Stephanie Macleod didn’t develop up sipping Scotch or dreaming of distilleries. In reality, she didn’t even like whisky when she first encountered it. A meals science scholar on the College of Strathclyde in Glasgow, she envisioned a really totally different future for herself. However a final-year challenge on sensory evaluation and the way minute chemical modifications alter style gave her a brand new fascination and love for the complexity of taste. When her college supervisor invited her to work with him on researching whisky, it opened up a complete new world for her.
“I began working with totally different distilleries, wanting on the sensory evaluation and realizing that from three elements—water, malted barley and yeast—every distillery, although the processes are roughly the identical, produces fully totally different taste profiles,” Macleod says, recalling her marvel on the course of. “How was whisky sitting on my doorstep and I didn’t know this stuff?”
From the lab to the mixing room
In 1998, Macleod joined Dewar’s simply as Bacardi had acquired the model, increasing from one to 5 distilleries. She started in high quality management, leaning on her analytical background. However her sensory experience was quickly put into use, and she or he moved into the labs. Certainly one of her first acts was placing collectively a sensory panel to make sure consistency.
“After I joined, just one particular person had a say within the sensory high quality of our spirit, and that was the grasp blender,” she says. “I assumed, ‘What occurs if he’s on vacation? We’d like greater than only one particular person.’”
Not lengthy after, her boss requested if she needed to coach as a grasp blender. “It took me a nanosecond to say sure,” she says, however the doubt nonetheless crept in. She can be the primary lady and sure the youngest particular person ever to carry the title. Would she be accepted?
By 2006, she had her reply. Macleod formally took the helm and have become the primary lady and solely the seventh particular person in Dewar’s 170-plus-year historical past to carry the title of grasp blender.
“Turning into a grasp blender is a journey rooted in each science and sensory immersion,” says Macleod. “I then spent three years learning underneath our former grasp blender, Tom Aitken, studying the artwork of tasting, gradation and mixing in minute element. It’s a deeply hands-on apprenticeship, coaching your nostril, mastering cask sourcing and seasoning and understanding easy methods to harmonize taste profiles.”
She provides that there was no textbook for her journey, but it surely was all about studying by means of experimentation, constructing a sensory vocabulary and mixing tutorial rigor with instinct and curiosity.
Her first take a look at as grasp blender was quick: launching the Dewar’s 15 12 months Outdated Scotch whisky mix in China and Taiwan. “It was nearly just like the delivery of a kid, however quite a bit much less painful,” she jokes. The discharge was effectively obtained, and the trade started to take discover.
Within the years since, the broader trade has acknowledged her management repeatedly. She has received Grasp Blender of the 12 months on the Worldwide Whisky Competitors six consecutive occasions, starting in 2019, cementing her affect far past Dewar’s.
Whisky has lengthy been branded as a “man’s drink,” and the trade usually displays that picture. However whereas outsiders could anticipate tales of resistance or exclusion, Macleod remembers one thing totally different.
“I did really feel as if, throughout the firm and outdoors the corporate, I used to be being rooted for,” she says. Mentors—principally males on the time—invited her into trade organizations just like the Scotch Whisky Affiliation and Scotch Whisky Analysis Institute. “They put me in locations the place I might community with a greater variety of individuals and permit them to assist me develop as effectively.”
Nonetheless, being the primary carried its personal pressures: “You wish to show your self, however you’ve additionally received duty to the model,” she says. “You usually need to put your self final, the model first, after which the crew.”
4 years into her function as grasp blender, Macleod grew to become a mother or father to twin women.
“If I assumed my life was sophisticated earlier than twins, it received much more sophisticated with twins,” she says. Assist from her husband and oldsters helped, however the problem reshaped her management type. As we speak, she is deliberate about supporting crew members by means of maternity go away and different life modifications, maintaining them looped in in the event that they wish to be and making certain their careers don’t stall.
“I’ve all the time made it my mission that as the primary feminine grasp blender, I received’t be the final,” she says.
Innovation inside custom
Macleod’s management is outlined by each reverence for custom and a willingness to push its edges. She usually cites a line usually attributed to Gustav Mahler: “Custom just isn’t the worship of ashes, however the preservation of fireside.” For her, which means respecting Scotch’s 200-year heritage whereas making certain it stays related for tomorrow’s drinkers.
She has championed improvements like Dewar’s “Easy Collection,” which launched cask finishes extra generally related to single malts, reminiscent of port, Mizunara, rum and even mezcal. “We needed to point out the fascinating flavors we are able to get from totally different casks, utilizing maybe a unique age assertion, simply exhibiting a unique side of the Dewar’s type,” she says.
Each choice, although, is grounded in Scotch whisky rules. “There are many issues that we’d like to attempt,” she says. “We wouldn’t wish to do something that will hurt the class [of Scotch whisky].”
That stability of experimentation inside constraints has saved Dewar’s blends dynamic with out shedding authenticity.
Constructing a pipeline for the long run
For Macleod, who nonetheless holds the title of grasp blender, shaping Scotch’s future isn’t solely about liquid within the bottle. It’s about who will get to make it. The whisky trade has grown extra inclusive since she joined in 1998, thanks partly to elevated visibility and outreach efforts. As we speak, nearly all of individuals on her mixing crew are girls, and Bacardi has graduate and internship packages that expose college students to totally different areas of the enterprise, from distilling to advertising.
She says the interns assist the crew see their work with recent eyes, noticing issues they’ve come to take without any consideration and reminding them how outstanding their trade actually is.
Internally, Macleod has helped institutionalize what she lacked early in her personal profession: structured suggestions and mentorship. She works carefully with Bacardi’s “Let’s Speak” program to encourage workers to map each enterprise targets and private improvement. She additionally serves as a mentor for OurWhisky Basis, a company recognizing, supporting and empowering girls in whisky.
“You don’t wish to hear people who find themselves always detrimental,” she says. “However so as so that you can develop, you’ve received to see the place your improvement areas are, so searching for out individuals which can be going to inform you that’s actually, actually necessary.”
Recommendation for the subsequent technology
Requested what she would inform younger girls eyeing a future in whisky, Macleod doesn’t sugarcoat the trail. It’s a powerful trade, however future Scotch leaders ought to take into account their aspirations throughout the whisky trade and even past, together with provide roles. She notes that the trail you don’t anticipate can usually be much more rewarding than the one you had initially envisioned.
LinkedIn, she says, generally is a sensible device for tracing the profession paths of trade professionals. And whereas ambition is effective, she warns towards burning out by saying sure to every little thing. “Just remember to’re leaving house in your life that you may develop,” she says.
For Macleod, development has meant studying to juggle custom and innovation, model stewardship and private ambition, profession and household. It’s additionally meant making certain the doorways she walked by means of received’t shut behind her.
“The whisky trade is secure while you see the subsequent technology coming by means of and having the identical, if no more, ardour for whisky and what it’s all about,” she says.
Picture courtesy of Stephanie MacLeod
