Profile: Brendan McCarron

It’s a good thing Brendan McCarron gave Scotch whisky another chance. It would’ve been understandable if he’d never gone near the stuff again, after enduring the trauma of a questionable 1980s medical remedy.

“When I was younger, I used to get lots of mouth ulcers,” he explains. “And for some weird reason in 1988 there was a theory that you could just swirl some whisky about your mouth and that would help it. It turns out it’s horrifically bad for it!

“But sure enough, my dad was having what I’ve since worked out was a glass of Talisker and he gave it to me to take a sip, rub it about and spit it out, or that’s what he had meant to happen. I didn’t realise, took a large sip and he went, ‘well you might as well just swallow it rather than waste it’. That kind of scarred me for a good 14 years before I came back to try my next whisky. So my first experience wasn’t ideal. Talisker is amazing, it’s just not so good when you’re eight with a mouth full of ulcers!”

Sure enough, Brendan did give whisky another chance. As is the case with many of us, his appreciation began to grow after a passionate pal took time to show him the ropes. After graduating with a degree in chemical engineering, and able to enjoy a dram without suffering PTSD, Brendan landed a role on Diageo’s graduate scheme. Within a few months of working at Burghead Maltings near Elgin, Brendan was given the opportunity to design the chemical processes for Roseisle distillery, the first single malt distillery built in Scotland for 40 years when it opened in 2010.

GO WEST

After a spell running Diageo’s blending team in Leven, Fife, Brendan travelled across the Atlantic where he briefly worked in New York City in a temporary role. With a full-time position on the table the move almost became permanent, but the 2008 financial crash had other plans. Back in Scotland, he applied for the senior distillery manager role at Oban distillery, where to his disbelief he was actually successful.

“I was told to apply for this job,” he says. “It’s too senior for you, you won’t get it, but it will open up the opportunity to go somewhere else. So I applied and ended up getting it, which was unexpected but phenomenal.”

After two fond years at Oban, Brendan was once again on the move. “My boss told me one day ‘I’m moving you back out west’. So I thought, oh I’m going back to America. It was Islay! I went from New York, to Oban, to Islay, and I was thinking ‘is St Kilda next or something?’”

As Diageo’s senior site manager for the company’s Islay operations, Brendan oversaw production at Lagavulin, Caol Ila and Port Ellen Maltings, and bedded into island life without a hitch. “I always say I got dragged kicking and screaming on to Islay, but I got dragged kicking and screaming off of Islay as well,” says Brendan.

“It was absolutely amazing. It’s been something like 13 years since I lived there and some of my best friends are from Islay. It was just phenomenal. I also had a very busy, challenging job as well, it wasn’t all just a dream. The job was tough, so you just got your head down and did it.”

THE APPRENTICE

Having spent almost eight years with Diageo, and with another promotion on the cards, it took a special offer to see him move.

Being headhunted by Moët Hennessy’s Glenmorangie Company as an informal successor to Dr Bill Lumsden was too good an offer to let up on. It was here Brendan began mastering his understanding of maturation, cask types and sensory analysis. “I learned a lot,” he says. “For five or six years it was just massively educational and a place for rapid learning, it was fantastic.

“At times it could be a little awkward, to be there when your role is to replace your boss. There was a bit of a balance to be struck. Eventually I realised that I intend to retire in the next 10 or 20 years and I don’t think Bill does! He’s like Benjamin Button, I mean, he’s just getting younger by the day and I’m clearly not.”

KINDRED SPIRITS

During his tenure under Moët Hennessy, Brendan built a healthy relationship with The Scotch Malt Whisky Society by hosting ‘battles’ at The Vaults. Here members could get a taste for different expressions of Ardbeg and Glenmorangie, some from the Society and some from Moët Hennessy.

And that was just the beginning: “It’s been a nice 10-year relationship,” he says. “I introduce all of the clients I work with now to the Society. Most of these places are not selling their spirit, they’re keeping all of it for themselves. But I’m successfully encouraging them to give a small amount because the SMWS really takes care of its whisky and makes incredible stuff.”

Having grown close with the Society over the years, Brendan now believes there is no better place for people at the start of their whisky journey to explore flavour. “This is going to sound like the perfect plug, but people should go to The Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Just go and try a few different things.

“But the reason I recommend going to the Society is you can take a punt on a couple of different drams. So even if you get a dram you don't like, it's a dram. You haven't bought a bottle or a case or a cask. Just have a go. But also, I think you'll find the knowledge level of the bartenders is phenomenally high. So you'll get people who will enthusiastically talk to you about certain things and be able to bring it to life for you. I learn new things about whisky every day and I've been doing it for 20 years.”

FLYING SOLO

After almost 10 years with Glenmorangie – and no signs of Dr Bill ever slowing down – Brendan left to join Distell where he would oversee Bunnahabhain, Tobermory and Ledaig. Combining the skills he’d learned as both a master distiller at Diageo, and a master blender at Glenmorangie, Brendan looked after all elements of whisky production. Though after a few years progress began to stall when Distell underwent a takeover from CVH Spirits and Brendan was ready for a change.

After being approached to help with various different projects, Brendan left Distell to take the leap in starting his own business as a consultant master distiller. “I kept getting approached for what were really interesting, exciting and educational new projects,” Brendan says. “It got to the stage where there were just too many of these things that I was letting pass because I had a full-time job.

“It was quite daunting to go out on my own, but my wife was super supportive. I talked to David Armour from Hunter Laing, who I did a bit of consulting for at Ardnahoe on Islay, about my plans on a flight back from Islay to Glasgow. He was amazing, gave me a list of things to do, contacts, things to set up. And so out I went.”

THE MENTOR'S ROLE

Brendan now helps mentor various distilleries worldwide, developing and refining their spirit character. Among them are distilleries such as The Lakes in England, Benbecula in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and Tenkyo in Japan. It’s no easy feat for new distilleries like these to weather their early years of production, especially at such a turbulent time in the industry.  

“Materials are expensive, planning and building a distillery always comes with lots of complications,” says Brendan. “Then, even after you’ve spent all this money on the building and all the equipment, you start producing, and everything costs a lot of money. You’re waiting probably five years before you can release your first bottling. But it’s more like 10, 15 or 20 years before you break even. The economics are the biggest challenge of it.

“My job is a much easier part of it because I’m there to educate, to teach, to listen. People would ask me to design a style of liquid, and I know how to make every type of Scotch whisky that exists already. So you can apply some of that to fermentation times, what style of mashing, what raw materials to buy, what type of yeast, what preparations of barleys, how much smoke or no smoke. I get to work on all that stuff, so my part is great in educating people and bringing them along for the ride.”

LEARNING LESSONS

Though there’s no denying the industry is going through a challenging period for new distilleries and whisky conglomerates alike. Brendan continues: “The market is tough right now. It’s a tough time to be a whisky maker, but it’s also a tough time to be a whisky consumer. There’s a cyclical nature to whisky. When the good times are good, frankly some companies get greedy. They get overly ambitious, both in terms of volume and price. And then when there’s a pullback, the pullback seems so sudden and so extreme that there’s then a reaction to cut production and save costs and save this and save that, it’s happened before and sadly I think it will happen again. The community as a whole won’t learn from it.

“I do believe that whisky has become too expensive. I’ve seen some 18-year-old whiskies be £100 or £150, absolutely that can make sense. And I’ve seen some that are £300, £400 and £500. I am first and foremost a whisky drinker and sometimes these things aren’t squared with me. The whisky should be expensive but sometimes the price is disconnected from the value of what’s in that product.”

Reflecting on his time in the industry Brendan has a few standout moments: “It was really cool when I became the Oban distillery manager, because it was so unexpected. That was a very proud moment. Getting appointed at Glenmorangie, obviously. I mean, that was a big job where they’d looked for a lot of people and I came in at the last moment and got it, that was also pretty cool.

“The other thing I’m proud of is every so often, having the courage, or the ambition to leave a safe role, which I had at Diageo. It was a shock for me to go to Moët Hennessy and it was a shock again for me to leave. I guess I was kind of convinced it was the right thing to do and so far it’s proved to be right.”