Guiding the Spirit: The Peripatetic Life of Jim Swan

The story it tells

He joined a contract laboratory outside Edinburgh in 1965, working on whatever came through the door: tomato soup, ice cream and increasingly whisky. In the 1960's Scotch was booming, and the firms behind it were still largely family concerns, growing fast and with the money and the curiosity to find out what was going on inside their own casks.

What he learned there was the science of taste and smell, how to separate a spirit into its chemical parts, and how to describe what it does on the palate precisely enough that someone else would agree with you. From there it was the production itself, the fermentation and the cut and what happens to spirit while it sits in a cask for years. He was part of the first generation with the instruments and the budgets to actually answer the question: why does whisky taste the way it does? Those questions carried him a long way from Edinburgh, and somewhere in all that travelling he picked up the name the Flying Whisky Doctor.

The book follows the work: chill haze and what it cost the industry to solve, the flavour wheel and how competing firms agreed on one shared language for flavour, what happened to the sherry cask trade and what replaced it, the oak down to its cell structure, and the last twenty years, when good malt whisky started being made in places Scotland had always said couldn't do it. He believed that great whisky wasn't tied to a place. Get the inputs right, and understand exactly what they were doing to the spirit, and you could make something exceptional anywhere. That belief took him thousands of miles from Scotland to places with no whisky-making history at all, and it runs through everything he worked on.

It opens with eight people leaving one lab in 1974 to set up a research consortium that a third of the independent trade paid into, sharing the cost and taking the answers back equally. It takes in the coopers of Missouri, the sherry families of Jerez, and the distillers in Taiwan, India, Wales and Israel who took the science somewhere it had never been used before.

He was my father, and he died suddenly in 2017 without writing the book he could have written. The archive came to me: notebooks going back to the 1960s, photographs he took between 1965 and 2015, diaries, letters, his working library, and the recollections of colleagues who are still around to share them. Very little of it has been written down anywhere else.

Publication is expected early in 2027.