eSignature Alcohol Inventory Made Easy

E signature alcohol inventory

hey what's up YouTube I'm Nick Viall national brand ambassador for the Macallan and I'm sniffing Wisconsin sniff and today we're gonna be sitting here talking about the masters collection yeah yeah 18:24 master series which we launched now a few years ago everything started off with the McCallum Eric asked which at this point you can find in any high-end whisky retailer this is top of the line when it comes to our core range expressions of the Macallan and then the rest of them are top of the line when it comes to the collection that you can find in most good quality whisky retailers as well this is a series that we launched obviously in honor of the foundation of the Macallan back in 1824 and what it does is that it showcases the scarcity of liquid of cats that we can use for each of those specific expression I'm glad you said that because a lot of times people see these in the store and they just see price tags yeah this it's hard not to see them and a lot of times people like there's no way that the whiskey you know I was literally in a store the other day where they had two em and it was five grand in the store and people were like oh my gosh what else will this whiskey do for me and it's like I don't think that's what this is about no exactly it's sometimes we transcend just what the whiskey is as it liquid and you look a little bit more at the investment of time and resources that goes into a cheating that specific expression and when you know a little bit more about the story behind it things starts to make a lot more sense now needless to say this is not necessarily the type of whiskey that everybody's just going to have in their cabinet at home to open up on a Tuesday night but for people who are big fans of scotch whiskey as well as history then you start getting into the artistic and romantic side of what whiskey has to offer and the value after that is decided by whoever is purchasing the whiskey ultimately so horse I mean that's always who decides the value really because people have argument all the time about what a whiskey is worth what a whiskey is not worth and it comes down to you know a combination of what you can afford and what you would like to drink absolutely it's a very subjective matter really if you look at stamp collections right no one would take one of those cents and put it on an envelope to stand out and then you look at that they value that some of those cents actually have and it's absolutely mind-boggling like we're talking tens of thousands of dollars for some of them so this is we fall in that realm of scarce and rare products as well as craftsmanship of the highest level when you say stamp because I remember as a kid collecting stamps and then you see there is some like upside-down plane stamp that's with like a ridiculous amount of money and as a kid you just get excited cuz you're like I'm gonna find that stay that as an adult you're like well you know there's good whiskey a whiskey out there exactly so yeah we go back to the series it starts with the Macallan O'Mara cask over here now this specific expression of the Macallan is something that we achieve over the course of 18 months just about which is how long it takes our master whiskey maker to visit all the warehouses go through all of the castes and assess their maturity now we have about 280,000 cast at the Macallan so that means that our mr. whiskey making team will go through roughly 400 to 500 different cast samples every son okay so there's a whole team it's not just about del Varner going out and getting drunk Bob over the production but let's be honest here he does most of his work with his nose of course so making whiskey is mostly an art of the nose and so he also cuts down the whiskey about half of its cast strength before he knows it and assess the quality of the whiskey's on that tribute that's something that uh who is it Richard Patterson the the nose also does like they talk about bringing it all down the 20% yeah I think most people would call that blasphemy and whiskey because it's less than 40 at least but ya know that's just interesting that it's so much losing yeah that's what David Stewart called himself a master no sir yeah the master blender or you know master whiskey maker but a master no sir I think that's a brilliant way to put it because the subtleties that the nose is able to pick up on is one of the rare senses of the human being that hasn't been replicated or made better by technology so this is why those those master whiskey makers are actually so well recognized in their craft and are such a special talent it's because their nose goes even further beyond what the usual nose like mine or yours although your cost sniffs oh but your nose is pretty good but what they're able to pick up in the whiskey as they cut it down becomes absolutely mind-boggling and they do it fast too I had the chance to work with Bob on replicating our 12 year old double cast expression one day when I was at the distillery and the speed at which he would analyze each of the sample is absolutely phenomenal by the time I was done smelling my very first sample he had 30 to 40 side and he was like this is what we're gonna use to make this expression Wow so it's very very fast because they've really perfected and that side of their craft so he goes through the four hundred five hundred a cat sample any over looks at everything so he works with a team but it's everything goes through him currently and he chooses from the widest variety of Shari cast that we've ever very used to make a single McCallum so the goal with McCallum Eric asked is to use a very small percentage of our total inventory room far less than one percent I on average can vary anywhere from a thousand to twelve hundred casts a year that are set aside and label that's where Caskey so it's a very small percentage and within that inventory is gonna have a pours of sixteen different cast types cats that are gonna vary in size in types of a number of usage with type which types of sherry actually sees in the oak and so using that wide variety of sherry cask is able to create those layers upon layers of flavor in this specific expresso because you're picking that out every year there's gonna be a difference per year it's gonna be like batches exactly actually we start seeing on the Shelf the vintage of bottling as well as the batch number on my counter area so this is something new that started arriving late in 2017 with bachelor number one of 2017 now we're seeing a little bit of batch number two and we should see the first batch of 2018 which it will be batch number three very cool so people can find compare it's gonna be easier to put them side-by-side and compare and find those micro differences you know you're never gonna see a wide difference from one expression to the other but you're gonna see small differences because it is a human process to make whiskey so it's not perfect every year even the master whiskey makers nose and palate evolves through the year so it's very interesting to see that progression of his senses as he perfects his craft it's very cool yeah you guys do use computers also though right I've heard of something like so when I went to Macallan you guys have like just a wide swath of all kind of technology and like spectrum analyzers to figure out what's in the whisky from a scientific standpoint just for the molecule yeah absolutely so there's the thermos dis analysis that's definitely made a lot of it is on the distillation side of thing so perfect thing distillation was a key at making better whiskey today than we've ever done before and I think most distilleries can say the same thing as their perfecting their craft then after that when you make the whiskey when we analyze the whiskey a lot of its going to be for the color of the whiskey as Macallan is naturally colored so having that consistency of color we use those tools because we don't have the caramel additives that I can put in there to achieve that consistency so we need a little bit of help on that side because going for natural color just makes making whiskey that much harder in order to achieve that consistency I want to apologize to everybody in San lien right now just uh this is gonna be really nerdy episode I can't help it like if you go to the de Sciglio most of the people from a Kalin actually are a bunch of like biochemists and like all kinds of bioengineers a bunch of nerdy folks yet making good product yeah like our new master distiller Nick Savage yeah I went in here absolutely but then you go into the warehouses and then you have that classic Scottish hospitality because those people are so passionate about their craft you walk in there and you could be walking you know into a Scottish farm and people have kind of that same approach salt-of-the-earth really committed to their craft and the hospitality is second to none getting back to rare gas so what we have here is a whiskey that's predominately agent first fill European oak cherry cask although we do find a little bit of second fill and a little bit of European oak it's gonna use sherry butts which is a classic cast we use at the Macallan to mature a whisky as well as hogshead which is half the size at 250 litre and sherry puncheon's which are the same volume as a sherry but but are smaller is it more squat so the the head of the cask has a bit more surface of contact with the liquid and you can tell this color here is that deep mahogany absolutely beautiful rich color the whisky is going to be that classic signature a luxurious nose of a Macallan you get all those sherry notes that nice dried through the element a little bit of the chocolate this spices the finish is extremely long and the complexity of the whisky is really what gets you every sip is a little different from the previous one makes for a fantastic experience if you have enough so it's gonna taste like something the second expression that line up is calming a reflection so this one was named after the reflection of the whiskey so once again circling back to that natural color element that makes them account so special as we know most distilleries actually use caramel coloring in their final product so it's always been something that kind of sets us apart at them account now we're kind of moving up that what I like to call that pyramid of scarcity here for each expression as we move up the number of casts that we can use to make it becomes a more restraint making for a whiskey that's harder to reproduce and that's that much rarer in terms of size and batches so with the Macallan reflection what we do here is that we move on to full fully first fill European oak in American oak cherry cask but what we predominantly use this times are sherry hot sets so those smaller 250 liter cats that's extremely important because we really don't fill that many of the heck the hogs at at them account the reason behind that is the fact that we never use our casks more than twice so the cask is always of the highest quality very rich and a smaller cast like a hogs it will intensify that surface of contact between the wood and the whiskey therefore making that maturation process that much faster yeah now especially for the European oak cast that's gonna give a lot of flavor to the whiskey in a very short amount of time the thing is once again looking at this color the whiskey has that very deep kind of sherry color to it you see a lot of all are also Sherry's or px series that will have that darker almost reddish hue to them like ruby eye to achieve that we have to find those perfect cats that are stable enough in terms of their interaction between the wood and the whiskey to age for the period of time that are necessary to achieve this complexity of a whiskey now this one is quite quite surprising on the nose it's quite soft lots of floral element lots of fresh fruit a bit of citrus is in there but then on the palate that intensity of the flavor comes through if this is when you start getting a lot of those chocolate a little bit of that coffee that's all intermingled with those lighter notes as well coming from the American Oh fantastic whiskey really showcases a unique side of the macaron that's that full spectrum of flavor that were able to achieve in the whiskey's using the cast that we do now the next whisky up is oh no sorry well you were so so their reflections actually so these two bottles actually have at home and the reflection is a funny one I opened it up for a birthday and actually uh the guy behind the camera there Jason took it over to his house we had a bunch of people over and it was weird because a lot of us talked about how it had a lot of those bourbon denotes and hearing that the oak that you guys used was American oak in those in this puncheon's like that's that's really interesting because a lot of that really just carried through and you're right like floral in the nose but very very alive but one thing I like about that the usage of American oak cherry guess is that firm accountants really reverting back to our sources in the past 30 to 4 years just about it's really the European oak sherry cask that kind of became that that classic mechanics that McCowan style but before that most of the sherry casks that we would get would be made out of american oak it's ironic because I find myself gravitating more towards the European oak Macallan so for me I'm tasting like the cast rank or tasting the older eighteens like to me that's like the signature flavor and some of the newer ones like the classic cuts are like not really in my wheelhouse but I you know some people like ginger know absolutely there's a it's funny that you mentioned that because a lot of people when you talk about American oak or Europe you know it's gonna be a very polarizing scent and that's true for every distillery you see it all the time as people prefer one style or the other and it just goes to show that taste is something that's very subjective once again hard to compare I like to make the comparison between white wine and red wine you'd be hard-pressed to say that one is better than the other in terms of quality is just a different flavor profile it's like peated and non Peter absolutely I think I know a guy that has a very rare cask black because do we really need to talk about Macallan doing something so accoring as it's a very very rare expression and that's all once again you're going down that that scarcity up that scarcity pyramid with even less gas you're right around only a hundred cats / batches that will make the cut in order to be selected from to make rare casts black and it has some of that very rare peated Macallan into it but yeah it very hard to come by and it's a whiskey that you find in the global travel retail that even I haven't had the chance to come across very often really my career a few times but not it's not my go-to whiskey let's say the original rear cast goes down much faster that way now this one this one actually gets back to your classic style it's the first fill European oak cherry CASP made of the Tabasco cooperage down in the lap on theta this is Macallan number six and it's your quintessential McCallum Bob Elgar know himself our master whiskey maker admitted that this was his favorite whiskey in the lineup it happens to be my favorite whiskey in the lineup and I think you're in my face you have a little bit of a soft spot a soft spot in your heart now this one is called number six because that's the sixth pillar of them accounts philosophy of whiskey making and it grew up since the Macallan itself it's the peerless spirit this is what Bob describes as the whiskey dreams of when he dreams about Macallan so as I said the first filled European oak sherry cask coming from the two Vasa cooperage those are the only Catholic can be selected from to make this whiskey and you look at it and here you're really in the deep ruby colors the whiskey it's absolutely dark it can barely see through it it looks literally like sherry and actually because it's not really a whiskey show without a bit of whiskey make sure that we had a little bit to sip on here absolutely I mean if you're gonna have some quality of whiskey you need to have the proper glassware right it's a little bit of an Scotch and sniff glassware here I'm sure they can find it somewhere yeah we don't have to talk about that I mean there will be links down in the in the description below you know how those things go just like your shameless plug yeah sure you something I know we can nose it forever I don't know if you remember the first time we enjoy this together at our first event but to me it's really the texture of this whiskey that strikes you at very first you know Macallan is known to have those very oily creamy styles of whiskey because of the small stills that we use for distillation some of the smallest ones in Scotland and this whiskey is the perfect example of that you can literally chew on this one the texture is phenomenal and then it's all dark chocolate red food you get those brandied cherries those figs a little bit of stone fruits in there figs on the driver it's perfect and then on the finish everything balances out with those okie Tenon's once again that bitter dark chocolate and those spices that give it that long-lasting finish the whiskey just doesn't stop going this is my favorite Macallan I've ever had a chance of trying I have a reservation about calling it my favorite whiskey because I truly believe that your favorite whiskey is one that you should be able to enjoy you know have your leisure definitely a highlight and a standalone for me and you said these come what type of gas with using this first fill European oak cherry butts coming from the tip Vasa so to Vasa the one throws the same type of cast where there's also using the addition number one yeah absolutely so we do find some of the two Vasa cask in the Edition number one it's the classic Macallan cask so those are the ones where we get most of our European oak cherry cast from but needless to say the first cap at a first kill cask are rather rare because you use them once and then a maximum of 2,000 pecan so it's not like we have a lot of those just laying around and once again going up that pyramid of scarcity of rarer cast that we can use to make this specific expression I mean we can do a whole video literally on how you guys make your own like that was a daunting thing to hear from nicola when me my brother over being like walked around she walked us around and then like told us like exactly how you guys make all of your casts and how like going to spain how you guys go to the same bodega and how you guys actually have the wood sitting out and dry instead of killing drying in the entire process and how long it takes it's a process that's a little bit mind-boggling in today's day and age of whiskey making where people are going crazy about single malt scotch and this process is really something that slows the whole process now but for us it's something that we're not willing to compromise on only because up to 80% of the flavor of our whiskey comes from those exceptional single cats exceptional cask so if we were to compromise on that we would we would do a paradise the whole production of whiskey which is really something we're not willing to do it's actually one of our pride to be able to say that we owned the cask making process from from start to finish we're the only distillery as far as I know in Scotland that will ship out from America overseas to southern Spain to actually make their sherry casks it's something that's actually quite special a lot of people will get their American oak cherry cast from us after we use them a few times and we've been dealing with the same Cooper just down there for decades at this point so it's a process that we that we perfected and we have Stewart McPherson our master of wood that actually overlooks that production to make sure that we only have the highest quality cats that that come into our distillery so good and then this finishes this line of finishes with Macallan M now a lot of whiskey asked me how is number six your favorite one and not M it's the top of the line it's one of your rarest whiskey you've ever made at Macallan and the reason behind that for me it's because McCann M simply is not whiskey at this point it's liquid history absolutely this is something that's quite special and it's something that I use all the time to describe this whisky but to be quite honest with you in the four or five years that I've been descriptive describing it I've never found better words to actually tell people about exactly what they have in this bottle now this whiskey can sometimes take over two years for our master of whiskey maker just like the perfect casts that will go into there seven different casts some of which date back to the Second World War era so to me to think back to what was happening at that time when in 1942 Scotland entered Second World War and the first thing that happens that their whiskey warehouses got bombarded because the enemies thought that it was a munitions or weapons Jim turns out it was way worse than that precious whiskey and so having whiskey that survived that era is something that's quite special so most of the cast that are used in these bottling actually date back to that era and that after that going up to three decades at 1916 1917 typically the youngest whiskey will be somewhere around in 1990s for this specific expression I think the largest batch of em we've ever produced was about 2700 bottles so it's a very small production for the world that world and just like number six beautifully a house in a handmade leather Christology Kent decanter absolutely you know when Bob takes so much time to select and create like the cat's can create those whiskeys it's important for him that they're housed in the decanter that perfectly showcases every single dimension of it so the crystal is perfect to showcase that natural color as well as the depth the hue that you find in the whiskey very very special stuff now back in the Second World War Macallan was forcing to using peat in their malting process because all the wood and charcoal was actually allocated to our efforts so they can make steel obviously absolutely and so we were using peat and as our source of fuel in order to Malta our whiskey and so you're gonna add a very slight hint of smokiness in this but it's not your classic smokiness don't go ahead and think I love whiskies here and that's not at all where we are it's very very small parts per million content and especially especially since the the smokiness of the whiskey tends to disintegrate as you age it for long periods of time and so at this point it's a faint smokiness that's in the back and a lot of that smoke actually evolved in different flavors you start getting a lot of that leather that tobacco leaves a little bit of that truffle as well and they're making for a whisky that's absolutely unique it also doesn't have that typical Macallan texture this one is a little bit more like a cloud of flavor it touches your tongue it just evaporates it's a cloud that takes over your old palate the flavors just hit everywhere at once and that that finish is very hard to describe because it's so complex that everybody experience it differently yeah it's very similar experience alright so for everybody who is not looking at the 1824 collection for like they're a media I mean maybe like you know that rare cast for like special occasions for the rest of us who are like regular people what are there any other options that we can have where we can have that type of this type of attention to detail but maybe not this type of attention to price yeah absolutely at Macallan what we have is also another limited range of whiskies whiskies that will be one offs on specific years or very limited in release an example of that is the addition series which is released every year and the box showcases the full cast makeup that was actually used in there so lots of information for the people that like to do a deeper dive into the what went into making that that specific whisky come to the Vice we also have here on the back other ones of our limited expressions we have three of the exceptional single cast seven cast were announced that were released in Asia in America in the last few weeks created a lot of buzz on the internet here a lot of people were kind of hunting down very very hard to come by because some of them only have a handful that will make their way into specific markets but those are fantastic come from a single vintage single cat's paw like cat strength once again natural color unsheltered whiskey and then for the people who are looking for on that higher end of the collective is enough if isn't enough exactly we have them account forty-year-old which is right now just hitting shelves in America only 70 bottles who will hit the market here so very small quantity in each of the key markets 70 shelves yes so this is it this has been extracted only from three casks yeah very very limited release four hundred and fifty four hundred and sixty five bottles only about like 44% and beautiful and once again dark natural color for the McCown forty or forty year old cherry okay that's awesome cool so there's options for everybody from a hundred bucks for the editions to absolutely ridiculous yeah whatever bunch of it and if you want a higher boob we also have classic that that's available right now that's a 2017 limited release once it's done it's gone cool so where can people reach if we want to reach out to you I know I I reach out to you all the time absolutely I'm very easy to reach on Instagram that's actually probably the easiest way to do I'm at Macallan Nicklaus that's McHale but the end afterwards my first I'm the first name to pop on top you can actually just follow some of the new expressions that we're launching some of the fancy bottles that we have on display all throughout America or if you want to send me a DM with some questions I'm always more than happy to answer them always happy to answer so yes so if you guys have any other questions comments concerns whatever may be go ahead and leave them in the comment section below and more this [Music]