Southern Alberta’s weather impacting whisky production in a good way

Eau Claire Distillery in Diamond Valley says greater angels' share makes for better whisky flavour.

Temperature and high-pressure fluctuations in southern Alberta typically aren’t good news for migraine sufferers but it turns out they are very good for whisky production.

The people behind Eau Claire Distillery in Diamond Valley noticed an interesting phenomenon soon after it started production close to 12 years ago and single malt whiskey was put into oak barrels to age.

“What that does to the barrel is that if you think of a barrel as a living, breathing thing, when the pressure comes, it’s pushing the liquid into the staves and it’s maturing and gathering flavor faster,” said Eau Claire president David Farran. “As it gets hot and cold, it’s oxygenating.”

Farran says the whiskey’s movement inside a barrel increases the flavour profile and speeds up the maturation twice as fast as distillers see in Scotland, where the temperature is more constant.

“A five-year-old from Eau Claire would be equivalent to a 10-year-old Scotch,” he said.

“We’ve now proven that and presented papers in Edinburgh (and other whisky producing countries) so at the end of the day, I think we have like the Goldilocks climate for making whiskey.”

When master distiller and Glasgow native Danny Gowrie joined the company a decade ago, he’d never seen anything like the weather in Diamond Valley and found the barrels were losing a lot of liquid.

“It definitely was a worry at the beginning,” he said. “Seeing those levels of volume losses is not something that I’m used to, but then when we go and start to sample the casks and as the yields went on, we really noticed a depth and complexity that we shouldn’t have been seeing.”

It’s a phenomenon the industry refers to as the angels’ share — a quantity of spirit that evaporates from the barrel as the whisky matures over the years. Eau Claire’s barrels were losing more than normal in the dry Alberta climate.

“We actually term it now as the angel’s gift because it does have such an effect on the maturation,” said Farran.

While distillers in other countries typically lose about three per cent of liquid due to the angels’ share, Farran says Eau Claire lost about 12 per cent during the first year.

That’s a “huge amount,” Farran says, but what the distillery loses because the dry southern Alberta climate is the moisture.

That loss “concentrates the whisky and the flavor so in the proofing process we can add back water and we have a wonderful whisky,” Farran said.

Recently back from a whisky judging event in London, Farran and Gowrie say they’re raising some eyebrows from the scotch community and others who’ve been making single malt whisky for generations.

“Especially when we go overseas, (Alberta’s is) a very unknown type of climate that people are not used to,” Gowrie said. “When you explain how quickly the temperature can change in a relatively short period of time, there’s a lot of shock and amazement at just how warm it can be and then cold fairly quickly.”

Farran says Eau Claire Distillery is being noticed by experts all over the world.

“Those people know whisky; that’s their beverage,” he said “When you can get accolades from them it’s a huge endorsement and very self-satisfying.”