A lifetime of service
This story begins in a way it couldn’t in this day and age, what with labour laws and other pesky legal technicalities. Sir Dennis Malcolm, awarded an OBE earlier this year for his contributions to the Scottish single malt whisky fraternity, began his career at the Glen Grant distillery at the tender age of 15. “It was the 3rd of April, 1961 and I will never forget the date. I started as an apprentice cooper because I was very interested in how the casks could hold the spirit.”
The affable raconteur jokes that he had very little say in how he moved from one of the beginning stages of production to a senior management level, very much in charge of new expressions and de facto brand ambassador of the eminent Speyside distillery. “My father was a distiller, my grandfather was a distiller employed by James “The Major” Grant who was the son of the founder no less. I was destined to become a distiller.”
“In those days, if you had children of distillery workers looking for jobs and there were vacancies at Glen Grant, we hired them. It was just family looking after family for us.”
Despite a Sir prefixing his name, Malcolm is humble about his input to what the Glen Grant brand has achieved today. “The foundations of Glen Grant were laid by somebody else. I may have created these new expressions but the tree was planted long before I was there and that’s the quality coming through now. You yourself never see that tree coming to maturity.”
Malcolm’s nod to his predecessors is a touch of class, but he honours equally the contemporary men and women working at the distillery. “The ingredients for whisky aren’t just barley, water and yeast. The most important ingredient is the people, it takes people with passion to make a great product. And it doesn’t have to be whisky, it could be an airplane or a Rolls-Royce.”
“Everyone’s got a good spark, a glimmer of excitement. Nurture it and help it grow.”
When asked if there was anything he would like to change about his life, Malcolm expressed a desire to break the laws of physics. “I’d like to reverse maturation. Not of the whiskey, but of my own. I’d like to go back to when I was 40, but I don’t think I would do anything differently to the brand, because it turned out how it was meant to be.
“Maybe some of the mistakes I made, because when you’re young everything is black and white, right or wrong. When you get older you gain a grey area called experience. But honestly, I don’t think I would change my life at all. I just want more time.”
As for the question of succession, Malcolm already has the right people in place at the distillery but has a little way to go before he can see whether his twin grandsons will submit their applications to Glen Grant.
“They’re just 13 years old. When they were born I put down a cask for each of them, from which I will sample at 18 years, 21 years, 25 years and so on so that we have a maturation journey for the cask. I hope I’m around for that.”
The most recent releases during his tenure are his own creations: Glen Grant 18 Years (RM688) and Glen Grant 12 Years (RM268). The former replaces the Glen Grant 16, and is the current standard bearer for the brand’s core age statement whiskies while the latter is also available in non-chill filtered form for travel retail – these, and every other Glen Grant tipple, are the only whiskies in the world to be purified between still and condenser from the time of The Major till today.
Glen Grant may be a scotch whisky that Sir Dennis Malcolm can be proud of, but the man himself is a distiller the whole industry can be proud of.
