From Which Distillery Does Ben Èideann Single Malt Come From?

From Which Distillery Does Ben Èideann Single Malt Come From?

This is not a Single Malt Whisky review (although if I can find the “Galilean Ruby” expression here in Yerushalayim then I might well review it in the future), but instead, this is a report of the results of my investigations into trying to determine from which distillery in Scotland the whisky in these two mystery bottles come from.

I first came across the brand Ben Èideann back in October 2019 when I was sent an email from a friend, who sent me a scan of an advertisement for a new kosher whisky from an Israeli Chareidi magazine. He asked me what I knew about it so I promised to try and find out and get back to him. Since then, I have seen these bottles in various wine stores around Yerushalayim.

There are on the market at present, two expressions of Single Malt under the brand name “Ben Èideann”, with apparently, one more on the way. What distinguishes these Single Malts from all the others, (including all kosher certified expressions), is that they bear the highly prestigious Teudat Hechshir of the Badatz HaEida HaChareidis, Yerushalayim, considered by many to be the most highly prized, having the strictest of Kosher standards of any Kashrus Certification in the world.

The first expression is named “Distillery Edition”, produced exclusively from American Ex-Bourbon Oak casks.

The second and much more interesting is the “Galilean Ruby”, which starts its life maturing in Ex-Bourbon casks but is then finished in, as they state on their official website – “Ruby sweet wine casks, specially sourced by our artisanal team from the Upper Galilee and Shomron Hills”.

The third expression, under the banner of “Coming Soon”, (again, quoting from the website), “…has spent its final months in extra special Cabernet Sauvignon red wine casks from vineyards in the Jerusalem Mountains. Intriguing indeed.

Unfortunately, though, these expressions are aimed at the very bottom end of the Single Malt Whisky market, with both expressions being bottled at the very disappointing legal minimum of 40% abv, possibly artificially coloured with E150a caramel colouring and are both pitifully NAS (“No Age Statement”) bottlings, intimating that they contain young whisky of anywhere from 5 to 8 years, I would guess. Additionally, (and this I find the most irritating), they are also NDS, that is (my own made-up term), “No Distillery Statement”!

Why am I so irritated by this? Well, seeing as the term “Single Malt” means that the contents of the bottle has been made from 100% malted barley new-make spirit, mashed, fermented and distilled at a single distillery, (hence the term “Single”), the knowledge of which distillery this whisky was made in, is kind of important, wouldn’t you say?

It’s like marketing a “Single Grape” Vintage wine and refusing to tell us exactly which grape type it is! Oh yes, the wine comes from a prestigious French winery in the Blah-Blah region of France, with hundreds of years of tradition……..but we aren’t going to tell you what it is!

Maliciously and tantalisingly suggestive is an actual photo of a Scottish distillery on their official website, but it is nameless.

https://beneideann.com/

The photo shows a distillery with a single traditional Victorian Style Distillery Pagoda, and the brickwork and black slate roof on the low standing buildings also looks late 19^th century.

It didn’t take long to work out what distillery this was. A quick email to Roy Duff of YouTube channel Aqvavitae only confirmed my thoughts. The copper coloured roof of the Pagoda with the weather dial, and what can just be made out as a deer’s head on top, is readily identified as the famous Glenfiddich distillery in the heart of the Speyside region.

Could this be the unnamed distillery from whence these whiskies come from?

The problem is that the label states that these are Highland Single Malts. That means a distillery anywhere from as south as Perth or Sterling, right up to the very north of mainland Scotland. However, this excludes a large block south of Elgin which, although geographically part of the Highlands, is considered a separate region in its own right, known as the “Speyside” region. Glenfiddich, (along with The Glenlivet), is probably the most famous of all Speyside distilleries. So, I am reasonably certain that had the whisky come from Glenfiddich then they would have stated on the label “Speyside Single Malt”.

The photo of Glenfiddich distillery is, in my opinion, a complete red herring. I suppose it’s there only to invoke the right atmosphere by showing a typical traditional Scottish distillery. However, in my personal opinion, I find this a little disingenuous. It would have been far more honest to have placed a caption below the photo reading “For Illustration purposes only”.

Before I continue with the results of my investigation, I suppose you are wondering why the owners of the Brand would not want to, or, are prevented from stating the distillery name.

No Distillery Statement Whiskies

Supermarkets like Lidl, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose supermarket, all sell Single Malt Whisky under their own made up branding name. They separate their ranges into Highland, Speyside, Islands and Islay single malts, without ever mentioning the names of the distillery!

The distilleries will agree to sell the supermarket chain their excess whisky at a knockdown price in order to get rid of their overstock or whisky which was originally supposed to go into Blended whisky, or simply to free up room in their warehouses for other projects. The supermarket will then bottle the whisky under its own brand name and sell it on their shelves, (sometimes right next to the official bottling of the same distillery), at a much cheaper price than the official bottling itself. Part of the legal contract will be a clause that they can only do this on the condition that the distillery is not mentioned, so as not to directly undercut the more expensive official bottlings.

For example:

Marks and Spencer produced an Islay single malt called, unimaginably, “M&S Islay 10-Year-Old”.

Now, there are only 10 (going on 12) distilleries on the island and only three, possibly four, which have the capacity to sell the supermarket excess whisky in bulk, namely Caol Ila, Laphroaig, Bowmore and perhaps Bunnahabhain.

Most reviewers who have sampled this, write that it is without doubt Laphroaig! Indeed, anyone who has even a limited experience with Islay malts, would probably identify Laphroaig in a blind tasting, if given say Caol Ila and Bowmore as comparisons. Laphroaig does have quite a unique and readily identifiable smell and taste.

However, being given blind samples of Ex-Bourbon matured Lagavulin or Ardbeg as comparisons would pose a far greater challenge, as all three distilleries are within a few hundred meters of each other, along the same single track road, on the Kildalton coastline. Moreover, they all share a common coastal, burnt seaweedy pungency that can be difficult to distinguish.

Having said this, (apologies for side-tracking an already side-track), I’m sure many of you may have heard of the infamous story of the so called lost distillery of Malt Mill. This never was an actual distillery in its own right but a single building inside the Lagavulin distillery, set up in 1908 to mimic the flavour signature of its next door neighbour, Laphroaig. The story goes that there was massive falling out which resulted in a huge brogus between the two distillery managers. This even reached the stage where Peter Mackie, the then owner of Lagavulin, ordering his workers to sneak out in the middle of the night and block the water supply which they shared, to Laphroaig. However, after taking legal action, the water was restored.

Upping the antics, Mackie then presented to the master brewer at Laphroaig “an offer he could not refuse”, and stole him away from Laphroaig to come and set up a micro distillery inside Lagavulin to recreate the Laphroaig style, even going so far as to replicate the stills, in order to undercut his rival.

This “distillery” became known as “Malt Mill”. However, so the story goes, despite all his best efforts and considerable investment, Peter Mackie could never manage to convincingly replicate the Laphroaig spirit and eventually gave up. However, now they were left with all this maturing stock. This was used in the company’s blends, mainly “White Horse”. The “distillery” was eventually dismantled in 1962. Ever since then, there have been rumours of casks of Malt Mill still sitting somewhere, awaiting discovery. If they do indeed exist, the whisky would almost certainly break records at auction when they came to be bottled.

If you go to the Lagavulin distillery, you can still see the original building which housed “Malt Mill” and on display, they have a single laboratory style sample bottle of new-make-spirit (not whisky as it never saw the insides of an oak cask) of Malt Mill, saved as a memento, on the occasion of the last distillation run in June 1962.

Back to my explanation. There is another reason why  a distillery name will be kept secret. Say, the bottling company owns a brand name which they want to promote. However, the whisky itself has been purchased from a whisky agent, or from one of the Scottish malt whisky surplus open stock markets. You can buy casks of virtually any style of whisky you require and bottle it under your own name, even a fictitious distillery name.

A classic example is the single malt brand owned by La Martiniquaise, (pronounced “La-Martineekae”), namely “Glen Turner”.

I’m sure that most people who buy this stuff assume that there is a distillery somewhere in Scotland called Glen Turner. Others, who are a little more informed, might think that the spirit comes from La Martiniquaise’s only Scottish distillery, that is, Glen Moray. However, the flavour profile is completely different!

Sourced Whiskey

In fact, La Martiniquaise purchase batches of casks from the same specified flavour profile group sourced from these whisky agents, as needs be. Yes, it remains “Single Malt” but who says that it’s the same single malt from batch to batch? The brand name however, remains the same.

This practice is actually very common in the United States with some of the most world famous brand names in whiskey and Bourbons purporting to come from a particular distillery, actually being sourced from bulk producing industrial whiskey plants. This type of whiskey is known “innocuously” as “Sourced Whiskey”.

The practice in the United States is perfectly legal. A company can set up an actual distillery, advertise its product as coming from this place, even conduct distillery tours where they display rows of casks, and all the whiskey in the bottles sold in their distillery shop are sourced whiskey, made in an anonymous factory, a thousand miles away.

For instance, one of the largest and also, the least known of all whiskey distilleries is “Midwest Grain Products of Indiana”, known for short as MGP. At this massive industrial size factory distillery, they produce some of the most famous brands in American whiskey, even so called “small batch craft distillery whiskies”. Some of these brands made at MGP, the distillery is legally forbidden to divulge.

A good example is the premium brand “Widow Jane 10-Year Straight Bourbon” which, according to the website and advertising, owes its unique credentials to an artisanal New York craft distillery production carried out “near” Red Hook, Brooklyn. In fact, Widow Jane is made from sourced whiskey bought in bulk from a factory distillery in Kentucky, which is, not exactly geographically near!

I find the whole business rather dishonest or highly misleading as best!

This reminds me of a news item I heard once on the podcast “The Whisky Cask”, (clever name), about a meeting between the senator of New York and the senator of Kentucky. Afterwards, there was press conference whereby the New York senator boasted that their local Brooklyn Bourbon was far superior to anything produced in his fellow’s state, despite being famous for its whiskey. Where upon the second senator calmly informed his colleague on a live broadcast that in fact, his so called Brooklyn whiskey was actually sourced from a distillery in his Kentucky! Oops!

Who is producing Ben Èideann?

I started off by doing the obvious Google searches but found nothing specific.

What I did find was that there is an Italian Independent Whisky Bottler called Dun Eideann. They spell Eideann with the exactly the same spelling.

Dùn Èideann turns out to be the original Gaelic name for the city of Edinburgh.

However, all distilleries around the Edinburgh region are Lowlands, not Highlands, so it couldn’t be any of them.

Using a Gaelic translator, it turns out that the word “Eideann” means Fiery in Gaelic.

Interesting but not very helpful.

Next, I tried asking my contacts in the various Kashrus organisations. They tried to find out but came up blank.

Then, I tried asking David Margolis, owner of “The Grapevine”, the kosher wine shop in Stamford Hill, in the heart of Chareidi London.  I was sure he would be able to point me in the right direction. David said that he does indeed stock this brand and gets it from the Kedem Europe Importers. When he inquired from them, they said that they thought it came from the Glengoyne distillery. However, when we contacted them, they denied it.

Next, I contacted a few distillery managers in Scotland who already produce Single Malt Whisky with Kosher Certification. Perhaps they might have heard something on the grapevine? However, no one had ever heard of this brand. I started contacting a few more distillery managers who might have produced this. All of them wrote back saying that they knew nothing about it and it had nothing to do with it.

On a whim, I tried using the “DuckDuckGo” site to search for Ben Èideann in public forums and came across some Whisky forums where a person called Harav Amir Elltuv, who describes himself as a Whisky Rebbe, mentions in one of his forum posts that Ben Èideann comes from the Tullibardine distillery!

Well, Tullibardine is certainly a Highlands distillery, all be it, the very lowest of the Highlands, quite near Deanston distillery actually. Encouragingly, being more like an industrial style modern looking distillery and not situated in a touristy area, Tullibardine would actually make for a perfect candidate to produce “sourced whisky”.

I searched for a contact email for Harav Amir Elltuv in order to write to him and eventually came across his name as an executive of a religious school in America. I found his contact email on the site and wrote to him, explaining who I was and asking him how he knows these whiskies came from Tullibardine. That was back in January 2020 and he still has not answered me, although the email never bounced back, so I assume someone got it!

Now, as it happened I visited Tullibardine distillery back in June 2019 and had a very enjoyable and friendly chat about “all things whisky” with the distillery shop manager. This included NAS products, Non Chill Filtering and artificial colouring.

So I wrote to Tullibardine, and asked them out right if they were producing Ben Èideann?

I received a very warm reply from Michael Elliott, Distillery General Manager.

He wrote that they do in fact intend to check out the whole issue of Kosher Certification at Tullibardine during 2020 on their official distillery bottlings, but couldn’t go into specific details.

Then he said something very interesting. That he hoped I understood, but he couldn’t comment on whether they were involved in the Ben Èideann brand or not “as the disclosure of this can be either driven by the distillery in question, or at the request of the bottler/brand owner.”

In other words, he wasn’t denying it!

Then, I noticed the shape of the Ben Èideann bottles and the style of packaging.

I know from the Malt Whisky Year Book, that Tullibardine in owned by “Picard Vins and Spirituex”, the only whisky distillery they own. However, they also own their own bottling plant which just happens to be right next door the distillery.

Pay particular attention to the bottle neck and plastic seal.

To me, they look remarkably similar, don’t you think? I would make an educated guess that both Tullibardine and Ben Èideann are produced at the same bottling plant factory.

“Wink, Wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind bat", as the late Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, would say, who unfortunately died last month. You will be missed.