What was the research laboratory at Inveresk?

It answered questions put to it by companies with no laboratory of their own. Paint, packaging, animal feed, soft drinks, whatever came in the door. Whisky was one client industry among many.

Sensory science was a growing field to be in. Flavoured crisps were new, the first diet drinks were reaching the market, and manufacturers who had never needed to describe a taste precisely suddenly had to, because they were now building flavours rather than working with the ones they had. Work of that kind came through a contract laboratory, and it is where he learned gas chromatography and sensory analysis. It is also where he learned to apply them for a client, which is a different skill again, and one he was still using fifty years on for distilleries that did not yet exist.

Whisky was a different proposition. It had always been a thing of mystery, and many of the companies were still owned by direct descendants of the men who founded them, among them Teacher's, Grant's and Robertson and Baxter. What Jim Swan brought was the method the food industry was already using, applied to a drink that had been made by knowledge handed down rather than written out.

The laboratory had survived into the 1960s at all because its director, Foster Woodward, brought in the American firm Arthur D. Little of Boston after government funding for its earlier seaweed programme ended, and Inveresk was run from then on as an Arthur D. Little institute.

Arthur D. Little had been applying science to industrial problems since 1886, with over a thousand staff across biology, chemistry, physics, metallurgy and engineering. It was also the firm where the flavour profile method was worked out, and a list of its publications from the late 1950s sits in his papers, with Sjostrom and Cairncross on the physicochemical research behind flavour among the entries.

The same connection is why a Varian Aerograph gas chromatograph arrived at Inveresk in the late 1960s, when few British laboratories had anything comparable. The chill haze work, from 1968, was done here.

A haze in a bottle bound for New York was a commercial problem for the brands then leading the export trade, and a laboratory had answered it. The scientific team at Inveresk had been assembled by Jim Gray, and in 1970 eight of them left to work on whisky alone. After four years of successful projects it was incorporated as Pentlands Scotch Whisky Research Limited on 30 September 1974, with twelve founding member firms. Pentlands was renamed The Scotch Whisky Research Institute on 2 October 1995, so the founding and the renaming are twenty-one years apart.