Dr Jim Swan

Jim Swan was born on Christmas Day 1941 at Cockenzie, a fishing harbour on the coast east of Edinburgh. He belonged to the first generation of whisky technologists. From the boom years of the 1960s he stayed with the subject for fifty-two years. His findings ran from what happens to spirit between the barley and the glass to the mechanics of maturation.

In 1965 he joined a laboratory a few miles along that coast at Musselburgh, which worked on crisps and soft drinks as readily as whisky. There he learned gas chromatography, which separates a spirit into the things it is made of. He learned sensory analysis, the discipline of describing a flavour so that somebody else gets the same answer. He also learned to put both at the service of a company with a deadline.

The work took him to American oak forests and Spanish bodegas. Later it took him to a new generation of distillers, making single malt where it had never been made. It took him to the drinkers who wanted to know how it was done.