My friend Michael Jackson… the other one!
Michael Jackson: a whisky icon
He couldn’t moonwalk but his whisky shuffle was a wonder to behold.
He couldn’t sing but had a great ‘voice’ nonetheless.
He was born in Yorkshire but literally wrote the book on malt whisky.
That book being Michael Jackson's Malt Whisky Companion (1989) which still ranks as a worldwide bestseller in the field.
My friend Michael Jackson was many things but, in this instance, was a genuine inspiration.
Michael wrote about his passions, beer, whisky and specifically malt whisky, as both journalist and writer, while also managing to be excellent company and eminently likeable. Having an erudite raconteur to drink with is one of life’s great pleasures and I spent many an evening discussing our shared love of that special golden malt elixir.
The World Guide to Whisky
Michael’s book “The World Guide to Whisky” is a great read, combining history and a guide to some of the great whisky distilleries around the world. It is one of those books you can go back to time and time again finding new information and references with each return visit. But it was the bestseller, his ‘Malt Whisky Companion’, that remains a great tasting guide to the Single malt distilleries of Scotland and led to a very fortuitous conversation.
We’d had many a conversation with Michael around developing and releasing brands of malt whisky and he was a great encouragement and sounding board when both developing and launching ‘Classic Malts’. It was at the end of this process that Michael asked he fateful question “so what are your plans for the other 20 odd distilleries?” And with that simple question Michael opened for us a Pandoras box of malt whisky delights.
So where to start? There were so many relatively unknown distilleries. What we decided to do was take each distillery and define its geographic locality, environment and individual features to showcase it as a whole entity.
The Flora and Fauna Range
So where to start? There were so many relatively unknown distilleries. What we decided to do was take each distillery and define its geographic locality, environment and individual features to showcase it as a whole entity.
In addition, Scotland has such a wide and varied range of flora and fauna that we could find examples of local animals, birds & flowers that were unique to that particular distillery and its location. For example, the swans that grace the pond beside the Linkwood distillery are almost a talisman, reminiscent of the famous Rooks at the Tower Of London.
Mining through all our fascinating findings later we again encouraged Michael’s input and, using one of his great gifts to headline and describe an idea he said: “so its sort of a ‘Flora & Fauna’ series?”
Having recognised the simple genius presented to us, we used that little to headline the series and made, for the first time, all of United Distillers malt distilleries available as bottled single malts for general sale.
The rest is history and the series stands as a testimony to both generations of craft distillers, and to a really good friend.
Michael Jackson’s legacy
By the way, if you were wondering about Michael’s writing credentials, he not only has worldwide bestsellers to his name, but also a collection of over 1,500 books from his personal library on beer, whisky and other drinks, as well as 300 copies of his own books, are stored at the Oxford Brookes University Library under the name “Michael Jackson Special Collection”. This will hopefully confound both music and whisky fans for years to come.
Written by Mike Collings, Founder, The Firkin Whisky Co., and Nick Venus, Whisky lover and Raconteur