do something different.

There is a great Scottish word, "thrawn", you know, which kind of means…

It's not stubborn, it's a determination to do what you think is right.

[Stephen] I think Francis at Daftmill is an example of that.

Somebody just doing things the way they want to do them.

So, tell us about this.

So here you are, you're a successful farmer, you're making--

-Am I? -You're growing barley for…

Yes, I'm being nice to you, you know.

[Dave laughs] You're growing barley for distillers,

you've got your cattle, you've got your vegetables,

and then you go, one day, you wake up and you go,

"I know. I'm gonna make whisky". So what--

-It wasn't really a "one day" thing. -[laughs]

It was an idea that kicked around for a long, long time,

but nothing ever happened with it.

You know, we just thought,

wouldn't it be nice one day to have our own distillery?

Because, you know, we've always drunk plenty of whisky, so…

[Francis] And we grew the barley that made the whisky,

so it would be quite nice to do the bit in the middle as well.

We spent a long time figuring out if…

you know, if it was possible to do it.

You know, could… could we do it?

Maybe we didn't think long enough on "Should we do it?"

Time is the main thing.

You know, the amount of hours that we have got to spend in the distillery,

compared to spend on the tractor seat.

So, you know… [clears throat]

The farm pays the wages at the moment, so it takes priority.

We can only make whisky in the… in the quieter times,

in mid-summer and mid-winter.

Spring and autumn is busy times on the farm, so…

[Dave] And you've also been very…

determined in only releasing the whisky when you felt it was ready.

I remember I've pestered you for years, sort of saying, "Come on!"

"When are you going to release it, your first whisky?"

And it's only just come out, and that's, what, 15 years after you started, so…

Why that way?

[Francis] It wasn't ready.

Things take time.

[Dave] So it's your whisky.

-You're making it to the style you want. -Yeah, yeah. Yes.

[Dave] And it'll be ready when you say it's ready.

-That's pretty much it. -[Dave] Yeah.

The smell in here is absolutely amazing.

You know, you just open that door, and this wonderful sweet waft of…

[Francis] Bit of wood and damp earth and…

the magic that is a warehouse.

-[Dave] You never tire of this, do you? -[Francis] No.

[Dave] When you're out in the field, I mean, do you kind of--

Are you surrounded by different smells? Are you consciously smelling things?

[Francis] Yeah, you know.

You know, like the harvest times, straw has a wonderful smell,

and you sometimes pick that up in a whisky.

You come around here and you think,

"Wow, this is an ancient old traditional distillery",

but actually, what you're doing is making it in a…

in a true traditional model, but in a 21st century way.

Yeah. But it's the same.

[Francis] If you want to go back to the past,

which bit of the past do you want to go back to?

Because it always changed back then as well.

Things have always changed, but…

sometimes things get better, sometimes not.

The seasonal aspect of it is… is very traditional.

You know, farm… farmers made whisky when… when they weren't farming.

You know, distilling is like curling.

You know, it's a winter sport best done by farmers.

So that aspect is… is very traditional,

but we're not afraid to use an electric motor,

if it makes life easier for you.

You know, we're not-- It's not a working museum.

We try to make a whisky

that sort of represents the area that we're making it in, you know.

We don't have big hills

or rugged coastline or what not.

You know, it's a soft and gentle sort of landscape.

So, the whisky that we are making kinda matches that, I think, anyway.

When you're trying to sell it to someone else,

you know, it seems a bit incongruous to say,

"This is a really wild whisky. Try this".

"Where are you from?" "Oh, the Lowlands of Fife".

[Dave] I wanna talk more about the East Neuk.

-It fascinates me. -[Stephen] Yeah.

There seems to just be this incredible community of like-minded people,

thrawn people, but creative people who just seem to have congregated.

You get musicians and artists and…

dreamers, I guess.

-That's… That's… -[Dave] Yeah, but why here?

Why can't dreamers exist in the Borders or Edinburgh or wherever?

[Stephen] It's… It's that social thing of the people being pushed to the…

the physical fringes of society anyway.

So you get, umm…

What happens… What always happens

in the history on the fringes of the coast,

where there's less kind of-- there are fewer rules.

There isn't employment, so people have to do their own thing.

And I think that probably lends itself to creativity.

Do you know, the same thing's probably happening in Spain and Greece just now.

Places that have gone through really bad times.

And then, young people start getting more creative

and start working out, "Okay, we don't have a natural job to go into".

[Dave] You've gotta make stuff.

[Stephen] Yeah, you've got to make things.

[James] I don't consider what I do to be traditional at all.

I mean, I do sing traditional songs

and I love a lot of traditional music, as I've said, but I write songs.

You know, I write songs about my belly button.

It's pop music. It's just not very popular, what I do, you know.

♪ My hands around your waist ♪

♪ Ignoring the usual ♪

♪ Commotion of the touch ♪

♪ 'Cause you mean you've been feeling At least a token of my offering ♪

♪ And the drink or whatever May smooth us through the rest ♪

[James] As an artist, it's important for me to totally disassociate myself

and not consider what anyone else is doing,

and just concentrate on what's in my head and getting that out.

And I think that is another…

Great thing that Cellardyke gives

is that there's hardly anything going on here.

So, you know, I can't go and say,

"You know, when Kate Bush did her… did her shows just a few years ago,

she didn't do any in Cellardyke".

-[Dave laughs] -You know? [laughs]

[James] So that is another reason. It takes you out of being…

a working professional musician,

which is obviously a valuable thing to just being a musician, an artist,

somebody expressing themselves through music.

And because the whole…

the whole city is so far away,

it is possible to divorce oneself from that

and just get back to the… the soul of it.

♪ We talk about the night And the company we came ♪

♪ We hear the advice of our conscience And our morals ♪

[James] In the old days, I used to get asked, I mean, I still get asked,

"Do you think where you're from affects the sound of your music?"

And I used to say no. But I think…

I think it has to affect anyone creative doing creative things.

Their area has to affect them, you know.

♪ At this time tomorrow ♪

[Stephen] I don't view booze as being any different from any of the other arts or--

You know, booze, music, painting,

it's all just one creative thing.

The majority of folk who do stuff…

So the majority of people who work in whisky or do the art

or make the music they are making,

they're constricted-- you're constricted by either a company

and a company's budgets or shareholders,

or you're constricted by a record label and their… their commercial demands,

or you're constricted by a publishing company

and what they want to make sure is commercially relevant.

And I think that's 90 percent of the people.

And I think the… the…

What they do, from a creative level, is slightly curbed.

So they do… they can do an amazing job, but it's slightly curbed,

and so they don't fully get to where they need to be.

I think there's then maybe, like, say, ten percent. I don't know.

Five percent, one percent, a small percentage of people,

who are-- have a kind of different approach to it,

where they collect things,

or they collect knowledge or instruments

or ideas,

and they know what to do with those things,

they know how they fit together properly.

And great… great blenders do that, and great artists do that.

And then from that, they create something special.

[acoustic music playing]

[James] One of the biggest moments for me was finding a CD

-by a lady called Anne Briggs. -[Dave] Mm-hmm.

And she looked so bonnie on the cover and I thought, I'll get that.

And just falling in love with it.

Absolutely falling in love with this…

the lyric, and the voice, and the…

and the way she put things over, and the kind of…

despair in her… in her sound.

[James] So Anne Briggs would tell the story,

and then the gap would just be right, it was just…

It was perfect, it was serene. It was just beautiful.

And the way she sang the stories, it was just so…

There was just sort of… love to them,

but not over-emotive, not over-pretty,

and just gorgeous.

♪ And the river is all the music ♪

♪ I would ever have ♪

♪ A long, long day since… ♪

[Dave] Anne Briggs is amazing.

I first came across her

and Scottish singers like Dick Gaughan in the 1980s.

This wasn'tThe White Heather Club

and all those couthy wee songs we were brought up with.

It wasn't what we were used to thinking traditional Scottish music was about.

And at the same time, writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and others

were starting to write about our Scotland and using our language.

These singers and writers were incredibly important

because they gave my generation and the generation after it

encouragement to do things on their own terms.

We began to look to Scotland and not London as a point of reference.

And as a result, a new creative movement was born.

The one thing that was missing from it was whisky.

[acoustic music playing]

♪ Whisky ♪

♪ Whisky is my name ♪

♪ Rollin', rollin' around ♪

[Stephen] The Scots Cellaris a great book.

[Dave] Yeah, I love that. I love that…

The reason… One reason I love that is

it tells the truth about whisky in terms of how it was being prepared.

Yeah, I thought-- I'm sure I've got it.

You know, you think, oh, whisky cocktails was a new thing, and look…

These are old, old recipes.

♪ No more air ♪

Do you want to try this one? You have to neck that.

♪ Whisky, I love you ♪

And what's this one here with all the dials in it?

Yeah, that was a prototype, which was conductive ink.

So you touched the label,

and then you heard a story, and it's sat on a plinth,

and as the… the whisky went down,

the stories got a little bit more bawdy.

-[Dave chuckles] -Is that the right word? Drunk.

[laughs]

♪ You knew now… ♪

[Stephen] Floyd on Hangovers.

-[chuckles] -It's a great book.

This was a project about…

[sighs] It was really…

Like, it was about a band that played on its own.

So, you know, and was influenced by different things.

So it was influenced by… by how popular it was,

and it was about kind of the ego of the band.

So we created a whisky that you could drink with it.

You know, as a whisky company, the one thing you can do is kind of…

you can try and stimulate artists to create things.

And you can make a whisky that can go with it or that can go alongside it.

You can't-- There's a certain bit where you can't really get any further.

As a whisky company, you can't make art or you can't make music,

but you can encourage the artists and musicians to do it.

But I still don't quite understand how it worked, though.

-No, neither do I. -All right.

-[Dave and Stephen laugh] -[Dave speaking in Irish]

[pensive music playing]

[film camera rolling]

[Dave] Whisky was big brands, you know, and it was old men,

and this real, kind of hardcore puritanical view of what whisky was.

Undiluted, strong male drink.

And I think what happens in the 1990s onwards,

when single malt begins to really build itself,

and people begin to talk about flavour rather than brand,

talk about place rather than advertising,

you begin to see

a new generation beginning to become interested in it.

The links between it and us in our daily lives

suddenly become more obvious.

Links that had, I think, really been lost for… for generations,

for a long, long time, are suddenly beginning to be re-established.

And as a result of this,

so you then have a new generation of bartenders,

you have a new generation of distillers as well,

who begin to look at whisky in a different way.

Let… Let's mix with it, let's drink it in different ways,

let's find these links which exist.

It can actually be exciting and innovative once again.

[indistinct chatter]

[Ryan] So, I'm Ryan Chetiyawardana, or Mr Lyan,

and I'm a bartender based in London.

[Dave] But at heart, you're a Scot somehow.

Yeah, adopted Scot. I think there's always that connection with it,

and it still feels like home, coming back to Edinburgh.

[Dave] You're noted and highly-praised, and justifiably highly-praised,

for being one of the most innovative

and forward-thinking bartenders on the planet.

[Ryan] We don't drink the same way that our ancestors did.

You know, not everybody is gonna be able to pick up a neat whisky

and dissect the flavours and be able to approach that.

Really, it's not that accessible to a lot of people.

So it's trying to find new ways of connecting people,

but it's also about representing modern Scotland.

You can travel through the Highlands and it…

it does echo those wonderful pictures of the past,

but there is also a very different side of the country that,

you know, is about the new culture of it.

The music, the people, the art, and that's being reflected in the spirit.

You know, it's a spirit of the people.

I think what I'm most interested in, from your perspective,

is how do we move things forward?

To innovate, you don't need to forget the past.

You just need to be able to continue to evolve

and keep some of those things that are still relevant,

and… and preserve that stuff as well.

And I think that's where you start to understand

not everything then will become etched in history.

You know, some of the new innovations will die,

but, you know, some of them will also become

part of the kind of next generation's tradition.

[Dave] So that kind of cultural aspect of Scotch, that cultural terroir…

-Yeah. -…is real and valid?

I'm desperate for someone to say yes, otherwise I've wasted the entire film.

-It's-- -[Ryan and Dave laughing]

No, it's… It is. It's the cultural terroir of it.

Any artistic endeavour is a communication.

It's trying to find a way of connecting with people.

And… And whisky is one of those things.

And I think it's… it's been very scared of losing its crown

and kind of opening up some of those new conversations

and trying to find new ways to connect with people.

And all those other things have moved on, you know. [stammers]

All of the other creative endeavours have--

You know, Scotland's a hotbed for it.

It's incredible to see all those things happening here.

And they have a real, direct, honest connection

with people around the world,

yet it's still trying to kind of falsify this old image,

whereas that old image can remain part of it,

it just needs to also represent the modern way with it as well.

[bar music playing]

[indistinct chatter]

[Dave] Over the years, I've come to believe

that whisky is a cultural product.

It doesn't sit apart from people's lives.

It's part and parcel of who we are.

You know, Scotland's conditions, its geology, its terroir, its weather,

dictate that barley grows here,

and that's why we make whisky to begin with.

And the reason-- And because we make whisky here,

and because of the way it's been drunk and sung about

and talked about and written about over the years,

it's become part and parcel of who we are.

We've been making whisky for a long time, and we make great whisky.

And… And over the next year, I think there's liable to be 140 distilleries

operational in Scotland.

So, great, boom times for scotch.

And that's good. That's a great challenge.

And I think what we have to do, and I don't wish to preach here,

but I think what we have to do collectively,

as people who love whisky, is not just talk about product,

not just talk about our heads and be analytical about it,

but actually start talking about whisky from our hearts.

Because it is part of who we are.

And it's been part of who we are as Scots for hundreds and hundreds of years.

It's what music's been about and it's what art has been about.

And that interface, that linking together of everything,

is vitally important to moving whisky forward.

♪ Well, oot o' the East There cam a hard man ♪

♪ Oh-ho, a' the way frae Brigton ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ He went intae a pub And he cam oot paralytic ♪

♪ Oh-ho, VP and cider ♪

♪ Ah-ha, what a hell of a mixture ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ Does this bus go Tae the Dennistoun Palais? ♪

♪ Oh-ho, I'm lookin' fur a lumber ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ In the dancin', he met Hairy Mary ♪

♪ Oh-ho, the flooer o' the Gorbals ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ He says, "Hey, Mary, are you dancing?" ♪

♪ "And oh, no It's just the way I'm staunin'" ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ He says, "Hey, Mary You're one in a million, oh-ho" ♪

♪ "So's yer fucking chances" ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ He says, "Hey, Mary, can I run ye hame?" ♪

♪ Oh-ho, I've got a pair of sandshoes ♪

♪ "Ah, ha-ha, ye're hell of a funny" ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ Well, doon through the back-close An' intae the dunny ♪

♪ Oh-ho, it wasnae fur the first time ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ And then came her mammy Goin' tae the cludgie ♪

♪ Oh-ho, I buggered off sharpish ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ Hairy Mary's lookin' for her hard man ♪

♪ Oh-ho, he's jined the Foreign Legion ♪

♪ Ah-ha, Sahara unner ra camels ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ Then Hairy Mary's had a little baby ♪

♪ Oh-ho, her faither's in the army ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

♪ From oot o' the East Over came a hard man ♪

♪ Oh-ho, a' the way frae Brigton ♪

♪ Ah-ha, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ Cod liver oil and the orange juice ♪

[crowd cheering, applauding]