Walk out of almost any distillery tour and the things you remember are physical: the heat of the still house, the sweet-sour air around the washbacks, the first cold breath inside a warehouse. We are trained to think whisky begins with barley, yeast, copper, and oak. In one sense, of course, it does. But before casks are selected for a bottle, someone has to imagine how a collection of different liquids might become one coherent whisky.
That person is often called a blender, a word that still sends some drinkers straight to blended Scotch whisky. Yet the act of blending sits behind almost every whisky we drink. A single malt bottling may be assembled from dozens or hundreds of casks from one distillery, each bringing something slightly different. The job can mean maintaining a house style through changing stocks, creating something new, or recognising an unexpected possibility in the inventory. It is less a final act of mixing than a continual process of judgement.
There is a desire to understand what that judgement feels like from the inside. Not simply how a blender works, but how they think: where ideas come from, how balance is recognised, and what a lifetime spent paying attention does to the way somebody experiences the world.
There are three people in particular whose routes into the industry couldn’t be any more different. Stephanie Macleod came through food science and sensory analysis before becoming master blender at John Dewar & Sons, where her work spans Dewar’s and single malts including Aberfeldy, Aultmore, Craigellachie, Royal Brackla, and the Deveron. Angela D’Orazio helped define modern Swedish whisky at Mackmyra and now works at Compass Box. Lora Hemy’s route took in painting, music, sound engineering, and perfumery before whisky, later helping shape Roe & Co in Dublin and taking on a new project in Japan. Together, they offered three very different answers to the same question: how do you imagine a flavour that does not yet exist?
Macleod’s early interest was not whisky but the relationship between structure and taste. At university she studied sweet-tasting phenolic compounds, then worked across soft drinks, cheese, olive oil, wine, and whisky. The scientific training remains central, but not in the cold, deterministic way people sometimes imagine.
“There’s definitely both sides,” she says of science and instinct. “You really can’t have one without the other.” Analysis checks what the nose might miss. Macleod was uneasy when she joined a company where one person alone assessed spirit quality; however experienced the nose, every person has blind spots. Her response was to build a wider sensory panel.
D’Orazio begins somewhere else. “I’ve always been very curious about experience,” she says. Flavour was part of an upbringing shaped by Italian food, Sweden, and travel, but whisky gave that curiosity somewhere to land. At Mackmyra, she found what she calls “permission to play with things”: Swedish oak, local peat, bakery yeast, fruit wines, small casks, and ideas that did not come with an inherited rulebook.
Hemy’s curiosity has travelled through different senses. At art school, her paintings began to escape the canvas, onto the floor and then into immersive spaces. Painting led to music and sound, then aroma and whisky.
“I see these things as intrinsically connected,” she says. For Hemy, sensory work offers “a chance to interact with people without them realising that you’re having a conversation with them”. Whisky, music, and scent can reach “the places where words can’t go”.
None of them can switch that attention off. Macleod notices corked wine, packaging, even the glue pattern beneath a label. D’Orazio mentally assesses the balance of a hamburger while eating it. Expertise has made almost everything part of the work.
Macleod’s process can resemble a controlled experiment. When considering an unfamiliar cask, she may swirl a sample of its previous contents around a glass, discard it and then add the whisky. It is an early test of compatibility before valuable spirit is committed to wood.
“It’s about complementing and not dominating,” she says. D’Orazio’s ideas often begin outside whisky. A visit to Japan and an encounter with vintage green teas led her to notice parallels between their aromatics and whisky. The first experiments were deliberately simple: “Do these two tastes go together? Do these two marry?” Only then did she move towards prototypes that resembled the finished whisky.
When I asked whether her thinking resembled a chef, artist, or perfumer at work, she chose the kitchen. “I’m a curious chef,” she says, describing her inability to follow a pancake recipe without adding sea salt, vanilla, and date syrup. Sometimes the impulse is simply to see what happens.
Hemy works through combinations too, but her mental picture is closer to music production than performance. She does not mean the familiar language of whisky as an orchestra. She imagines the screen of a digital audio workstation, tracks placed together, frequencies competing or leaving space, elements entering at different moments.
“I think probably the way I think about whisky first is more as a piece of music that I can formalise,” she says. She may draw the experience as layers, a geological diagram, or a timeline showing what should happen at the front, middle, and back of the palate. She rarely begins with a single flavour, thinking instead in groups of elements and how they might behave together. Balance is one of whisky’s most used words and one of its least examined. For Macleod, it begins with a dry-sweet equilibrium, but also with succulence: something juicy, complex, and mouth-watering. The aim is not neutrality. It is to let the cask amplify what belongs to the whisky without overwhelming it.
For D’Orazio, balance is something felt, but also something communicated. Smoke is her clearest example. She compares smoky components to a collection of peppers, capable of providing spice, perfume, or backbone. The question is not only how much to use, but whether the drinker should consciously notice it. A small reduction can move smoke from the subject of the whisky to a supporting part of its structure.
Hemy is more suspicious of the neatness of our language. She keeps a private vocabulary for her own work, alongside shared vocabularies developed with teams. Feelings may become shapes; flavours may occupy a position in the mouth or a point on a timeline. She is hesitant to call this synaesthesia. She thinks instead of fluency across sensory languages, as another person might move between German, French, and Russian.
A sensory impression is private, drawn from memory and culture. Macleod points out that “custard” may be useful to a British audience and meaningless elsewhere. When she travels, she asks people to describe whisky through their own references, expanding her vocabulary rather than imposing hers.
A whisky has to work twice. First, its components must speak coherently to one another. Then the finished liquid must speak to somebody the maker may never meet. All three described lives spent gathering material.
Macleod smells plants, herbs, delis, and markets, consciously storing impressions for later. Damp soil returns her to childhood walks on Arran; cola cubes give her a route into pineapple aromas. New cuisines make new descriptors available.
D’Orazio remembers ripe cloudberries eaten on a northern Swedish bog, sticky hands attracting butterflies, and later finding ways to carry cloudberry, raspberry, and cherry into whisky. These are part of the working library from which new ideas can be drawn.
Hemy rejects the romantic idea that creativity simply arrives in a dream or in the shower. It can be cultivated and, to some extent, systemised. For her, it means a “gathering of as many different life experiences and curiosities, and then storing them in a way where you can return to them and reassemble them in different original new orders”.
She calls it “a collector’s instinct”. Records, art, architecture, travel, science, and flavour research enter an archive that can later be remixed. Art and science are not opposing forces to her. Both require the confidence to connect things that are not yet fully visible.
None of this happens alone. Macleod relies on multiple noses. D’Orazio talks about blending at Compass Box as constant feedback around sweetness, texture, and smoke. Mentors matter, but so does the freedom to make mistakes. A palate may be personal; creating whisky is conversational. The clearest common quality was not sensitivity, technical knowledge, or even imagination. It was curiosity. Macleod says an exceptional creator has to care, remain passionate, and keep asking why one blend works better than another. She is suspicious of anyone who claims to know everything about whisky because “there’s always a cask that will arrive that you think, ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’”
D’Orazio says experience has made her better at knowing what she does not want, but she hopes she has not mastered everything. That, she says, would be boring. Hemy still calls herself a distiller, though “it’s slightly broader than whisky”.
Spirits have given her a lens through which to absorb people, places, and cultures, and a reason to try seeing the world through more than her own eyes. When people visit distilleries, they almost always leave talking about stills, warehouses, or casks. Perhaps they should leave talking about people. Because the remarkable thing is not that whisky can taste of pineapple, jasmine, or beeswax. The remarkable thing is that somewhere, before a cask was chosen or a recipe written, somebody imagined those flavours.
