Want your home bar to really impress?
Offer your guests a taste of Gerston. Or Stratheden. Maybe a dram of Auchnagie.
These whisky producers, lost (in some cases) for over a century, have been revived in “spirit” (ha) by The Lost Distillery Company.
Making things extraordinarily difficult for the LDC: There’s no juice left. These Scotches didn’t leave behind any DNA. So the Lost boys have to recreate these non-existent spirits by scouring archives and focusing on 10 key components that influenced the making of the blended malts, including the date of the last distillation, locality, water quality, where the barley was sourced, the yeast, how much peat was used, the wood used to store the spirit, and so on.
After that, the company identifies eight key “flavor nuances” (peaty, floral, woody) of the spirit until, finally, a team of archivists and whisky makers debate the final product.
It’s not perfect, but it’s theoretically close. “What we can say is if the distillery was still open today, this is the style of whisky they’d be producing,” says co-founder Brian Woods
Bad news: For now, the lost whiskeys, made in batches of 1,000 bottles, are only be shipped to the UK, although the e-shop Crucial Drink promises worldwide delivery sometime this year.
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