This Master Distiller Made Whisky For More Than 60 Years: Glen Grant Distillery's Dennis Malcolm

Working at Glen Grant is not a job for me, it's a way of life. And when I leave the house in the morning and close the door, which came off the major's mansion house which was knocked down in 92, I feel I'm shaking hands with the major every day. And I'm not going to work, I'm going to my second home, because Glen Grant Distillery has been my life. I'm Christopher Coates, editor of Whisky Magazine. I've travelled to Speyside, a region that's home to more distilleries than any other in Scotland, to visit one of the longest-serving distillers in the world of whisky. One of the true greats of the industry, Dennis Malcolm's name has become synonymous with that of the Glen Grant, the distillery he calls his second home and the heart of his life. Recently, the Glen Grant honoured its master distiller's legacy by releasing the oldest whisky ever bottled by the distillery. A single malt matured in a single sherry butt for 60 years. Which is exactly how long Dennis has been working in the whisky industry. Inducted into the Whisky Magazine Hall of Fame in 2014, this legendary whisky maker was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen in 2016 for his services to Scotch whisky and the Speyside community. But far from being a man of titles, rank and accolades, to his friends, family, colleagues and the people of Speyside, he's just Dennis. He's like in with the foundations of the distillery. You think Glen Grant and everybody within the industry think of Dennis. That's just the way it is. Hello Dennis, good to see you. And you, welcome to Glen Grant. Always happy to be here. That's good, let's go and see this distillery now then. You have a few peers in the industry, there's a few other master distillers out there and some that have nearly worked in the industry as long as you. But very few people can say that they were born on the site of the distillery that they then went on to manage. So what was that like growing up here? It's my second home. I used to play in the grounds here because we've got massive grounds, so it was lovely to be able to play in the grounds and when your father worked here and your grandfather before you, you were allowed into the plant after 5 o'clock, which was lovely because it was interesting and you did what you were told because your dad worked here. You'd have 27 acres of an orchard and gardens up here to run about and play in as well. There was no TV when I was a wee boy. TV was the thing of the future for us then. Most people went out and played with their friends and also maybe 20 a side football and playing fields. Three little streams in the village here, so we used to go and look for trout and fish for trout and go for trout, so it was great. We found our own entertainment. So obviously a lot of people come here today to visit the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival and something that almost everybody says when they come is that they don't just come for the whisky, because to be honest they quite often get the whisky at home and they come for the people and the community in this area. What was the community like growing up here? Was it quite connected? Yeah, the community was very important when I was growing up. There were five distilleries and most of the people's employment was in farming or distilling. So everyone, it was one huge big family. And I remember, to justify that is, most people once a year walked from the church to the railway station, when we were at the railway station, and everyone went onto the train. The village emptied and we all went to the Sunday school picnic once a year down at Lossiemouth and then to Hopeman. So very much one big happy family in Rothes. It was perhaps these happy formative years in Rothes that inspired Dennis to give so much back to the community. Dennis is well known in Rothes. He's lived here all his life and Dennis is well known everywhere and by everyone. He's a very nice, very kind person. He works hard for the community. He is a Rothes man through and through. He's an elder of the Church of Scotland. He's also the convener of the church as well, so he plays a big role in the community. And until recently, he was also on the board of a local school district and he was a justice of the peace. I think he does other things in the community, but sort of behind the scenes, if you like, does what he wants to do. He looks after a lot of the older people and especially ex-employees of Glen Grant as well. He likes to go round and have a joke with them and speak about old times, which not enough a lot of people do that nowadays. The world's moved on. Just as Dennis has become a treasured figure in the Speyside community, since its founding, the Glen Grant Distillery itself has played a key role in Rothes and the wider Moray region. I think you don't have to go very far to find someone who drinks whisky in Rothes. With five distilleries, five pubs, and an average of 1,500 people, I think that's a perfect balance. So why do you think the founder chose Rothes as a place to put his new distillery? They picked this area because it was an abundance of water, they had their own water supply here, and they weren't far from Lossiemouth, which is 16 miles away, and at that time was a deep-sea port. They used to build ships in that area, so just imagine how do you get coal to heat your stills? It comes by boat into Lossiemouth, and where did your cars come from? Spain, Portugal, all sherry in these days, so in by boat. Perfect area, so they'd come with horse and cart, or steam lorries by then, and then of course one of the founders founded the railways, which made it lovely for him to take his cars in and out from the seaport and his coal. So the distillery really had a profound effect on the area then? I would say so, more so with the railways, because when he founded the railways in 1852 and in 1858 up to Rothes, the government then took over and carried on with the railways all the way up Speyside, but that was a super supply chain for the whole of Speyside, and Speyside, as you know, is the heart of the whisky industry, so it couldn't be better for the industry. So I've heard a few people say that without the railways, Speyside wouldn't be what it is today, and certainly wouldn't have the reputation that it has today. But I think it was always going to be a whisky region, because it was far enough away from the authorities in London, and all these wee glens etc, so it was always away, but the railways did service all Speyside, and that made it easier for the distilleries to get their whisky, their casks down to the lowlands, to the bottoming halls, because in these days the bottoming halls were all down there. However, the railways, and particularly the Rothes train station, also played one very important role in Dennis' life early on. The train would stop there every morning at twenty past six, because they'd come in the morning, and I had to start at half past six in the morning. My father had been in a night shift, so I was in the coopers, so he'd come home just about ten past six from his work, he'd come in the door and just shout, Time you're up Dennis! And Dennis, like any other young guy, would just lie there for a while, and then you'd hear the train, you know, because it tooted when it moved over, because it was twenty past six, so you had to get out fast to get up here. Though Dennis claims he needed the train's whistle to get him up in the morning, for as long as anyone else can remember, he's been full of energy and always on the go. I'm not joking, I was sprinting after him. He's probably one of the most energetic people that you'll ever meet. I first met Dennis when I came to work here in Speyside, and Dennis was a colleague, and I was absolutely bowled over by this guy with all the curly hair, who was just a bundle of enthusiasm, wherever he went at double quick speed, he just got on with things and empowered people, or enthused people to do whatever it was they were meant to be doing. Just remember this very tall, very thin man, with dark curly hair and thick black rimmed glasses, running past the office. Since then I've always known that Dennis never really does walk anyway, he's always running, or almost running. Of course, before becoming the energetic distiller he's known as today, Dennis was just a young Rothers boy, looking for his first job. So obviously your dad worked here, your grandad worked here, so was it a foregone conclusion that you'd end up working here too, or did you have to go through a rigorous interview? No, there was no interview. At the time the owner was Douglas MacKessick, and he said any employee who had a boy or a girl leaving school age, looking for some work and there was a Glengranth, just tell them to come up to Glengranth. So my interview was basically just arrive and start at Glengranth. But basically I wanted to be a cooper. I liked working with wood, so I thought it was amazing how a cask can hold in liquid that's thinner than water, so I wanted to be a cooper. So you knew you had a job here, what was it like turning up on that first day, do you remember it? Remember it, I'll never forget it, because it was quite a traumatic day for me, getting up early in the morning, wearing dungarees and boots. I walked up to where we are just now, and this was a cooperage here on our left-hand side of the building, with big double doors with the old-fashioned snake, as they called it, you push your thumb on it. When I came to the door, I didn't go in, I was very nervous. I heard noises of hammers. I knocked on the door, and nobody stopped. The noise didn't stop, so I knocked again, and then there was silence. I opened the door a tiny little bit, and just slunk into the bucket door and shut the door and stood there. They all stopped, they just stared at me, and I felt really uncomfortable, but they did it on purpose. Before Dennis could set about learning how to build casks, his first task was to make his own hammer. And the head cooper said, Ah, you've made a good job of that, did you do that yourself? And I said, No, I got help. I couldn't have been a little bit more honest at the time. So what kind of work were you doing as a cooper here? Was it just repairing, or was there something else going on? Well, initially, every cask gets checked to see if it's fit for filling, and the hoops get hardened, and then they get stenciled into the cooperage at the filling store for filling. But we started building our own casks as well as repairing. So it was the early 60s when the Boorman casks came over from America. They came over as shooks, dismantled, so we had to rebuild them again, so we did that here. But it sounds like you enjoyed your time as a cooper. I loved it, I loved it. It was a creative sort of job. And you had to make sure that your quality counted then as well, because that cask that you made had your own identifying mark on them when they were filled, went to the warehouse. If that cask leaked five or ten years later, and the head cooper saw it, he would remember you, because he knew your mark, your trademark. So there was real accountability in there then? Oh, sure, sure. Quality was important then as well. This commitment to quality endures in everything Dennis does, and it's something that's earned him much respect from his peers. But it wasn't just this professionalism that made him popular. Dennis is known by everyone. He has always got a story to tell, he's always got a joke to crack, but his knowledge is as in-depth as his wit and sense of humour. And everywhere you go, people are asking after Dennis. He's a charismatic guy that is very much a people person and looks after everybody very well. Very much, it's his generosity and his kindness that everybody knows. I think it's his attitude to life. I mean, he's full of enthusiasm. He loves life. I mean, he's got so much energy, and he imparts so much wisdom. I mean, it's just great to be around Dennis. Just a lovely guy. But being well-liked and good at coopering wasn't enough for Dennis. He wanted more. So at some point you must have made the decision that you didn't want to make casks anymore and you wanted to come inside here and make whisky. Well, it was quite simple, because most people when they're young are inquisitive, and I wasn't any different. I wanted to know exactly how the liquid that went into these casks that I was making was made. So I then started a six-year, basically, apprenticeship on production from malt intake, milling, mashing, fermentation and distillation to the new spirit going into the casks. So was moving from the cooperage into shift work in the production side of things, was that a big change for you? Yeah, it was actually, because I loved creating things, and that's why I was a cooper. But here it was, I was learning new skills, and there was guys that had been here for donkeys here doing production, so I learned a lot from these guys with all the experience that they had. So the young Dennis ended up in the perfect position for an aspiring young whisky maker. His mentors had all the knowledge and experience, while he had all the energy and willingness to learn. In days gone by, you'd maybe say five, ten years in each position, you know, tundrum still, it was mashers, before you became a production sort of brewer or manager. And they were all hundreds of years of experience, and I'm just this young, really keen and interested young guy, so I knew I wasn't going to fail. There was no way in my mind that I could fail, because I had hundreds and hundreds of years of experience teaching me how to do it. I was basically their project, you know, and they didn't want a failed project. How did you work your way up from starting shift work all the way up to brewer eventually? Did you have it all mapped out? I didn't really plan it out, you know, I became very interested in production, and seeing how the distillery was run, and then most young people are ambitious, so I wanted then to be in total control, not just be able to make cask and be able to produce it, I wanted total control of it, so maybe I was slightly ambitious then. Dennis was seen as the modern distillery manager at the time. Remember, as a young manager, he was taking over a very old traditional distillery that was needing to move with the times, and Dennis was a person to stand that. Although Dennis was moving to management, that didn't mean he was taking a desk job. You know, I was young when I took over running Glen Grant, and the challenge of doubling the production of the plant while still operating at full capacity was absolutely fantastic for me. I felt I'd achieved something, rather than shutting it down and expanding it like most people do. The distillery saw the need to expand, and in 1973, we doubled the size of the distillery, which was fantastic, because we knocked down our mouldings, built a new shed there for housing the stills, then two stills in 1973, so that gave us six stills, and we did this during the distillery still working, so that was a challenge for us, and that kept us really busy, and it was wonderful. And that's what happened 100 years before that. The young major who took over in 1873 doubled the size of the distillery, so we did the very same 100 years later. The present-day Glen Grant is what Dennis has delivered over the years, the new mashtun at the still house, etc., and a lot of these things have been accomplished by Dennis, and a lot of hard work put into that as well. So you said that you were the brewer, which is a production manager, so you were in charge of actually making the whisky at the site. The term that people are usually more familiar with today is distillery manager, but you also had a distillery manager back then, so what was the difference? The distillery manager at that time was in the office buying and selling and recording all the delivery orders from one company to another, so he was completely involved in that, whereby the brewer, or the production manager, was controlling the day-to-day running of it and looking after the shifts and the people who were working for you. So the manager had the desk job, but you had the fun job being here with the guys making the whisky. That's correct. You're down on the grass roots, and you were creating again, which I really loved, but the present-day manager has to do all that now, which is fantastic for them. It was great working with Dennis because he was always in the same humour, he was always full of energy, full of life, always had something to joke about, always laughing. It was just really a laugh a minute. It was fantastic working with him. It's fun. Dennis keeps us on our toes. Funny. Witty. Mischievous, maybe. One of the tricks he used to play on us as shift workers was there was a setting, and it's just a setting in the stills, and we would congregate in the canteen, but we were only supposed to be in the canteen at certain times, and we weren't all supposed to be in the canteen. In the evening, you would hear an alarm, and you would rush out, and you'd say, I bet you that's Dennis. But if it wasn't Dennis, you had to really find out what it was, but that was Dennis keeping us on our toes. So when you got into doing the expansion, you must have had to make loads of decisions about how you were going to change things, if at all. And one thing I'm really curious to know is, why did you stick with the wooden washbacks? Glen Grant was founded in 1840, and we had wooden washbacks then. So I'm a great believer in keeping tradition and innovation, so we kept the wooden fermenters so that we had the same style of fermentation. It would have been very easy to change to stainless steel, which would last forever, and didn't need the maintenance that these wooden ones do, but I still strongly believe that part of the character of Glen Grant comes from the bacteria that's left of these wooden fermenters. During the expansion, the wooden washbacks weren't the only traditional pieces of kit that Dennis chose to retain. Glen Grant's very special in Rothes because it was the first distillery that was founded here, but I remember walking through the door of this still room many years ago, there was something else that I noticed straight away, and I think you'd have to notice when you walked in, that really sets Glen Grant apart from every other distillery in Rothes, but also pretty much every other distillery in Scotland, and that's these big guys here, these purifiers. So how come we've got them here and not at every other distillery? Well, they end up at Glen Grant Distillery because James the Major, in 1873, doubled the distillery. He installed the purifiers on the wash and the spirits distillation. That's an empty cylinder between the lye pipe and the condenser. The boiling vapour of the lye pipe goes in midway. Light vapour rises, obviously. Hits a cold head because we run cold water over it. The heavier ones reflux back into the cell, and the lightest and purest goes over to make Glen Grant single malt, and that has been the situation since I came here 60 years ago. So it's a really, really important part of the distillery character. Yes, it is. It contributes to the character, the DNA of Glen Grant. Luckily for Dennis, the world's leading fabricator of copper pot stills, for Scythes, has its headquarters just across the road from the Glen Grant. This family-owned coppersmiths, today run by the father-and-son team of Richard for Scythes and Richard for Scythes Jr., has built stills for almost every distillery in Scotland, and many more around the world. For Scythes, I've been part of the make-up of Glen Grant since I started here. Richard's father, and possibly his grandfather before him, had been here. So Richard has the drawings for the stills, and he produced all these stills for us as we required it for doubling up a distillery. So you've got everything right on your doorstep that you need. Local tradesmen doing local things, you know. It's nice to do that. We depend on the locals to come and run the distillery for us, so it's nice to reciprocate, and we all look after one another, you know. And so, from washbacks to the stills, people to casks, Dennis developed a mastery of everything needed to create the fruity spirit that the Glen Grant is famous for. It's a house style that he's come to know inside out. The character of Glen Grant to me is basically slightly dry in the nose, fruity estuary with a nutty, fruity finish. And the purifier helps that character to be there for us all the time. The major in 1873 wanted to make it that way. He wanted it to be different. He still wanted the single malt to be different from others. Others were experimenting with blends, and he just wanted to keep his single malt, but put his own stamp on it. I think you're completely right. It definitely stands out from other Speysiders. I think if you do a side-by-side tasting, you can always pick the Glen Grant out. So obviously, over the decades, things have changed in the industry, and things have changed here. There's even just practical changes made to the production process. You've said to me before that you feel that the distillery character has stayed the same from the day that you started here until today. How was that achieved? It's achieved by keeping the same process parameters, and I can guarantee you that the spirit is the same quality as it was 60 years ago when I started. And days gone by, in the 50s and the 60s, you'll find there's more sherry cast being used, so that had a different influence on the finished product, and we use more bourbon. But the character and DNA of this new spirit is still the same as the day I started here 60 years ago. So when Douglas MacEssock put you in charge of the Glen Grant distillery, he wasn't just giving you the keys to whisky production and, in time, a big expansion project. He was also saying you've got to maintain these wonderful grounds that you've got here at the distillery. Was that a lot of extra work for you? Yeah, it was a huge load of work because we didn't have official gardeners then. We just had to use our own men when they were free, and the whole site's 50 acres roughly. But the gardens were important to him because his uncle John, who founded them for him, so he really wanted to keep them like that. And I think it's important because our water for our mashing flows through this little stream called the Buckstream, which meanders through the garden, so it's protecting our water rights as well. One of the projects on which I worked was the restoration of Glen Grant's brand home and the restoration particularly of the gardens, which were completely overgrown and derelict. And turning them into the wonderful place they are now was a project which was very close to his heart. He wasn't directly responsible for it, but he was really keen to do everything in his power to make it happen and to make it easy for the people who were doing it. Not long after you'd completed the expansion of the Glen Grant in the 1970s, unfortunately the whole Scotch whisky industry went into a bit of a nosedive and entered some pretty difficult times. As the manager of the distillery, was it quite difficult to keep people's spirits up? Yeah, it certainly was, and at that time, in 1979, Seagram's Row and Chivers took over the company. We then had nine distilleries in the group, and we were very fortunate because the production director at that time wanted to keep the distilleries running as full capacity as possible. And that helped, because people were worried about their jobs and all the rest of it, but I thought there was a strength in being a little bit bigger and having different brands, so we fared that quite well. He had a lot of difficult management decisions. There was automation, there was a reduction of manpower, but he did that, and he did that a lot. He was very sensitive to that. There have been so many peaks and troughs, so many times. Dennis's style of management certainly suited that, because he managed to keep everybody's morale up and whatever, because he is such a bouncy, happy-go-lucky chap, but he also knows how to get the work done. And he's very hard-working. How did things change otherwise once Chivers had taken over the distillery? Well, with Chivers owning, they tried to mix the managers from Chivers, four distilleries, and the Glenlivet distilleries, five, blend the management together, so move us about, which to me was a good thing, because it gave managers the opportunity to run different distilleries and gain more experience. But you'll understand, some people possibly didn't think that was very positive, because they might have young kids at the school, and it was disruptive, but I thought that was one of the strengths of being part of that. And I actually run the nine distilleries from 1992 to 2000, which was great for me, because I was still indirectly running Glen Grant, so I was still at home with Glen Grant. I think what really came across in the years that I worked with him was, although he was responsible for all the distilling that was happening within Chivers Brothers at that time, nine distilleries, his passion for Glen Grant distillery and his enthusiasm for it. So I believe at that time you really had your work cut out for you, because it wasn't just the malt distilleries they put you in charge of, but there was also some farms and a gin distillery as well, so they kept you busy. It was quite a package really, you know, there was two farms down beside Longbourn, one up at Glenlivet, a sheep farm up at Glenlivet, and a gin distillery down in Paisley. So I was kept busy. So it sounds like you hadn't quite realised your dream that you'd had as a young lad about running the entire Scotch whisky industry, but I think that sounds like it's about as close as anyone could hope to get. No, I still failed, I think. I still failed in that respect. Time runs out, don't you, you know. Dennis gave me probably one of my biggest breaks was that he recommended me to be a trainee brewer, and that was my first step in management. Well, Alan came and worked on shifts for us, and I saw huge potential in him, and so the director who ran all the shifters at Glenlivet Distillers, and they were looking for a trainee manager, and he asked if I had anyone that I thought was suitable, and I says, I've got a perfect guy for this job, but I don't want to give him away. And he says, you're not losing him, Dennis. He's going to be in with the company, and he'll still be there. So I said to Alan, and Alan went to be a trainee manager based over at Strathislay, you know. He was, as you say, he's turned out to be the most important master distiller in the industry, as far as I'm concerned. He is basically, to me, an encyclopedia of the industry. There's a number of folk that I would count as mentors to myself, and certainly Dennis is one of those. But Alan isn't the only person who's learned a thing or two from Dennis. I've been working for Dennis now for about 14 years, and I've learned so much from him. I mean, he's a living, breathing encyclopedia. He's a natural, you know, teacher, mentor. So I've been very lucky to, you know, have spent, you know, a large chunk of my career working alongside Dennis. Oh, I've learned plenty from Dennis. First of all, how to pause when you're in a situation where you don't know what to do or you kind of get agitated for some unknown reason. Keep cool, breathe, think, and then you will see, you know, which way to go. I was very, very fortunate to have such a good mentor, I think, because he's a very even-minded guy that steps back and looks at every situation before he decides how we're going to solve it or what we're going to do next. Which that was a great learning for me, because I think I was a huge challenge for him to begin with because I was maybe thinking too fast, and he needed to slow me down a bit. His great saying is that in time of crisis, there's two things that you do. You switch off whatever the issue is, and then you go and boil the kettle. Make yourself a cup of tea and then stop and think before you do anything else. And that is something that I learned from him many, many years ago, and to this day, it's still used here, and I've made sure all the guys know it as well. I mean, he's a people person. I mean, for Dennis, there's four ingredients that make a great single malt Scotch whisky. Water, malted barley, yeast, and the fourth ingredient is the right people. And really, Dennis has been able to bring the best out of people. He's always asking about how your family's getting on and has concerns about everybody and everybody's well-being at the end of the day. And as I say, it's something that's stuck with me, so when I got the opportunity to work with him, as opposed to be down the bottom of the tree, I just took that as a great privilege. And as one might expect, Dennis does enjoy sharing a dram with friends. He likes to have a good time in the evening, like most of us do. One of the nice things, say, when Dennis took over here, he phoned up and says, So we had our chat, agreed on some casks. And then he says, So, of course, a walk up the garden means that you were going up to the safe. He would open up the safe, take out the bottle, pour a dram to each of us. If you wanted water, well, threw the copper dog down into the water and opposite. He's been a good friend. After many years running nine distilleries and more besides that, change came again in the late 1990s when Dennis moved to Inver House Distillers to manage Balmenic Distillery. Little did he know, within a few short years he'd be back at the Glen Grant, as after purchasing the distillery in 2006, Campari Group came calling. Well, I had a phone call from George Sirsif, who was the MD for Campari for France and possibly taking over Glen Grant because it's in the UK, and asked me to come and speak to them. And obviously someone had told them about me. And I didn't need to think about it, you know, because it was coming back home for me. So I came and saw them and they accepted the role of looking after, putting Glen Grant back on the map again. It was brilliant. The nice thing about Campari buying Glen Grant was Campari were 100% behind the brand. They invested heavily behind the brand. I spent millions of their money buying warehouses, putting in hot water recovery systems for the environment, and then building a bottling hall on site. So the benefit of that is we are still in control of everything from production right through to the bottle for the consumer. It's a fantastic position to be in. The people who founded the place and built Dunnage Warehouses, because Rack Warehouses weren't there then, and Glen Grant has made its name on tradition and innovation. And I strongly believe keeping the tradition of using Dunnage Warehouses is the way forward. And that's why we bought the 11 Dunnage Warehouses and refurbished them to stock the most of Glen Grant's stockers in Dunnage Warehousing. With Campari investing heavily, the distillery restored to its former glory and its whiskies growing in popularity, Dennis had one final task, to pick a successor who would continue to safeguard the Glen Grant long into the future. When I arrived here, it was quite evident that Greg was the second Dennis, and did you sort of think he was going forward into that role? Well, I had the experience of Greg many years before, when I was running the shivers distilleries, and looked for him to come into production then. And then when I came to run Glen Grant, after about a year, I wasn't able to do everything myself because I was too busy. There was just five guys, so I needed an assistant. So Greg was a production operator then, and believe it or not, the five guys all applied for it. And Greg was my obvious choice. And he's very, very interested. He takes ownership of what he's doing. You can see by his attitude, he wants to make Glen Grant shine. And most of all, he challenged me, which I really enjoyed, because that made me think on things slightly differently. And he's done that to this day, so he is the perfect choice for succession planning for me. He's some guy to work for. Some days you're never sure what was going to happen next. He would have some crazy ideas and some really good ideas, and we just had to get on with it and see how we got on. He likes to get his own way, or he did. And sometimes challenging him was a serious challenge, though there was always a compromise to be found. He's a very professional guy. It shows Denison a great light to think that he had the opportunity to pick the person and to mould that person to be his replacement and to be good enough to be that replacement. In 2021, in recognition of his commitment to the Glen Grant and his incredible six decades in the whisky industry, it was decided that a very special sherry butt containing whisky distilled 60 years ago would be bottled in Denison's honour. Throughout a process of maturation, lots of different things can go very right or go very wrong, and 60 years is an awfully long time. In that time, a whisky could end up too woody, it could drop below 40%, it could leak, heaven forbid, and yet this one looks as good as the day it was coupered. What do you think made it special? I think it's the quality of the wood, actually, and the quality of the product that's been in it before, because it complements the spirit from Glen Grant very well. It's a good marriage of sherry and Glen Grant, but it's a first full sherry butt, and it's in excellent condition. I never had any doubt this was going to be a really nice finished whisky. Whiskies that are single malts, that are aged for a long time, 40, 50, 60 years, are normally done in bigger wood because it doesn't take on so much colour. If it was a hog's head, it would have been completely black in colour, I would think, by now, but this is just about right, a nice chestnut, vibrant chestnut colour, I think. Do you think this one has any life left in it yet? Yeah, I think there's a lot of life in it. There's more life in the butt than there is in me, and that's quite obvious, but it's a very, very good sherry butt. It's in good condition all over, so I wouldn't be frightened to refill it again for a second fill, you know. And I don't think I'll be around to announce it, but maybe Greg will do that. So how does it feel to have this special six-year-old whisky bottled in your honour? It's sad in a way because the butt, of course, looks better than me. No, I'm really proud to be involved in launching this, you know, because it's very much in the line of the style of Glengranth when I started at Glengranth, predominantly sherry, so it certainly reflects the style of Glengranth at the time. So obviously your dad worked here at the Glengranth Distillery, and your granddad as well. If they were here today to see this milestone being marked with this special bottling, what do you think they'd say? I don't know. I think I'm not saying that I've achieved that much. What I'm saying is I'm carrying on the tradition that all my predecessors did, you know. They've laid the foundations of Glengranth, laying down good wood, making good, consistent spirit into casks, so all I'm doing is carrying on the story, you know. It wasn't me that created this. I'm just the custodian of it just now, and someone else will do it after me. Of course, this special bottling is just one thing Dennis will be remembered for, but those who've known him longest can say it best. I think it's just a Rothes living legend, and it always will be. He's Mr Glengranth, and he always will be, regardless of who comes after him, or who's been before him. So in 60 years' time, they'll still be Mr Glengranth will be Dennis Malcolm. I think he'll be remembered for the things that he's done since he took over, which under Seagram, they didn't bother about spring water and all the old style, if you like. So I think Dennis will be remembered by Glengranth for making sure everything was taken back to where it should have been. He'll be a legend in his lifetime and beyond. We'll all remember his enthusiasm for years to come. What Dennis does now is lay down stock for the future so that future generations will enjoy the fruits of that labour. I mean, Dennis really has his personality very much in the whisky that he's been producing for the last 60 years. I think there are very few now in the whisky industry like Dennis, these big charismatic figures that have been in it for so many years and with such a wealth of stories as well as a wealth of knowledge. And they're people who are very keen to share their knowledge as well, which he is. Though I've had the opportunity to meet many distillers in my time at Whisky Magazine, I don't think I've ever met anyone quite like Dennis. His presence can be felt not only at the Glengranth distillery, but in the town of Rothes, the region of Speyside and the wider world of whisky. Like so many others, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to spend some time in his company and rub shoulders with a living legend who has dedicated his life to Scotch whisky. He will be remembered mainly, I think, for his kindness, generosity, his selflessness.