Putting the dram into drama
Spirit of Shakespeare: the bottles from the second Act of The Macbeth Collection
As the curtain rises on Act II of The Macbeth Collection, Gordon Thomson talks to the team behind one of whisky’s most original and artistically ingenious series. Photography by Anna Olszewska and John Short
One play. Five Acts. 42 characters bequeathing 42 astonishing whiskies. The inimitable penmanship of Sir Quentin Blake. And four of the most talented names in whisky sharing director credits. The Macbeth Collection is a creative beast of an undertaking, a thrillingly original production already garlanded by critics and set to run and run. The brainchild of Lexi Livingstone Burgess, known for his innovative design work in whisky, it could be the most exciting thing to happen to Scotch whisky since a jodhpured Johnnie Walker first strutted his stuff.
A bit of background before the lights dim and we begin. Within the five Acts of the Macbeth collection are six series, comprising The Leads (five regal malts), The Thanes (12 noble malts), The Ghosts (vanishing stocks from six ghost distilleries), The Witches (three malts and a blend), The Murderers (four island malts), and The Household (10 characterful whiskies).
‘Like the witches’ cauldron, this is a series bubbling over with wild invention and intoxicating possibilities’
The ‘Acts’ are effectively a means of rolling out the 42 whiskies in the collection in manageable and intriguingly balanced batches of bottles. Before any Macbeth scholars raise a quizzical eyebrow from stage left: the characters in each Act do not appear in anything like the way they do in the play. Instead, this is a serendipitious line-up, chosen to offer variety and surprise with every sip.
March 2023 saw the staging of Act I, nine remarkable whiskies inspired by nine characters, including First Witch (a 19-year-old Ardbeg) and Lady Macduff (an imperious 31-year-old Linkwood). You can watch a conversation between Lexi Burgess and Max Bennett, who played Macbeth at the Globe in 2023, where they sample the Act I whiskies, below.
And now the stage is set for Act II, another magical cast of whiskies from the length and breadth of Scotland.
The characters in this second Act are led by Lord Macduff – one hundred bottles of a 45-year-old Bunnahabhain Single Malt Scotch Whisky – accompanied by three noble Thanes, Single Malts from 18 to 28 years of age. The Second Witch and The Second Murderer are once again whiskies wreathed in smoke and sherry. The Household Servant and Soldier, distilled at Clynelish and Benrinnes, complete the dram-atis personae for Act II.
Like the witches’ cauldron, this is a series bubbling over with wild invention and intoxicating possibilities. Dark, mischievous and full of unexpected delights, the Macbeth Collection is a bloody and brilliant idea pulled off with masterly aplomb.
Credit for this must go the quartet of whisky geniuses behind it.
As well as Burgess, the team comprises Sukhinder Singh, founder of The Whisky Exchange and now owner of award-winning independent bottler, Elixir Distillers, along with its head blender, Oliver Chilton; writer and author Dave Broom, who penned the character notes; and the unmistakable hand of Quentin Blake, our most famous living illustrator, who brings everything vividly to life on the labels.
Enough talk, let’s to the action, as Barley meets Burgess, Singh and Broom to hear about whisky’s once-in-a-lifetime take on the Scottish play.
Read more about Macbeth Act I
Is this a dram which I see before me? : Lexi Burgess meets Max Bennett, who played the lead role in Macbeth at the Globe in 2023
Barley: This collection has such creative ambition and scope. How on earth did you come up with the idea for it?
Lexi Burgess: I’ve been working on the design side of limited and rare whisky for quite a long time and I became fascinated by Scotch. I was doing lots of reading about the history of it and I realised it was a lot like the plot of Macbeth. It’s a lot of people trying to kill each other – often family members. I thought it would be the perfect structure for a collection that could talk about the whole of Scotch, because you’ve got all of these different characters which people have emotional relationships with already. What would happen if you cast them as whiskies? In my other world working for distilleries, they’re very interested in ‘verticles’. If you go to a Dalmore tasting, they want you to taste six Dalmores. It’s the same with Macallan or whoever it is. They want to keep you in that channel.
Independent bottling is much more broad-based than that, and it got me thinking: is there a way that you could make a coherent project that would get people drinking things they wouldn’t normally taste? Not based on personal preferences, because everyone’s whisky decisions are normally based around assumptions and preferences that they already have: I like peaty whiskies, I like Speyside whiskies. I like this or that distillery.
I thought if you had these characters together in one collection, you’d be encouraging people to explore different drams.
And then you’ve got these brilliant tiers, because whisky comes at very different price points and we didn’t want to exclude people.
Lead character: Lexi Burgess
My initial idea was it should all be single cask. And Sukindher said if you do that, the whole thing is just going to disappear. No one’s going to drink these whiskies and the purpose of this is to get drinkers to experience a range of different whiskies. So we had to work out how to have some volume at the bottom of the collection so it was affordable. And to ensure there would be enough bottles, so they don’t just vanish.
‘The history of Scotch is a lot like the plot of Macbeth. It’s a lot of people trying to kill each other – often family members
Barley: The structure is ingenious. Can you talk us through it?
LB: Well, it kind of emerged from that initial thinking. We can have some lead characters, that will be old stuff, which by necessity will be expensive. And then there’s the witches, they can make an amazing blending story. The murderers – they can come from the different islands off the west coast. And then the household characters. The Thanes, which sit under the lead characters, they can be whiskies around 30 years old. And then the ghosts, from ghost distilleries. Not all the characters appear in all the acts. There are no ghosts in Act II.
I had the structure. I now needed something really compelling visually.
A way with birds: Sir Quentin Blake
Barley: Is that where Quentin Blake came in? I’m fascinated by how you persuaded him to do it.
LB: I’d worked with Quentin for a long time on other design projects. I asked if he would consider drawing characters for Macbeth and he said he wasn’t interested. So I said, ‘well, how about if you draw them as birds?’ And he said, ‘yes, sure, no problem’, as he loves drawing anthromorphic birds. And as soon as I had those drawings, I realised I had a project of value.
Barley: Dave and Sukhinder, how did you both came to join the merry throng?
Dave Broom: I was on board as soon as Lexi told me about this madness. It was – and is – an inspired idea that looks at whisky in a new way, was obsessive about quality but had a huge amount of fun attached. So many releases are deadly serious, or else contrived. This was an opportunity to play creatively.
Sukhinder Singh: I’ve been involved in whisky for 36-odd years. I’ve seen everything. But when Lexi presented me with the project and showed me the images, I just fell in love with it. I hadn’t seen anything this exciting for years. What really intrigued me was whisky being matched to a character. I’d never seen that done before. As Lexi says, we looked at single cask and decided it was too easy, ‘200 bottles, in and out’ would be boring. For all the effort that had gone into the design, we needed to make it a bit bigger. What we [Elixir] are good at as a whisky company is creating flavor, using different cask types from the same distillery, putting them together in different ways to create flavour. And that empowered us to be able to do that.
Barley: Is there a good example of how that worked in practice?
The Scotch is the thing: Sukhinder Singh opened up the Elixir vaults for the Macbeth Collection
SS: In the first series we had Bloody Sergeant. When you look at the character in the play, he’s come from battle, he’s covered in blood, he’s rough, a warrior. We wanted a whisky that was bold. We went through our stocks and realised we had Blair Atholl, we had it in bourbon casks, refill casks, and we also had some in wine casks. So we just thought: wine, blood, interesting! What does it taste like? Brilliant. It just worked. On its own the wine casks were too much, but blending them away with a bourbon cask, actually created something delicious, with a lot of fruit, lovely oaky wood, and then we balanced it with the wine cask and that wine cask just sings beautifully. It worked perfectly with the character.
Some of Quentin Blake’s original illustrations for the Collection
Barley: How did you and Dave work out the original approach to the tasting notes, which aren’t so much tasting notes as character profiles…
LB: I’d never met Dave at that point, and I got an introduction. I went to see him and asked if he’d write profiles for these whiskies. No distillery names. I just wanted descriptions of what the characters might taste like, and we did that before we started any conversations about going to find the whisky. That’s pretty unusual. Normally what happens is the other way around.
‘Smoke lends itself to creating the impression of wildness and danger, a straying into the dark side’
DB: It got tricky when the character only says one word – or maybe says nothing at all, but when you look at why they are there at that point in the play, a flavour or style will reveal itself. The key thing is that the whiskies are character led. We didn’t go looking for, or feel we had to have, distillery X or Y in the selection. The ones that we chose were done so because they matched the character. I think it’s allowed this series to include lesser known distilleries and expressions rather than relying on a few big names.
Barley: Dave, can you say a bit more about the process and the flavour camps you came up with to distinguish the different sets of characters….
DB: My role was to get inside the play and try to understand the characters and then to think of how their personality, role and actions could manifest themselves in a flavour. Flavours true to the lead characters were most obviously divided into light and darkness – the question was how to signify this in whisky? Smoke lends itself to creating the impression of wildness and danger, a straying into the dark side; the blood and gore of this tragedy brought to mind rich, sherried whiskies, and light and ‘goodness’ felt best conveyed by refill American oak: golden, honeyed, soft, gentle and sweet. Once I had the charctater flavour profiles, I’d give them to Ollie [Oliver Chilton] and he’d work his magic, trying to find whiskies which fitted. He’d send Lexi and me the choices, we’d all taste and debate.
We nearly always agreed, though I’d occasionally find myself saying things like, ‘This isn’t quite Lady Macduff enough’. We all began to think of whisky in a different way. Or maybe we were just going mad.
Barley: I suppose it’s a play that can do that to you. Tell me more about the precise nature of those notes. They’re highly poetic.
‘A sharp profile in cold moonlight’: Second Murderer
DB: We agreed they should be neither solely about the character in the play nor traditional tasting notes. Combining them feels in the spirit of the project. Take the Second Murderer, for example: ‘A thin flame rises from damp wood. The smell of wet wool and a sodden autumn’s bracken. Seed cake crumbs fleck the thin rags. A sharp profile in cold moonlight, the smoke clings to the sallow flesh. There can be no mercy.’
I also chose accompanying quotations from the play to appear on the bottle – not always the most famous words, but the ones that I felt got to the nub of that character and consequently the whisky.
‘The Second Witch is a match made in some dark hell. It is such a perfect match’
SS: Dave is a master of writing and he knows the play inside out. It was like he actually knew each of the characters. When you read the synopsis on the back of the label, it’s so eloquent, Shakespeare could have written it himself.
Barley: Indeed. They are beautiful. What are you favourite characters and whiskies from Act II?
DB: How can you pick your favourite child? Anyway, actors are thin-skinned. That said the Second Witch [an Isle of Islay 26-year-old] is a match made in some dark hell. It is such a perfect match.
SS: I really like the Clynelish [Soldier]. It’s a 14-year-old cask strength. It just sings. It’s beautiful. I really love the Glentauchers 27 – that’s for Lennox. I’m a fan of finding really good whisky from lesser known distilleries. Nobody knows Glentauchers, and this one is delicious, elegant and classy.
LB: The Lady Macduff in Act I was a 31-year-old Linkwood that just transformed into something else. I feel the same about Lennox, the Glentauchers. It’s of an age, it’s 27 years old, something has happened to it where it’s so concentrated, it becomes incredibly tasty.
‘An angelic avenger’: Lord Macduff
Barley: Lord Macduff is a stonking 45-year-old Bunnahabhain, correct?
LB: Yes, absolutely. And that’s another good example of the vision. I was very clear that if we were going to release these whiskies in groups of sets – lead characters, thanes, witches, murderers, household, etc – that you would have a clear idea at the beginning of the pricing structure. So the household characters should always be between £80 and £150, rising upwards to the lead characters. I never wanted to end up in a situation where if you decided you were interested in the flavour subset of witches, that the first one might be £200 and then you’d come to the second one and it would be £2000. That wouldn’t be fair on whoever was interested in that collection.
‘We didn’t want to ratchet up the price of the lead characters from one act to the next. A full set of Act II costs £4,200, whereas Act I was £13,500’
So we decided that with the lead characters we’d go with the oldest whisky, and near the top of the price range. The Macduff is £2000. We didn’t want to ratchet up the price of the lead characters from one Act to the next. In fact, a full set of Act II costs £4,200, whereas Act I was £13,500 for a full set. By the way, we don’t have any problem selling full sets.
Barley: What makes the Bunnahabhain such a great fit for Macduff?
LB: The Bunnahabhain is extraordinary. Dave says he always wondered what Macduff would do if was approached by the witches. I mean, he’s quite violent. In the end, he’s the hero, but Dave always contended that he’d have gone for it [the throne] himself if he had the opportunity. Anyway, he’s coming from a place on Islay where there is that darkness and dread, but from a distillery where there is no peat.
Barley: Yes, and Macduff is quite a remote and isolated figure, as Dave hints at in his notes. Anyone who has driven down that rackety road to Bunnahabain distillery overlooking the Sound of Jura will surely appreciate the connection. Dave’s notes are wonderful on that one. I think it’s worth quoting them in full:
‘Time has been served, love known and lost.
Autumn’s ripe soft fruits start to dry;
the heart’s sweetness clinging on
as concentration shifts.
The complexities of revenge and love
are woven together, opposites in equilibrium.
No recklessness, just intent
and determination.
An angelic avenger.’
Barley: I love that – ‘an angelic avenger’. Talking of avengers, were there any bloody disputes in your debates over matching characters to whiskies?
DB: There was one beautiful whisky, a Highland Park, which Ollie put up as a potential murderer. It was magnificent, but just way too pleasant to fit the bill. There wasn’t an ounce of evil and depravity about it. So it was rejected. I wasn’t popular! However, it’s now found its home…
LB: I remember! That’s Young Siward, an 18-year-old Highland Park. Initially we had this idea that all the murderers were going to come from different islands, so we’d have one from Orkney. The First Murderer comes from Mull, and the Second Murderer is a peated Jura. The Highland Park was just so delicious. We were all sitting around doing our tasting for the first Act and Dave said, ‘I love this, but it's just not murdery enough!’
So it was rejected. I had to swallow that one, but actually, Ollie saved it and we’ve recast it as Young Siward in Act II.
A Quentin Blake sketch
Barley: You’re telling complex and challenging tales with this collection. How important is storytelling to Scotch and its future?
DB: Storytelling is central to whisky because people like stories. Because a story is a way in, because whisky is a spirit which demands discussion. Because there are layers in its creation, because it is more than just a hit of alcohol and a label and a score. It is about people, place, making, history and creativity. It is, at its best, compelling. It demands storytelling.
‘We rejected a Highland Park in Act I as a potential Murderer – there wasn’t an ounce of evil and depravity about it’
SS: Traditionalists like me like the simple labels. The uglier the label the better. Some of the best whiskies I’ve got have the ugliest labels you ever seen, and I’m just going, ‘I love it because nobody wants to buy it!’
But the new wave of consumer is very different and they need storytelling, they need stimulation from different things. Macallan probably does this better than anyone, they’ve gone out of the whisky market to partner with artists and photography, all of which brings new people into the category.
So I guess Macbeth is on the same lines, it appeals to different people. At the end of the day whisky is about flavour. I hate bland, one-dimensional whiskies, ones that don’t have layers of flavour. What we pride ourselves on is finding whiskies which are alive and that have layers and layers of flavour; every sip tastes different, on a different day or season it tastes different – always good, but different. And I think for me that is storytelling, the conversations people have about what they’re tasting. That’s why I fell in love with whisky, because when we speak about whisky, we share notes and we share our thoughts.
Quentin Blake’s drawing of Lennox
LB: I agree with that. In fact one of the motivations for choosing Macbeth is that the language is complex. It’s a sophisticated thing. It’s something which you are sort of pushed through at school. A lot of children resist Shakespeare, but eventually, some of them get it and when they get it they start to realise how magical it is. And that’s a lot like whisky for me. It’s actually quite hard to introduce people to whisky. You have to invest quite a lot of time in them. Because it’s a challenging drink at the beginning. But then you go through that door and then suddenly you’re there, and you never want to leave.
That’s one of the most amazing things about Quentin. If you think about Quentin’s books for children he did with Roald Dahl. Imagine those books illustrated by somebody else – they’d be monstrous. Think about The Twits, it’s basically a story about a couple torturing each other. The way that Dahl writes it is hilarious, but it’s a husband and wife abusing each other from beginning to end, when they’re not abusing animals. If you draw that in any context which strays into the real, it would be horrific. Quentin has the ability to take very sophisticated, complex, emotional things and distill them into drawings which people aren’t terrified by.
‘Imagine Dahl’s books illustrated by somebody other than Quentin – they’d be monstrous. Think about The Twits, it’s basically a story about a couple torturing each other’
Barley: I hadn’t thought of his work for Dahl like that before.
LB: The whole purpose of the project is to say, ‘you might be new to whisky, but you know Shakespeare’s play? Its complex. Well, this is complex and adult too, but it’s also enjoyable and fun, just try it.’ And it might also be speaking to people who already like whisky, who like a certain flavour, in which case you try to encourage them to try the one next to it, and so on. People who say they don’t like peated whisky find one they do like.
It’s been the same for me. In the process of casting this, my knowledge of distilleries has grown exponentially because so much stuff is being put in front of me. Sukhinder’s frustration with me about my lack of knowledge of 1960s distillation and what is tastes like, has all been to my benefit! He’ll say ‘I can’t believe you haven’t tasted this. You don’t know what that tastes like.’
SS: There have been lots of experiments where people have matched whisky to music or whisky to art. I went to an event where they blindfolded people and you listen to music and then you taste whisky. Getting people to think about flavour using sound, sight, taste. This is a different way of doing it, we’re doing it the other way round. We’re not matching music or art with existing whisky, we’re trying to find the whisky that matches new characters, which is unique and new.
‘Maybe we were all going mad’: Dave Broom got wholly immersed in the play and the project
Barley: How much knowledge did you all have of the play, and how much did you immerse yourself in the text or filmed versions of Macbeth during the process of making the collection?
DB: I read and re-read the play and return to it as we prepare each new Act. Then there’s the films. I’ve seen them all. Orson Welles’ raw and brutal 1948 cinematic adaptation, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood a decade later. Joel Coen’s, Kurzel, Fassbender, and the filmed stage productions – the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench one in particular. And of course my daughter’s ‘Barbie Macbeth’ which she did at primary school. It’s on YouTube and is Lexi’s favourite.
Each is a different angle on the play and the characters. It’s helped immensely and made me somewhat obsessive.
There’s also the music – the Third Ear Band’s soundtrack to Polanski’s in particular. We did a music and Macbeth tasting/listening at Spiritland which added another layer of craziness on top.
‘You know Shakespeare’s play? Its complex. Well, this is complex and adult too, but it’s also enjoyable and fun, just try it’
LB: It’s funny for me because my parents work in theatre. My mum’s a choreographer and my dad was an actor, and I’m actually weirdly slightly phobic about the theatre because I spent so much time there as a child. But the written aspects of the play I’m very familiar with. I know the text well. That’s why we ended up with 42 characters. If you talk to a theatre director about how many characters there are in Macbeth, they will say probably around 20. And in terms of actors, they would get it down to 15, because the soldier at the beginning will be the servant at the end.
But when you actually write it all down there are 42 characters, which gave Dave a bit of a challenge because some of them don’t have any lines. But Quentin came to the rescue because the drawings of the minor characters are just so like vivid that you can build a story around them. The drawing of the servant, for example, is great. I mean, the servant is quite funny anyway.
Lennox, 300 bottles of a 27-year-old Glentauchers
Barley: Did you talk to Quentin about Shakespeare and his take on Macbeth?
LB: He’s a very literary person, people sometimes forget that. He has 350 different titles in publication in over sixty languages, and 160 of them are adult titles. He was awarded the Légion d’honneur. He’s done Don Quixote, lots of heavyweight stuff. He read English at Cambridge. Put it this way, he didn’t need to read the play again. He just said, ‘I know who these people are.’ That’s why I think he did the drawings in the middle of the night. Those things exist in his head.
Barley: What about you, Sukhinder, are you a Shakespeare fan?
SS: I read the play when I was young. I remember bits of it. I started it again. I’m halfway through. Ollie was the same, we both said we needed a refresher before we get into this, so let’s agree to read the play. I asked Ollie if he’d read it just before the launch of Act I. He said. ‘no, I just watched it on Netflix.’ That’s quite funny.
Barley: That’s great. Whatever it takes. There are so many different interpretations. I remember seeing Patrick Stewart in the lead about 15 years ago and he brought an almost Mussolini-like sadism to the role.
LB: Remember, there’s a high level production of Macbeth running somewhere in the world all the time. Even in places like like Shanghai, there’s this huge immersive version called Sleep No More, which is basically the same plot. We went to Asia to talk about this project and it can be tough. Going to Shenzhen or even Japan, when you’re using a translator, it’s challenging. They might not know know Macbeth, but then you outline the plot: ‘Over ambitious man, tries to kill a king, led astray by some evil spirits and also possibly by his ambitious wife’. The they all go, ‘oh yeah, we’ve got a version of that story too, I know exactly what you mean’. After that, they’re totally immersed in what we’re talking about.
Blood on the tracks: Max Bennett as Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre
Barley: They’re eternal themes, aren’t they? It resonates in all societies. Do you think you need to be a fan of Shakespeare to enjoy this?
LB: No, I think not. In whisky tasting there are different levels of knowledge in a group and that can be intimidating for some people when you’re asked if you can taste currants or stewed apple or whatever. But actually, there’s a third, sort of invisible person in that conversation, saying, ‘do you think this whisky tastes murdery?’ Or ‘do you think this whisky tastes witch-like?’ Suddenly, the playing field is levelled in a way it isn’t in binary tasting. I’m always thinking I might get it ‘wrong’. And Dave, Sukhinder and Ollie are all brilliant at it, and they’ve been very forgiving of me, but it’s still daunting.
‘The one thing I hear from women is that all the whiskies on the market are just too masculine. They just don’t appeal to women’
Barley: On top of Quentin’s incredible drawings, the design work on the packaging in this project is stunning. How important is art and aesthetic becoming in whisky? Is whisky an artform?
DB: Whisky to me is a craft, but Macbeth takes that craft and aligns it with art.
SS: The way I look at it is that whisky has this seriousness to it. Some of the labels, some of the bottles in the market, are a bit masculine, with very hard facts about distillation, bottling, cask numbers, cast types, angels share loss and so on. All of this is lovely to a geek, but to a normal person it’s too much. So I think you need something to draw them in. I guess picture labels and art, softens it a little bit, brings people in.
The one thing I hear from women is that all the whiskies on the market are just too masculine. They just don’t appeal to women.
LB: I agree with Sukhinder. I hear it all the time. Going back to the relationship between whisky and art and other cultural art forms, it comes down to this: there are projects that have integrity and meaning and there are ones that don’t. There are loads of things out there that are just selling devices. And I think that the audience see through them pretty quickly, and so it comes down as the basic question of whether or not that thing is any good.
Barley: Finally, what do you think Shakespeare would make of all this?
SS: He’d be very proud.
LB: He’d say it was the greatest staging of his work ever. ‘I’ve never seen a production of Macbeth that took over seven years to come out!’
DB: Wherefore art my royalties?
Macbeth Act II Collection will be available from this month onwards at leading whisky retailers in the UK including The Whisky Exchange and Hard to Find Whisky
Introducing the cast of Macbeth Act II
Servant – Clynelish 14 Year Old, 1600 bottles, £135
Soldier – Benrinnes 12 Year Old, 2400 bottles, £84.95
Second Murderer – Isle of Jura 17 Year Old, 1200 bottles, £125
Second Witch – An Islay Distillery 26 Year Old, 750 bottles, £695
Lord Macduff – Bunnahabhain 45 Year Old, 100 bottles, £2000
Young Siward – Highland Park 18 Year Old, 650 bottles, £225
Lennox – Glentauchers 27 Year Old, 300 bottles, £375
Ross – Ben Nevis 28 Year Old, 850 bottles, £495
Photography by Anna Olszewska and John Short; illustrations copyright Sir Quentin Blake
