60 whiskies a day... but not a sip passes the lips!
IT would be a dream job for many – spending your days quality checking the finest Scotch whiskies. But Kelsey McKechnie, the first female apprentice malt master at Balvenie, has no need to taste the various tipples to check how good they are. The whisky expert instead relies on her exceptional sense of smell to ensure the ‘water of life’ is up to scratch, and can ‘nose’ up to 60 samples a day. The 27-year-old said: ‘It’s probably funny for people to hear but with brown spirits, mostly everything that you pick up in the nose is what you’re going to pick up in the taste. ‘So unless we’re doing one-off batches, or there is anything that we really want to make sure that what we’re picking up in our nose is what we’re going to pick up in our palate – day in, day out, we actually don’t do much tasting at all. If we do, we will always spit it back out.’
Originally from Ayrshire, Miss McKechnie now works at the Balvenie distillery, in Dufftown, Banffshire.
She previously spent six years at William Grant & Son, and has been in her present role for three, learning under the supervision of one of the industry’s longest serving malt masters, David Stewart MBE.
Following in the footsteps of Mr Stewart’s first apprentice, Brian Kinsman, who is now master blender, Miss McKechnie faces a few more years of training.
‘The apprenticeship is quite long,’ she said. ‘We joke about it a little bit. David was an apprentice for about 11 years and Brian Kinsman was his apprentice for nine.
‘So, I will say in the spirit of competition, we’ll need to shave a few years off that.
‘It’s definitely the sort of role that you are better having this earlier start so that you can enjoy all the years of whisky production ahead of you.’
While the science of the job was developed through a qualification in brewing and distilling from Heriot-Watt University, Miss McKechnie’s love for whisky is a family tradition.
She added: ‘In my family, especially at Christmas and birthdays, everyone would love to open a single malt. A dram of whisky in my family has just been so loved’