Deviant Distillery has launched with a limited release of Anthology, a series of new malt and dark spirits said to have a flavour identical to a 10-year-old whisky in just 10 weeks.
When John Hyslop realised that more than 200 million litres of whisky worth nearly $10 billion evaporate from barrels into thin air each year, he invented a better way to make spirits. With his background in industrial chemistry, he built a technology that could create a spirit with a chemical composition and flavour identical to a 10-year-old whisky – in just 10 weeks.
The media release states:
Hyslop identified how to replicate the reactions that take place in a barrel and enhance them by controlling physical and environmental factors that influence oxidation, esterification and evaporation. The technology can create a spirit identical to whisky in a fraction of the time while staying true to the natural whisky-making process.
Deviant products are made from the same four all-natural ingredients in whisky – barley, water, yeast and oak. They cannot legally be called ‘whisky’ because they are not aged in a barrel for the minimum amount of time, so their legal definition is a ‘single malt spirit.’
“Other than the ageing process, everything about our spirits is what you would expect from an ultra-premium craft whisky – we just can’t call it that”, Hyslop says. “I explain it like this: instead of putting a supercharged engine into a car and racing it to the finish line, we just remove all the obstacles in its way and let it become what it wants to be”.
At Deviant Distillery, all Deviant spirits are brewed and distilled by hand using premium malt barley without any additives or chemical catalysts. Hyslop uses a hand-made, direct-fired copper pot still and wood from the same barrels the local cooper provides other distilleries and vineyards.
Because the production cycle for each new batch takes only 2% of the traditional ageing time, Hyslop can experiment with different grains, casks and flavours every 10 weeks.
“With the traditional distilling model, what is bottled today was barreled 10 years ago. But now, in theory we can conduct several centuries’ worth of flavour tests and arrive at an ultra-premium drink that no single generation ever could before.”
Four products in the Anthology series are available now, with a new one coming each month. Hyslop will explore new flavours with each batch, which will ultimately influence the brand’s flagship product line, ‘This is not whisky’, expected to launch mid-2018.
This article was originally published on October 30, 2017 on our sister website Gourmantic.
