Bill Lumsden has a reputation for mischief. He also has an expansive job title. The director of distilling, whisky creation, and whisky stocks for Glenmorangie and Ardbeg—who also holds a doctorate in fermentation science—may have created some of the most beloved scotch whiskies on the planet, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

“It’s all to do with the Scottish psyche,” he told the Unicorn Review. “We are world champions of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. By our very nature, we have a self-deprecating sense of humor.” He notes that other master distillers in his peer set—like David Stewart of Balvenie, Richard Paterson of Dalmore, and Alan Winchester of Glenlivet—are similarly grounded, and that’s important when acting as an ambassador for the whisky. “A real big turnoff for me is someone who actually believes in their own hype.”

The thing is, it would be difficult to over-hype Lumsden’s accomplishments. Throughout his four-decade career in the whisky industry, he has achieved things some distillers never even dream of. And he isn’t even close to slowing down.

All the barrel finishes you see nowadays? Lumsden was one of the first distillers (along with Stewart) to pioneer the technique.

The cultish following that Ardbeg has attained over the years? That comes largely from Lumsden’s role in resurrecting the distillery and creating the modern single malt.

Even the fact that Glenmorangie, one of the most popular and best-selling scotches in the United States, remains shockingly well priced compared to many others is thanks, to some degree, to Lumsden’s advocacy in the boardroom.

And, perhaps most significant of all, Lumsden has led the way in true innovation in scotch whisky. That means never shying away from experimentation, from things like extended fermentations (Ardbeg Fermutation) and extreme levels of peat (Ardbeg Supernova and Hypernova) to incorporating heavily roasted malt (Glenmorangie Signet) and drying barley over Highland botanicals instead of peat (Glenmorangie A Tale of the Forest).

It has all been done without much regard for his reputation—even, occasionally, as a deliberate thumbing of the nose to the rulemakers. “Apart from a small group of very close friends and family, I'm not interested in what people think about me,” Lumsden said. “Underneath it all, I’ve got a heart of gold.

Lumsden’s exploits could fill a book—and soon will, as he disclosed that he’s in the process of writing a memoir. He spoke to The Unicorn Review about his long career and what the future might look like.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Unicorn Review: You told me at one point you keep a copy of the Scotch Whisky Regulation on your lab table to "see what I can contravene." Is that hyperbole or do you actually sit and troll the regulations looking for inspiration?

Bill Lumsden: It's probably 80 percent hyperbole, 20 percent reality, because if you really drill down and look in great detail at it, I think it can inspire you to do things that maybe were done in the past. And that's the key here. If it's something that you have evidence was traditionally done in the industry, then generally you can get away with it.

A prime example of that was A Tale of the Forest. So myself and Ian Russell, the former company archivist, found evidence of malt of barley being kilned over all sorts of stuff, which is kind of obvious because it wouldn't just always have been peat that was burnt to generate the fire.

The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) were a little bit uncomfortable—it wasn't so much what I had done, but the way in which our promotional material was talking about it. They asked me not to talk about these elements flavoring the malted barley, so I started talking about using combustible materials. Let's face it—why on earth would I have done it if it wasn't to flavor the malted barley?

I do respect the regulations from a consumer perspective, as a whisky lover but also a distiller, because it's there to protect the equity of the brand that is scotch whisky. Plus I also sit on the SWA Scotch Whiskey Regulations Committee, which I think they invited me to join in a poacher-cum-gamekeeper type scenario.

You are good at breaking rules while also being respectful of them, which is nice since whisky seems to invite a lot of gatekeeping and people dictating rules about how you can and can’t drink it.

If someone was introducing me to a new drink, I would always listen to what they're saying, but then I would find my own favorite way of doing it. I was invited to judge on the Kentucky leg of the International Wine and Spirit Competition last year, and there was a guest judge. He was a dyed in the wool, hardcore bourbon drinker, and he was castigating everyone else on the panel, which was full of professional distillers and creators. And I just thought, you're missing the point here.

It's all very well if that's your view, but you can't ram that down everyone else's throat. It just so happens that the scores this particular person gave for all of the whiskies were totally out of sync with every single other person in that panel. So it helps in life, not just in your career, to be a little bit more pragmatic about things and understand that other people have different and equally valid views.

Peat Overload

That reminds me of how you have said you’re not that into extra heavily peated Ardbeg, like Supernova and Hypernova, but you make it because there are people who love it. Is there such a thing as too much peat?

The reality is, and I'm speaking here with my scientific hat on here, that you can only reach a certain level of phenols in the malted barley through natural processes, i.e., drying the barley over a peat fire. Some of the mind-boggling numbers I see out there, the first thing I think is I don't believe that.

The second thing is that it gets to a level where your palate cannot pick up any more, so what's the point in doing it? Our mantra has always been, that's all very well, but does it actually taste good? You might throw right back in my face, "Well, Billy boy, you don't like Hypernova." And I don't, but I do understand that there's lots of people out there who do. The vast majority of our ultra-heavily peated stock that we used for Hypernova is in refill bourbon barrels to maximize the pickup of that flavor.

Rules are Meant to be Broken

Is there a rule, whether official or unspoken, that you haven’t broken yet but want to?

Oh, God, yeah. Now, when I say haven't broken [a rule] yet, what I mean is that people just don't know that I may or may not have broken it. With some of the equipment we have in the Lighthouse at Glenmorangie, we can do things which we simply wouldn't contemplate in the main distillery. It’s not impossible to imagine that some of the things we have done do not meet with the current scotch whisky regulations.

The obvious thing to do is to look at types of wood other than oak. But let's just say oak wood is the wood of choice for some very, very good reasons. I'll give you a little anecdotal example. The last time I visited Yamazaki, [Suntory chief blender] Shinji Fukuyu himself took us into the laboratory and he let me try a sample of Yamazaki and said, "What do you think, Bill?" And I said, "It's absolutely dreadful, Shinji." He was rolling about laughing. It was a barrel that he'd had made where the heads had been knocked out and replaced with toasted cedar wood. It brought a little lump to my throat because it reminded me of an old aftershave brand that my late father used to wear.

Obviously there's much more than [wood]. The Scotch Whisky Regulation currently only allows you to use five cereal types: barley, corn, wheat, oats, and rye. Anything else outside that, like sorghum or rice or triticale, it's not something I've actively pursued. But you can see there might be a bit of interest there.

You don’t always go for the obvious when creating new products. Many of your innovations genuinely break new ground rather than just iterating. Are you consciously looking for the less-obvious ideas?

It's partly been conscious, but it's partly driven by my personality. I've always been a contrarian. If someone tells me, “You can't do that,” then almost automatically the first thing I'm going to do is do it. Even if I know it's going to end in pain or arrest or whatever, it's just the way my mind works.

At the board meetings, I don't like being controversial just for controversy's sake, but I am prepared to speak up with views which are not always popular because maybe, just maybe, it might lead to something positive—and occasionally it does. I think the CEO respects me for that reason, as long as I'm not just doing it out of pure mischief, which sometimes I am.

What is the craziest or perhaps dumbest experiment that you have tried that has actually worked?

We've done a few things which from a pure biochemistry perspective were nuts. Enzymes are critically important in the production of beer and whisky. In terms of scotch whisky, you're not allowed to add enzymes. They must be endogenous, i.e., come from the malted barley or the cereal itself. But for enzymes to work to their optimum, you need particular conditions of pH, temperature, salinity, all these things.

So we've mucked about with these parameters, and the production of alcohol was disastrously curtailed as we knew it would be, but we still got an interesting product at the end of the day. There’s some bits and pieces like that. [Ardbeg and Glenmorangie master blender] Gillian Macdonald is a chemist. I'm a biochemist. So we sometimes use our backgrounds to see just what would happen.

I am being deliberately very vague here. We are going to possibly even launch a product from that next year. It’s a prime example of something which we knew would not work, but we tried it anyway just to see what happened.

The Evolution of Ardbeg

You were instrumental in reviving Ardbeg Distillery and building the single malt brand into what it is today: a unique whisky with a personality of continuous experimentation. When you eventually retire, what’s going to happen? Will Ardbeg continue to evolve?

At some stage I'll take a step back, but I don't think I'll ever step away completely. The idea of the professor emeritus is quite appealing to me, and the company has indicated to me that they would like that to happen as well. But honestly, if something happened to me on the way home this evening, both brands will be in very good hands with Gillian. She has a similar philosophy and outlook and, most importantly, love of the brands. I have no concerns there whatsoever.

I actually sit on the board of the company, and that's not that common for people in my role. I think it's critically important from the perspective of protecting spirit quality, because it's the easiest thing in the world to start saving money on your whisky by just using cheaper raw materials, by cutting corners, by driving your distillations, but all of these things negatively impact on quality.

I know you're not asking me this directly, but if I was to say the one legacy I would like to be remembered for was improving and maintaining the quality of both Glenmorangie and Ardbeg. That’s my passion, to make sure that continues.

I didn’t know you sat on the board of LVMH. Do you give input on stuff like pricing? I’ve been impressed at how Glenmorangie has kept prices reasonable while also, in some cases, raising the age statement.

As a member of the executive management committee, I generally will not make the final decision; that will lie with the CEO. But I certainly have a say in it. In some respects, I think we've underpriced. For many years I thought our beautiful 18-year-old was a real value for money—maybe too much value for money, but you have to strike a balance.

Obviously we are all aware of the current situation in terms of the global economy, the global geopolitical situation, Gen Z coming through, all these things. I think it's more important than ever that while you don't cheapen or undersell your products, you do achieve a realistic price point there. I like these projects where we're making super limited, super old, super expensive products, but the vast majority are probably never even going to be drunk by people. They're collectible. I really have loved the fact that certainly for the Glenmorangie brand, we've always been very democratic and the vast majority of what we make is for people to drink and enjoy.

Ardbeg fans: we know them, we love them, we are them, but they can sometimes be quite over the top. Is it ever too much?

They don't take it a bit too far. They take it way too far. I have had one death threat from an Ardbeg fan. I think it was delivered in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way.

I always say to Gillian and the team, when we're setting out to create a new Ardbeg, "You have to understand there's likely to be at least 10 percent of our Ardbeg consumers who will not like this. It's just the nature of the beast." So you have to sometimes be a little bit thick-skinned. You have to take a step back and rather than view it as negative or a personal attack on you, view it as the fact that they are so passionate about their favorite brand that sometimes it goes off that way. And I'm the first to admit that it's almost impossible to make 100 percent of our Ardbeg client base happy. It's just not going to happen.

It's never happened, not even when you released 10-year-old for the first time?

If you had asked me this six months ago, I would come back to you and say we are going to make that happen because we are about to release, for the first time for many years, a cask strength version of our 10-year-old. [This release is now out-ed] I thought, everybody's been asking for this for years—everyone's going to love it. But actually I got some very negative comments from one person in Australia. Maybe this person was just having a bad day, but that's the only negative comment I heard about that product.

The other product which I personally have never heard a negative comment about is Ardbeg Alligator. That was not only a terrific product, it was such a fun project to work on, and I think we got everything just right in terms of the simplicity of how we described the product and the little tongue-in-cheek marketing with alligators out in the bay and things like that.

Palate Changes

In a recent conversation we had, you talked about how your palate has been coming back from the big and the bold to more subtle and nuanced flavors. Is that change influencing what you're making now?

There’s a mantra I've always had in my own tiny little mind, and that is: remember, Billy boy, you are not making this for yourself. You are making this for your consumers. Now, 99 times out of 100, guess what? I love the products myself. I don't always. Hypernova was a good example of that.

You need to be careful that as your palate changes you don't allow your products to drift too much in terms of flavor. That’s why I think it's important, A, always to have a good stock of historical benchmark samples to compare it to, and B, to have quite a wide range of people on your sensory panel so you're not simply relying on your own view.

We have a panel of tasters in the company who have all gone through very rigorous sensory testing, so we know they've got a good nose and palate. But as I get towards a product being launched in market, I'll often put it out to people in the company who I know have no good palate, but they're whisky drinkers.

What do you think about American craft whiskey?

If we're talking about American malt whiskey, I'm still waiting to have my socks blown off me by an absolutely fabulous one. Westland so far is about as close as it's come. The majority of American malt whiskeys I've tasted are made to the same spec as American bourbon and Tennessee in that they're using virgin oak, and I think they maybe need to look at that. That would be my view.

I'm going to use a strange comparison here, but I was also of the same view of Irish whiskey. I was perfectly happy to sip on a Jameson or a nice Bushmills or whatever, but did it actually really thrill me? Not really. But then about two years ago, I tasted Redbreast 12-year-old and I thought it was utterly fabulous. I thought, that's what's been missing.

Future Plans

Your kids work in scotch whisky too. Is there any competitiveness among you?

My son's at Chivas and my daughter's at Macallan. My son has had a couple of people saying, "You need to be very careful in what you say to your dad." But the reality is that there are no real secrets. We all know what each other are doing. And it's one of the things we all love about our industry—that we have enormous respect for all of our fellow distillers. Now, obviously we like to sell more than them if that's possible, but we respect what they do. I think it's this camaraderie that exists in the industry, more than anything else, that makes it so positive.

If you weren’t working in whisky, what would you be doing?

I would love to be working in fashion and fabric. In Scotland, we have a very rich history of weaving cloth. The mighty Chanel in Paris recently have bought a number of cashmere houses in Scotland.

My current favorite brand is Missoni from Italy. I've spent a fortune on things from Missoni and I'm not sure I'll ever wear them. That's not the point. I just love the craftsmanship. I love the unusual fabrics and the very unusual patterns and textures they use.

In Peebles [a town in the Scottish borders] there's a very famous woolen mill called Holland & Sherry and they supply cloth to all the top tailors throughout the world at Savile Row. They don't have visitors in. I tried to blag my way in once but they were having none of it. No matter how much I told them about the great admiration I have for what they did, it wasn't working. But I'm not giving up.