I’m excited to say that Whisky Impressions will have a stand at next week’s Springbank Open Day, on Thursday the 21st of May.  The Open Day has been on the go for a good few years now but this year it has been expanded to include the town’s other distilleries, Glen Scotia and Glengyle, and has become the Campbeltown Malts Festival. Hopefully the first of many!

I have to say this is a first for me for a couple of reasons - first time I’ve done a whisky festival in my home town and first time I’ve done a whisky festival where I don't actually have any whisky on my stand! Just t-shirts and prints. Hopefully some of you will come along and say hello, despite the lack of whisky though.

I remember one of the very first whisky festivals I went to, just after starting work at Springbank. It was in Vienna and I got talking to some of the guys from the Austrian Whisky Society who had a fantastic collection of old whiskies with them. After the show, when we were all congregating in the hotel bar (as you do), they invited me to join them for a dram of Springbank 1966 Local Barley that they had just opened. I was really touched that this group of people that I had never met before would share such an old, rare, whisky with a young lass just started in the industry. 

That’s the great thing about whisky though, and thing I love about whisky festivals - it’s all about sharing. I’ve lost count of the number of times since that moment that strangers, friends, competitors or customers have come up to me at a whisky festival, glass in hand and said, ‘taste this, it’s fantastic!’  I don’t know why it is acceptable to taste a stranger’s whisky but it just is. I mean if someone you barely knew come up and offered you a lick of their ice cream you would think they were a total weirdo but somehow with whisky it’s ok. Don’t question it too much ok, just embrace it.

I just hope this new trend for ‘investing’ in whisky doesn't stop people sharing their whisky with others; not for profit or gain but just for the simple pleasure in sharing a great dram. 

So, the big news this month is that the Chancellor has cut Duty on spirits by a whopping 2%. Well whoop de doo. Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely a step in the right direction but how much difference is it really going to make?


Assuming that this Duty cut actually gets passed on to the end consumer (which I very much doubt), that equates to a saving of a grand total of 20 pence, including VAT, on every bottle of spirits you buy. For sake of argument, let’s say you buy a bottle of whisky a week. In just over a year, 58 weeks to be precise, you’ll have saved enough money to buy yourself a bottle of Tesco Value blended whisky. Won’t that be a treat? 

Seriously though, if saving 20p on a bottle of spirits really makes a difference to your life then you really shouldn't be buying it in the first place!

It wasn't just spirit duty that was cut either, beer duty was also cut by a penny a pint. So if you buy 300 pints, you effectively get one free. I don’t really know how much a pint costs these days, it may not be £3, but you get the idea. 


But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it’s more about the wider political and economic implications rather than how it affects the end consumer - a tacit agreement by the government that alcohol duty is, in fact, too high? Or a cynical plot to win over voters with a crowd pleasing tax cut in a General Election year? I know which one I’m going for! The SWA is certainly hailing it as a historic move though and a ‘significant boost to a home-grown industry’.  When you consider that there have only ever been five spirits duty cuts since the landmark 1823 Excise Act then this duty cut, small as it is, certainly does seem to take on a bit more importance. 

It’s when you look at alcohol duty overall though, and not just spirits duty, that you realise just how highly taxed spirits are compared to other alcoholic drinks. I hadn't realised quite how much of a difference there was until I looked it up on the HMRC website.  And it’s not just the levels of duty that are different either, it’s also the way the duty is calculated. For example; spirits and beer are taxed according to alcohol strength (litres of pure alcohol) whereas cider and wine are both taxed by volume of product (albeit with lower or higher duty rates for very low or very high alcohol examples of these). The end result is wildly different duty receipts depending on what you are buying.  I’ve done another infographic (starting to like these things) to show just how much disparity there is!

For those of you that like concrete figures, the Duty per litre on the examples I have used is;

Spirits at 40%vol £11.06
Beer at 4% vol £0.73
Cider at 5% vol £0.39
Wine at 14% vol £2.73

For the purposes of comparison, if everything was taxed the same as spirits, the figures would be;

Spirits at 40%vol £11.06
Beer at 4% vol £1.10
Cider at 5% vol £1.38
Wine at 14% vol £3.87


Bit of a difference, isn't it? I think it’s time for a radical overhaul of the duty system. I tend to agree with the SWA that the fairest way of doing things is to have one duty rate based on the litres of pure alcohol in the product. After all, alcohol is alcohol, right? Especially in these days of responsible drinking and recommended units. Why should one unit of alcohol consumed as whisky be treated any differently from one of beer or cider or wine? You could always have reduced duty rates for small scale producers (as they already do for beer) to help small or new producers, who don’t have the same economies of scale for their raw materials or production costs, compete on a more level playing field than the big boys. Surely this would do more to stimulate the economy and support home grown industry than a token 2% duty cut, welcome as it is?

Day 6 and we are still on the bird theme, this time geese. The obvious choice for today would be Grey Goose vodka, produced in the Cognac region of France. Bit too obvious though, isn't it. I really feel I need to make you work a bit harder for your tenuous links drink.

As well as being a very tasty addition to a traditional Christmas dinner, geese were also honoured for their protective services. (Have you ever been stuck in a field with a load of geese when they all start running towards you? Scary. And noisy. I can see why they were effective protectors)

So, on the subject of protective geese - Dumbarton distillery, near Glasgow, was once renowned for having a gaggle of ‘guard geese’ as its site security. There were actually three different types of whisky produced on the one site; Dumbarton grain, Lomond and Inverleven single malt (The Lomond still is now at Bruichladdich). The distillery closed in 2003, but you can still find bottles by the likes of William Cadenhead*, Scotland’s Oldest Independent Bottler.

Day 6 then, get yourself a dram of Dumbarton. Might take a bit a tracking down but hopefully worth the effort.

*Yes, this is a shameless plug for my husband’s employer. Other indy bottlings are of course available too!