Matt Hoffman, Master Distiller of Westland Distillery in Australia by Melissa Parker

Going with the grain

WESTLAND SINGLE MALT WHISKEY CREATOR AND MASTER DISTILLER, MATTHEW HOFFMAN, COMBINES HIS RESPECT FOR SCOTTISH TRADITION WITH THE CREATIVE USE OF INGREDIENTS FROM HIS SPECIAL CORNER OF AMERICA, TO CREATE A WHISKEY THAT IS TRULY AUTHENTIC TO THE PACIFIC NORTH WEST.

Words Melissa Parker

Matt Hoffman is in the foyer of the Sydney Four Seasons hotel on a promotional tour of Australia. We meet to discuss his American single malts. Hoffman’s doing things differently in Whisky World, a trait that has earned him the title of American Whisky Maker of the Year by Whisky Magazine. When it comes to distilling, Hoffman thinks outside established boundaries and has broken new ground with his local expression of single malt. Raised with an American sensibility toward food and flavour, in a region renowned for its barley crops and brewing industry, he had everything around him to make single malt whiskey. The Pacific North West has barley, it has local oak, and it even has peat bogs. Its climate is cool and humid, providing a delicate temperate climate for the perfect maturation of whisky in cask.

He journeyed to the spiritual home of Scotland to be trained by the traditionalists, and from there he took the ritual of Scottish single malt distilling and made it purely American.

Hoffman is curious and always questioning, this is quickly evident soon into our conversation. His real inspiration for his whiskies comes, not from the distilling industry but instead from the food, wine and beer industries. Flavour fascinates him. Growing up in America he was exposed to industrialized food that made him

I learnt through my studies everyone uses the same two or three barley varietals malted in the same way, so there is no flavour difference in Scotland. They say there is no such thing as flavour in barley and that is frustrating.

hyper-aware of the differences in flavour when compared with the raw and natural alternatives. He sites Rene Redzepi’s Noma as a key influence; the foraging of local, region specific ingredients to create unique flavour.

Making single malt requires four ingredients - barley, yeast, water and oak. Hoffman dissects and analyses every one of them to extract maximum and unique flavour. He dismisses water because water doesn’t have flavour so it’s not a topic of discussion for Hoffman. He says he has clean water and that’s enough, end of story. When we get into barley, however, sparks fly. Malted barley is the number one key ingredient in whiskey so Hoffman works with the local barley producers to cultivate unusual strains of barley to introduce new and different flavours to his whiskey.

“I learnt through my studies everyone uses the same two or three barley varietals malted in the same way, so there is no flavour difference in Scotland. They say there is no such thing as flavour in barley and that is frustrating to me,” explains Hoffman.

“If you are exposed to the beer industry and the craft brewing industry you know beers taste different; porters, stouts, amber ales and pale ales are all different in flavour because of the malts, and yet in whiskey why has nobody made that jump? So we dived straight in.”

Hoffman also plays around with different strains of yeast for a broader flavour spectrum. In Scotland, they only use one strain of yeast, the M strain, also known as distiller’s yeast. Again, Hoffman goes against the grain, and uses a brewer’s yeast. You can hear the collective Scottish sigh at the shock of it, but Hoffman cares nothing for that, he cares about the citrus and heavy red fruit and cherry flavours; for the spice and pepper and cinnamon and ginger that his wild ferment promoting Belgian yeast brings to his single malt.

When it comes to the fourth variable, oak. Westland uses top quality air-dried American white oak casks made from quercus garryana, the oak species that is native to the Pacific Northwest. In Scotland maturation is the key indicator of quality but Hoffman says that is because they believe all the flavour comes from time in cask. The quercus garryana oak imparts its own unique spectrum of flavour to Westland single malts of blackberry, molasses and blueberry jam adding that extra special layer to the whiskey.

“All our whiskies are three to six years old, and people say you can’t make whisky quality in that time but you can if you don’t practise the same methodology of the Scots relying on the casks for all the flavour.”

“Now is the time for the whisky industry to reinvent itself and search out flavour over every part of the whisky-making process, not just at the end,” Hoffman states. “We get our flavour from playing with the raw ingredients from the beginning.”

The most exciting discussion was around the local peat in the Washington State area that Hoffman and the Westland team discovered through the new age exploratory tool – Google maps. Once discovered, and keen to use it in their peated expression – the current expression is made from heavily peated malts from Scotland – Hoffman sought out a malting house but no one knew what to do with it. That all changed in 2016 when a start-up malting house took it on. This was the first malting house in the US to make peated malt commercially thus making Westland the world’s first American peated single malt using local peat.

“The ecosystem in the peat in Washington State is very different to the peat in Scotland; our stuff has about eleven different species of sphagnum moss that all contribute a unique flavour to the whisky.”

I was advised this exciting breakthrough product will be released in the next two years.

For Hoffman the exploratory process of finding new flavours for his single malt whiskey is endless. He sees potential everywhere and believes tapping into it effectively creates compelling product.

Hoffman’s inquisitive and searching mind is inspiring. Westland’s range of authentic American single malts are true to their roots and tell the real story of the Pacific Northwest. The range includes the Westland American Oak Single Malt, Westland Peated Single Malt and the Westland Sherry Cask Single Malt.