King Car Whisky: Distilling the Kavalan Spirit

Yilan's Yuanshan Township sits along Highway 7, about 20 minutes beyond the Xueshan Tunnel in what is sometimes referred to as "Taipei's backyard."

Two chimneys in the distance that resemble the tobacco flues of Kaohsiung's Meinong Township mark the site of the King Car distillery.

In fact, the two spire-like chimneys are entirely decorative. King Car put them up to given their distillery a more vibrant and evocative look.

Once you've had enough of majestic natural scenery and manmade amusement parks, consider giving an educational factory tour (often with free samples) a try!

It's the drinker, not the drink

Taiwanese love their whisky. Macallan, Glenlivet, Johnny Walker, and other famous brands all have their fans among Taiwanese tipplers. But very few of them have actually made a "pilgrimage" to a foreign distillery. And now that King Car has established its own distillery in Taiwan, they no longer need to. A quick jaunt over to Yilan's Yuanshan Township reveals the mysteries underlying the process of making fine spirits.

The facility has had more than 1 million visitors in the year or so since it opened up to tourism in December 2008, and saw a record 16,000 visitors on a single day during last year's Lunar New Year's holidays.

Its great popularity is evidence of the great curiosity Taiwanese feel about whisky distilleries. Though King Car keeps the facility open to visitors free of charge year round, section coordinator Andy Chang says it prefers that visitors make an advance reservation, which enables the company to maximize their enjoyment by providing a guided tour.

On entering the distillery, visitors are first introduced to the King Car Corporation. Founded in 1956 as a manufacturer of detergents and pesticides, the company has extended its operations to the production of cleaning products, beverages, and biotechnology. It's even involved in aquaculture. A large, diverse business entity, King Car owns a number major brands, including Dr. White detergents, Meih Fei pesticides, Mr. Brown coffee (distributed in 53 countries around the world), mini-Oligo energy drinks, and Green Time mineral water.

King Car is an entrepreneurial company that has always enjoyed "doing what others haven't." Bullish on Taiwan's NT$600-800 billion a year whisky market, in 2005 it began building a whisky distillery in Yuanshan, a township noted for the quality of its water. Emulating distilleries abroad, King Car also decided to open its facility's doors to visitors, educating them about whisky while also promoting its own products.

King Car's whisky "castle" is a European-style white-walled black-roofed structure. If it weren't for the two warehouses built alongside, it wouldn't look at all like a factory. The facility's deliberately foreign, non-industrial air has made it a popular destination for wedding photos.

The King Car distillery in unspoiled Yilan is now producing Kavalan, Taiwan's first whisky. The facility is open to visitors, who are invited to have a look around and sample the product.

Malt and barrel

There are no real secrets involved in the production of whisky. In fact, the first stage of the process is much like that of beer making: malt (sprouted barley) is cooked for eight hours, helping convert its starches to sugar. This dried malt is placed in a tank with yeast fermented for 60 hours, producing a liquid that contains about 8% alcohol. This product, known as the wash, is then distilled twice. About 10% of the second distillation, the so-called heart of the run, is then casked in wooden barrels to mature for at least two years, at which point it at last becomes whisky.

The public can observe the entire process through windows. Viewed through the glass, the saxophone-shaped copper stills are beautiful as well as functional. "Their shape helps increase the amount of contact between the alcohol and the walls of the still, giving the spirit a more complex, multidimensional flavor," explains Chang.

The warehouse in which the spirit is aged lies at the heart of the facility and is a focus of visitor interest.

Where foreign wineries keep their wines in cellars, King Car's aging area is a five-story-tall warehouse housing nearly 30,000 barrels of maturing spirits.

"Whisky is different from wine," says Chang. "It has to breathe during the aging process. Air must flow, which makes underground storage inappropriate."

As a forklift shuttles around the warehouse, the distillery's spiritual leader-master blender Ian Y. L. Chang-explains that the temperature and humidity at different heights above the building's floor determine the type and size of oak barrels used. For example, in summer, the upper reaches of the warehouse can exceed 40oC, while the temperature nearer the floor remains just 20-some degrees. To account for this, they stack large casks, from which spirits evaporate relatively slowly, at the top, and smaller casks, which have more rapid evaporation rates, down below. Samples of the mature whisky are extracted from the casks, analyzed, tasted, and blended before bottling to harmonize the differences between the flavor of each of the casks and ensure consistent quality.

The highlight of the tour is the tasting. It begins with an introduction to the whisky's "nose" then gradually moves on to an assessment of its taste. The guides' detailed explanations quickly bring even novices up to speed.

The Kavalan Solist series has two lines. The Kavalan Solist Single Cask Strength ex-Bourbon Cask is a golden whisky with a sweet mouthfeel that has picked up scents of green apples, cherries, vanilla, and coconut from the oaken barrels in which it matured. Jim Murray's Whisky Bible 2010, which rates 3,850 whiskies from around the world, gives the Solist a 90.5 and describes its nose as "an unusual array of dry toast, walnut oil, grated chocolate and even dried banana skin: an attractive compilation."

Aged in sherry casks, the Kavalan Solist Single Cask Strength Sherry Cask is a deeper amber color. Murray rates it a 92, scoring it 22.5 for nose, 24 for taste, 22.5 for finish, and 23 for balance. He offers an intriguing description of this whisky's nose as well: "The grape is massive, virtually exploding from the glass. Against a toasty, hickory background the fruits go through the gears, even with an ultra-ripe cherry note." He adds that it is "one of those fabulous sherry butts marked by a mild sulphury shadow but has so much else going on that much, if not all, can be forgiven."

According to master blender Chang, most male consumers prefer the "firm" flavor of bourbon-casked whiskies, while female consumers tend to prefer the mellower taste of sherry-casked whiskies.

King Car currently sells four whiskies, including two single-malt Solists. Marketing a single malt is an exceptionally bold move for a new distillery, and Murray praised the distillery for its courage when he visited last March. Taking heart from his accolades, the company released limited quantities to market in August. "Our goal is to further the development of spirit making in Taiwan," says Richard Ma, the company's spokesperson.

Toppling tradition

What exactly is whisky? Why hasn't anyone in Taiwan made it before?

Roughly speaking, distilled spirits made from fruits are brandies, while those made from grains are whiskies. Broken down by color, red wines are maroon, while gaoliang, maotai and other "white" spirits are transparent. Whisky too is colorless when first distilled. It's the aging in oak casks that gives it its rich golden-amber color.

Whisky originated in Ireland and Scotland, which have a boreal climate. Subtropical Taiwan, on the other hand, is more known for its production of Taiwan Beer and Kinmen gaoliang, which acquire their unique flavor profiles from the imported barley, Penglai rice, and Kinmen sorghum used in their production. Because King Car was the first company to attempt to make whisky locally, it had to start entirely from scratch in terms of ingredients, facilities, and techniques.

"Just because something hasn't been done before doesn't mean it can't be done at all," says Andy Chang, who was involved in the process from day one. He notes that King Car achieved success three years after beginning test production in 2006. In so doing, it turned the conventional wisdom that "good whisky can only be made in boreal climates" on its head. (While Thailand also makes whisky, its quality is poor.)

Before starting construction, King Car personnel made numerous trips to distilleries in Japan, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, the US, and England to glean what they could. The company imported barley malt from Scotland, acquired its distilling equipment from a Scottish provider of turnkey solutions, and assigned personnel to study with well known distillers. But everything they learned had to be tested in Taiwan to see how it would be affected by the local climate and conditions.

King Car's first efforts were less than ideal.

One problem was that the consultants brought in from Scotland lacked experience distilling whisky in tropical climates. Consequently, they had trouble aging the whisky in Yilan, where the mean annual temperature is 25oC and the humidity is 70-80%. The company then hired Dr. Jim Swan, an expert in the maturation of spirits with a background in chemistry and biology. Swan spent seven months testing and tweaking before settling on an approach appropriate to Yilan's climate.

The trick turned out to be in the oak barrels. "Whisky's fickle flavor is dependent upon the oak casks in which it is aged," explains Ma, explaining the company's "cask strategy."

King Car uses two kinds of oak barrels-large 500-liter sherry casks imported from Spain and smaller 200-liter bourbon casks imported from the US. "The differences in size and point of origin create differences in the flavor of the mature whiskies," says Ma.

The two casks are made of different materials and have very different prices. Sherry casks, which are in short supply, are expensive, costing roughly NT$35,000 each. Bourbon butts cost just NT$3,000-4,000 apiece. Whereas sherry casks impart grape flavors to the whiskies aged in them, bourbon butts flavor whiskies with hints of coconut. These retained flavors make older casks even more valuable than newer ones. King Car sends buyers to Spain and the US every year to acquire replacements, though selecting them is something of an art.

Good setting, water, and spirits

"The cold climates of boreal nations allow spirits to 'hibernate' in their casks," says Ian Chang. "Because the chemical reactions occur so slowly, their whiskies take more than a decade to mature. Yilan's excellent water, and its large variations in temperature and humidity speed up and intensify the chemical reactions. As a result, our spirits mature quickly in their casks." He adds that King Car has earned global respect for producing a two-year-old whisky that matches the quality of 10-year-old Scotch whiskies.

Lin Yifeng, owner of the well known Whisky Master website, calls Kavalan whisky a "prodigy." But he adds that rapidly matured whiskies do have a flaw. "Because they don't interact with the cask for very long, they aren't as smooth, complex, or refined as whiskies from abroad that have aged for a decade or more. They still lag a little behind," says Lin.

It's hard to beat history, and hundred-year-old distilleries have quite a head start. King Car is using its "cask strategy" to try to close the gap and has certainly made a splash with its first efforts.

Choosing which part of the distillation run to use is another key factor in the quality of a whisky. Andy Chang says that when King Car branched out into the production of distilled spirits, company chairman Lee Tien-tsai argued: "Drinking spirits is a pleasurable activity. People shouldn't have to suffer side effects," and insisted that the distillery do its utmost to eliminate the compounds that cause headaches and hangovers. King Car therefore uses only 10% of the second distillation, virtually the heart of the heart of the run, to make its whiskies. Though this spirit has an alcohol content of 76% (versus 70% for foreign whiskies), it is less likely to leave tipplers with a hangover.

Chang stresses that King Car Kavalan is produced from a single variety of malt, that no man-made ingredients are introduced during the production process, and that no spirits from other facilities are blended into it. The company's aim is to offer its single malts as an exemplar of Taiwanese refinement.

Whisky's new homeland

King Car chose Kavalan to be the center of production for Taiwanese whisky in part because Lee Tien-tsai hails from Yilan and in part because the excellent waters from the Central and Xueshan ranges, the mountain breezes, and the damp Pacific air impart a wonderful character to the whisky.

"Just as foreigners who reside in Taiwan come to love this land," says Ma, "whisky will adopt Yilan as its new homeland." He argues that though whisky is not a part of Taiwan's traditional culture, it should do very well here. After all, no one anticipated that cafes would become ubiquitous back when King Car first began producing canned coffees here 25 years ago.

The distillery has become popular more quickly than King Car anticipated, and the company is already at work expanding its parking lots and covered walkways to accommodate more visitors. "We want everyone to understand how conscientious we are being with regard to Yilan, the environment, and Taiwan," says Ma.

In March, King Car will also begin offering a coffee liqueur aimed at young women, introducing Taiwan to a flavor it had previously known only in song.