Canadian whisky is good, actually | Canada Voices

I remember when I was awoken to the possibilities of Canadian whisky.

I’d come to the 2014 Spirit of Toronto festival to taste the whisky world’s wildest wares from Scotland, Japan and America. But like too many Canadians, I held the belief that our homegrown hooch simply didn’t meet their muster – as if something in our nature led our home and native whisky to be sweetly insipid, something timid to be diluted further with ice or soda. And while America’s bourbon boasts a distinct cherried, woody bite, Scotch can uniquely tap into saline, smoky depths and Japanese whisky can achieve floral highs, Canadian whisky is most associated with the sterilized tasing note that comes from being thoroughly distilled: “smooth.”

But then I met Don Livermore, the Fordwich, Ont.-born master blender for Hiram Walker & Sons. A microbiologist with a doctorate in distillation, he pulled an unmarked bottle from behind his table – ardent whisky-festival goers will know that this is where the good stuff lives – and poured me a blend from the barrels he’d studied for his PhD dissertation. The spirit was savoury and balanced, with rugged notes of dill and caraway – anything but shy. And I told him then what I admit now: I didn’t know whisky made here could taste that good.

“Wow, that was a while ago,” Livermore said with a laugh when I recounted this to him last month. “But that was your first touch point, right? And you changed your view – that’s the opportunity, to get liquid on lips and tell our story.”

More and more people might be experiencing my a-ha moment these days. The “Buy Canadian” movement is taking flight, with Canadians seeking bourbon substitutes after provincial governments took American products off liquor-store shelves in response to President Donald Trump’s trade war. So thank goodness our best whisky makers – whose craft requires vision, since their products need years to age – have been preparing for their close-up for a while.

“If people taste the good stuff,” said Davin de Kergommeaux, the Ottawa-based writer who has been championing Canadian whisky for decades, “they’re gonna come back for more.”

Livermore, who just won the World Whiskies Awards’ Rest of World Master Blender of the Year, has been a leader in that effort. The good doctor has leveraged one of Canada’s biggest distilleries to launch smaller-batch premium offerings, and with Lot 40, a much-awarded, 100-per-cent rye, he’s played with wine barrel finishes with a Scotch maker’s confidence. “I grew up on a meat-and-potatoes diet; my kids are growing up on sushi,” he mused. “We’re seeing a shift in flavour profiles in whiskies too, and the beautiful thing is that our regulations are set up in a way that we can adapt to that.”

Strict rules govern the branding of specific liquor categories – a single geographic location, the amount of a certain ingredient, the type of barrels. But Canadian whisky regulations are less purity-obsessed: Regardless of the grain, it counts so long as it’s fermented and distilled here, and aged in a certain-sized cask for at least three years.

That’s led to a uniquely wide range of flavour outcomes: We make rye so sturdy and rich that some American companies have bought it, aged it in the U.S. and slyly suggested it’s their own, and our more delicate malts can go toe-to-toe with Scotch distilleries. “I believe we’re operating at a higher level than the Scots, and of course the Americans – you don’t have to be at much of a level to beat the Americans,” said Graeme Macaloney, the master blender of Macaloney’s Island Distillery.

His nine-year-old operation in Victoria has become the World Whiskies Awards’ fourth-most awarded distiller in just five years’ time, deploying the latest scientific techniques to mitigate the plasticky sweetness of younger whisky and offering some of the finest cask finishes in the country thanks to relationships with industry luminaries. “There’s a competitive drive for me,” he said, “but what I love most is taking someone who was drinking cheap rubbish whisky and exposing them to high-quality whisky, and having them realize the true variety you can have.”

This flexibility has also fuelled Canada’s centuries-long tradition of blending. Instead of following strict mashbills before fermenting the grains, Canadian whisky makers generally distill each grain type separately and mix the end product by its flavour. That’s liberating, says Livermore, and blending later can even help Canadian whisky stay relevant: “Ten years from now, I don’t know what people will want, but you have to make decisions now.”

The definition is so loose that Canadian whisky doesn’t even have to be all Canadian, or even all whisky. Distillers realized that the high taxes on whisky in America, our primary market, could be eased if it was blended with wine or other spirits. By the 1950s, says de Kergommeaux, that evolved into Canada’s “9.09 per cent rule,” which allows up to one-eleventh of a whisky batch to be comprised of other products.

This can drive innovation, and few people are doing that better than Andres Faustinelli, the master blender of the Bearface whisky brand. For the Venezuela-born Mr. Faustinelli, who worked with California wines and Tennessee whisky before being lured by Canada’s freedoms, “that 9.09 per cent is magic – it allows me to go places that whisky usually doesn’t go,” he said. So far, he’s deployed smoked sea salt and hand-foraged mushrooms, and his first offering in Bearface’s One Eleven Series – his ode to the rule – gorgeously commingled small-batch mezcal. “I can promise you, a blender can always do a better job than a single cask,” he told me.

His latest experiment, the limited-edition Wilderness Series Wild Air 03, could come off as insulting Canadian caricature: the whisky is barrel-aged in shipping containers in the B.C. woods, finished with birch bark and mixed with maple sap, which had to be rushed from Quebec in one day or it would’ve gone stale. But the result is delicious, surprisingly subtle – and confidently unique. “The possibilities of Canadian whisky are so much wider than anything out there,” he said.

But this freedom can be a double-edged sword. High-volume distillers can exploit the 9.09 rule to mask younger, poor-quality whisky with flavouring, or to save money when exporting to the U.S. Macaloney proposes establishing an “international single malts” category to distinguish craft from Crown Royal amid the sweep of Canadian whisky. And for purists, label transparency like Bearface’s is key, so consumers know exactly what they’re drinking – and so that a whisky’s age, still an easy marker of quality to many, can’t be questioned. “Any other country, if you put so much as a teaspoon of young whisky in it, you can’t put an age statement on it anymore,” explains de Kergommeaux.

While Canadian whisky is having a moment, it’s not immune to trade disruption. Distillers use American oak casks and Chinese pot-still parts, and while Canada is rich in grain, some occasionally bolster or process their stock in the U.S. Midwest. There are also domestic trade barriers, even after a federal-provincial agreement to allow distilleries to sell directly to most consumers; the powerful liquor boards, which already generally ignore domestic craft distilleries, may block even this half-measure, further hampering their ability to sell themselves internationally. Tariffs are also likely to dissuade U.S. retailers from stocking Canadian whisky – and that’s a problem, since Americans represent about 70 per cent of the market.

But the best thing, as they say, is to keep getting liquid on lips. “If people could taste them, I think they would take just a little bit of pride that Canada is not second-rate,” said de Kergommeaux. “We’re as good as anybody when it comes to making great whisky.”