INTERVIEW
Dr Kirstie McCallum is the chief blender for Distell International, working on whiskies like Black Bottle, Bunnahabhain, Deanston, Scottish Leader, and Tobermory. She’s based at the company’s HQ in East Kilbride where she has her own blending lab. JASON CADDY spoke to Kirstie to find out how she arrived at a career in whisky, despite graduating as a chemist, which whisky bars she likes to visit, as well as what it’s like being a woman working in the whisky industry.
You trained as a chemist. How did you get into the whisky industry? I always wanted to work for a pharmaceutical business after doing a degree in chemistry at Glasgow Caledonian University. But I was told that if I wanted to go far in pharmaceuticals I would need to have my PhD, plus there was a scarcity of jobs in the pharmaceutical industry then. As it turned out, while I was looking for a job, I was offered a temporary position with a grain distillery in Glasgow called Port Dundas and I fell in love with the industry straight away. I started off in the labs, basically looking at the production side of things. I joined Burn Stewart (owned by Distell International) in 2016 after working for both Chivas Brothers at Glen Keith Distillery and for Allied Distillers. What is your favourite whisky bar in Scotland and outside of Scotland? That’s a bit of a hard one. Where I choose to go greatly depends on my mood at the time, but what I would say is that I love going to The Pot Still on Hope Street in Glasgow plus I’m also a big fan of The Bon Accord on the city’s North Street. I’ve travelled extensively in my job, like the U.S., South America, Russia and Canada, but I’d have to say that all in all the best whisky bars that I have seen outside of Scotland have been in Singapore. It has some wonderful bars with a fantastic selection of whisky, and I would recommend that every whisky lover visit Singapore if they get the chance! How did you train your nose and your palate? A lot of people assume that you can’t train your nose, but you absolutely can. You must have some ability to start with I suppose, but you can train it up from there, by nosing as many whiskies as you can. I’d like to think that I’ve always had a good sense of smell, but when it comes to training your nose there’s no substitute for practice, which comes with experience of course. Is the whisky industry female friendly, and are more women drinking whisky? In my experience there have always been women working in this industry, it’s just that they used to mainly working behind the scenes, so to speak, like in labs and in marketing roles. Whereas now there are certainly far more women blenders and distillers, so we are a lot more visible, which is wonderful. In terms of women drinking whisky, I see in my general observations that there are absolutely more of us drinking whisky. Although I have to say that I’m 19