“I got more of, ‘is this some marketing gimmick? What’s going on with this label that has a picture of a woman’s head with all this stuff coming out of it? What’s going on?’” he recalls. Reactions, safe to say, were mixed.Įngland, he says, was slower to warm to Glaser’s disruptive approach. Glaser flew to the US to showcase Hedonism in New York and at the San Francisco whisky festival, before taking on London with “bottles of Hedonism in my rucksack, walking from bar to bar and from store to store”, and then heading up to Scotland. Reactions from the trade were mixed, to say the least. Glaser was keen to move away from what he describes as “labels that look like they were designed in the time of Queen Victoria”, and show how things can be done differently, but done well. The goal was to help Compass Box stand out from the Scotch whisky market – not just with the liquid. “Certainly, back then, grain whiskies bottled on their own were very few and far between, and there were zero major brands of grain whisky at the time,” he recalls. Interestingly, Glaser chose to begin with a 100% grain whisky. I thought I could bring this discovery to the world by doing it on my own rather than with all the money we had at Johnnie Walker.” The art of making whisky: Compass Box’s Artist BlendĬompass Box’s first release was Hedonism, which is still available today. “There’s something really extraordinary and compelling, and magical, a deep cultural history that nobody gets, nobody understands. But I thought, there’s something here with Scotch whisky that the average person under the age of, say, 40 has no idea about. Most of the big whisky companies had way too much ageing inventory in their warehouses. “Global sales were flat or declining, depending on the year back then. “This was around 2000 whisky was in the doldrums – the whole industry was in the doldrums,” he recalls. Then, during a holiday to the Bahamas with his wife, Glaser had his ‘eureka!’ moment, and realised his ambition to set up his own Scotch whisky company. “Over the course of various projects I was involved in, I was asking lots of questions about why do we do this, and why do we always use that, why do we re‐use refill casks so much? Why hogsheads and barrels? Why do we chill filter? Why do we colour whiskies with this caramel stuff? And so on and so forth.” “Blending really did capture my imagination as a creative platform,” Glaser explains. Glaser reflects fondly on working with “legends in the industry”, including recently retired Johnnie Walker master blender Dr Jim Beveridge, and Diageo master blender Maureen Robinson. The self‐confessed “wine geek and beer home brewer” was not a Scotch whisky drinker at the time – but after being sent to Scotland, Glaser was soon enamoured with the ‘water of life’. From there, he secured a job in marketing with the world’s biggest blended Scotch whisky brand, Johnnie Walker. But a wise word of advice from “a great friend and mentor of mine, Peter Holt” saw Glaser step out of the “long line of people trying to become wine makers in California” and into business school. Since he launched Compass Box in 2000, his goal has been to showcase all that is great about the blended Scotch whisky category.Īfter university, Glaser was determined to become a wine maker in his US homeland – a desire that greatly influences his approach to whisky‐making today. “People have this perception that single malts are the best.”īut Glaser sees the beauty in blends. “The administration that put these tariffs in place thought, ‘well, single malts are the best they must be the most expensive’, not thinking that there may be blended Scotch whiskies and blended malts, and other categories of Scotch whisky, which are equally good, equally expensive, or more expensive,” says Glaser. The decision to clamp down on single malts is demonstrative of the subcategory’s perception compared with its blended counterpart, notes Compass Box founder and whisky maker John Glaser. For a company dedicated to blended whisky, such as Compass Box, it mercifully granted a ‘free pass’ from a tax that grossly affected exports in 2020. When the US imposed punitive tariffs on Scotch whisky in 2019, the government specifically targeted single malts – not blends of any sort. *This feature was originally published in the June 2022 issue of The Spirits Business As the company moves to the next stage in its development, SB meets the man with a vision. Scotch whisky brand Compass Box has always done things its own way, thanks to the ingenuity of its founder, John Glaser.
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