Myths of the spirits industry, debunked: a Series

Common misconceptions you may think about spirits, and the truth behind them

The spirit industry is full of unwritten rules and myths regarding each and every spirit. Some of these have an element of truth to them, and some are just fiction. In the first entry of this series, I'm going to debunk the common myth that all clear spirits are flavourless and reveal the truth behind it.

Myth One: All Clear Spirits Are Flavourless

This is one of the most common myths in the spirits world and one I hear all the time, especially from people whose main experience with clear spirits has been cheap vodka drowned in a mixer. Because many mass-produced spirits are deliberately made to be as neutral as possible, it’s easy to assume that clear means characterless. In reality, clarity has absolutely nothing to do with flavour or complexity.

In fact, every spirit as it comes from the still is clear. Because of the way that distillation works, only vapour passes through the still, and as a result, this process removes colour entirely. A spirit’s flavour comes from its ingredients, the way the spirit is distilled, and how the spirit is treated after distillation; whether the spirit is clear or dark in the end is mostly unimportant. Colour is something that is usually added later, most often through cask ageing, but sometimes through maceration or caramel colouring, and is sometimes even removed through filtration choices.

Vodka: Not Just Alcohol and Water

Vodka is a good example of how misunderstood clear spirits can be. While regulations often describe vodka as being “neutral,” that doesn’t mean flavourless. It means the flavours are subtle rather than dominant, and those subtleties come directly from the raw materials and the way the spirit is made.

For example, wheat vodkas tend to be soft, rounded, and slightly creamy; rye vodkas often feel drier and spicier; and potato vodkas are usually fuller-bodied, weightier, and sometimes slightly earthy. You then get cane neutral spirit, which has a light and clean taste, with a very faint sweetness and some peppery notes, especially when neat.  These differences aren’t imagined, and they’re not created through ageing. They come from starch content, yeast strains, fermentation behaviour, distillation cut points, and how much character the distiller chooses to keep.

Mass-produced vodka is often distilled to extremely high strengths and heavily filtered to remove almost everything except ethanol. That’s a choice, not a requirement. When vodka is distilled with precision, its texture, mouthfeel, and subtle aroma become part of the experience rather than something to hide behind a mixer.

Gin: Related, But Not Directly Comparable

Gin often gets lumped into the same conversation as vodka, but it isn’t exactly comparable. While it usually starts with a neutral base spirit, gin’s defining character comes from botanicals added during and/or after distillation, most importantly juniper.

Because of this, gin’s flavour is more overt and aromatic than vodka by design. Different citrus peels, florals, roots, spices, and herbs can dramatically change the profile from one bottle to the next. Even the same botanical, such as juniper, can taste very different depending on where it’s grown and how it’s handled.

However, with gin, colour isn't always a flavour indicator. You'll see a lot of gins in the wild that have colours to them, some of them because they are flavoured gins with colour added to coincide with the flavour you would taste, and some infused with ingredients that provide a natural colouring, such as sloe gin. 

While most gins start as a neutral grain spirit base, we at North Point do it a little differently, having our gin be a molasses-based gin, which makes our gin very unique. If you were to taste this base spirit before any botanicals are added, you'd taste a big difference from a grain neutral spirit in flavour and mouthfeel, allowing us to have a smooth, easily-sipped gin at 45.1% ABV.

White Rum

White rum is another spirit that’s often assumed to be simple, but that assumption falls apart once you look at how it’s actually made. Depending on the base material (molasses or fresh sugarcane juice), yeast choice, fermentation time, and distillation style, white rum can range from clean and crisp to intensely funky and tropical to earthy and vegetal.

What surprises many people is that a lot of white rums are actually aged. They spend time in oak casks just like darker rums, picking up colour and flavour, and are then filtered, often through charcoal, to strip the colour back out while leaving much of the flavour behind. The rum looks clear, but it hasn’t lost its character.

We like to say our Pilot Rum is a white rum without the colour stripped from it; it gains its beautiful golden colour through ageing in ex-highland whisky casks, and longtime fans will note the colour deepening over the past few years as each cask gets a little bit older. The casks are not just for colour, but to give the rum a wonderful flavour coming from the cask influence and the spirit it used to house.

If you want to read more about rum, go back to our August blog post written by our Distillery Manager, Heather, to learn all you need to know about rum.

Rum is the People’s Spirit: What you really need to know about Rum

New Make Spirit and Whisky

Every whisky in the world starts its life as a clear spirit, often called “new make.” Fresh off the still, before it ever touches a barrel, whisky is colourless. Its cereal character, fruity flavours, and spirit weight are already there, fully formed.

This is the topic I really like telling people about. The number of people I have heard say, “I didn't know whisky was clear” when I have introduced them to New Make Spirit is unbelievable. 

Let me make this clear by saying New Make Spirit is not whisky, but it is the base for all whisky, and it is where all whiskys begin. 

The colour we associate with whisky comes from time spent in wood. The cask adds colour, tannins, spice, and sweetness, but it doesn’t create flavour from nothing, it builds on what was already present in the New Make. A well-made whisky starts as a well-made clear spirit.

At North Point, we wanted to make sure we created the best New Make Spirit we could before laying anything down in a cask. Our Dalclagie New Make Spirit incorporates Maris Otter malted barley, a heritage grain that is packed with beautiful cereal flavours: notes of baked sweet pastries, croissants and super full-bodied. We combine this with a fantastic Norwegian strain of yeast called Kveik – traditionally a brewer's yeast, but our head distiller, Greg, showed us all the potential this yeast has with Scotch Whisky. Kveik has an amazing property that allows us to ferment at slightly higher temperatures than most other yeasts. We ferment for a minimum of 7 days in wooden, open-top washbacks, which gives our spirit lovely fruity flavours. Combined with the fresh Scottish water of Loch Calder, located close to the distillery, it gives us a really interesting New Make Spirit that will be the base of all of our outstanding Dalclagie whisky variations in the years to come.

The Reality

Clear spirits are far from flavourless; the key is to look for the right things: ingredients, methods, still type… these are far better indicators of flavour, whether you’re dealing with dark, coloured, or clear spirits. Definitely don’t write off clear spirits: there’s a whole world of flavour out there waiting for you!

If you are interested to learn more about what I've said, why not book a tour and visit the distillery to see firsthand the process that goes into making everything? And if the talk of our New Make piqued your interest and you'd like to learn more about our whisky to come, or even discuss our cask programme to own your very own cask of Dalclagie, send me an email at: Oliver@northpointdistillery.com