Whisky: Scotland’s holy water, its cultural force majeure, its great brined and often smoky hymn to patience, land, and craft. It is also a world policed by tweedy Caledonian purists who believe the amber liquid should only be handled by men with surnames which sound like failed ironmongers: McLaggan, McTavish, MacHaggis. Which is why the arrival of two swaggering mates from the outskirts of London, sans the requisite clan tartan or mist-drenched birthright is to some an aberration akin to deep-frying a haggis in olive oil.
The South African-born Ross Archer — quarter-Scot by way of by way of his grandmother who grew up in Portobello, Edinburgh — and his English comrade Russell Spratley, have the sheer nerve to assume that whisky might not, in fact, be the sole preserve of men who speak in a dialect of throat-clearings and glottal stops. They lack a 200-year-old distilling dynasty but what they have is far more dangerous: audacity.
