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Cask to Glass

Cask to Glass

Written by: David Holmes
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How do you take your whisky?


Neat? Splash of water? Block of ice? Or even a mixer?


However you take it, join John Beattie, former Scotland rugby international and semi-retired BBC radio and TV news presenter, as he celebrates the heritage and flavour of Scotland's national drink and the world's favourite spirit.


Whether you call it whisky, whiskey, uisge beatha, aqua vitae, or the water of life... there's a story behind every dram; a craftsman behind every drop; an aroma with every nose; and a flavour in every sip.


This is the spirit of Scotland: distilled in a place; shared around the world.


What makes it so special? Why is it so loved? And who are the people that make it, and the aficionados who drink it?


Join John every Thursday as he explores the alchemy that takes place from cask to glass.


Slàinte!


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Host: John Beattie

Producer: David Holmes


Socials:

@C2GWhisky

@JohnRossBeattie

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Episodes
  • Aussie Drams with That Whisky Girl Sarah Russell

    Aussie Drams with That Whisky Girl Sarah Russell
    Apr 30 2026

    By day, Sarah Russell is “Miss Sarah”, an Australian primary school teacher in Adelaide. The rest of the time, she’s “That Whisky Girl”, an Instagram influencer and whisky podcaster breaking down barriers in a male-dominated industry.


    “I just wanted to get the girls going,” she tells John from Kyoto, Japan’s “cultural capital”, where she’s just back from visiting the Miyagikyo Distillery founded by Masataka Taketsuru, the Father of Japanese Whisky.


    “I got into whisky into whisky a few years ago,” Sarah says, “and I’ve just found that it’s a very male dominated field. And every time I go to whisky events, I’m usually the only girl or it’s a couple of girlfriends and they don’t really love whisky.


    “But I meet lots of girls who love whisky and they talk about how maybe they don’t feel so comfortable going to these events. So I just really wanted to get everyone into it.”


    “You know,” she continues, “it’d be fantastic to have a bit of a girls’ night out at a whisky event rather than just it being a bit of boys’ night thing. And I’ve met so many women who are whisky distillers in Australia and brand ambassadors and amazing bartenders. So I really just wanted to showcase everything they’ve got going on.”


    But she adds: “I feel anytime I'm in a whisky bar in Adelaide or at a whisky show the amount of times I've had people say, ‘Do you even like whisky? Do you even know how to drink whisky?’ Or I've had like men stop me and just be like, ‘This is how you drink whisky.’ I'm like uh-huh I know.”


    So at the start of the year Sarah launched a fortnightly podcast on Instagram called “She’s On The Rocks” to do just that.


    Sarah’s whisky journey started off with whisky and cola when she was younger. But as for whisky on its own, “I was like, nah, it's not for me. It's a bit burny.”


    Yet, while she found she “struggled with drinking it”, she loved the smell of whisky; liked nosing it. “So I just kept trying it,” she says. “And eventually it just clicked for me. One day I was like, ‘What is this? I love whisky now’.”


    But not just the taste.


    “It's the memories behind things and it's the experiences, it's the people. It's just such a wonderful community as well,” she explains.


    Join John and Sarah as they trade memories made over sharing a dram; discover Sarah’s three favourite Australian whiskies; and find out just how much heftier the Angels’ Share is in Australia compared to Scotland, which is why, Sarah says, “It’s so hard for us to get older age statements.”


    Slàinte!

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    Socials: @C2GWhisky | @JohnRossBeattie

    Creator & producer: David Holmes

    Art work & design: Jess Robertson

    Music: Water of Life (Never Going Home)

    Vocals: Andrea Cunningham

    Guitars: John Beattie

    Bass: Alasdair Vann

    Drums: Alan Hamilton

    Bagpipes: Calum McColl

    Accordion: Gary Innes

    Music & Lyrics: Andrea Cunningham & John Beattie

    Recorded & mixed by Murray Collier at La Chunky Studios, Glasgow, Scotland

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    27 mins
  • The Whisky Algorithm: David Thomson of Annandale Distillery

    The Whisky Algorithm: David Thomson of Annandale Distillery
    Apr 23 2026
    If you want to get David Thomson, co-founder of Annandale Distillery, started, just tell him, “You don’t make peated whisky in the south of Scotland.”“Yes, we do!” he’ll thunder.Then expect a wee history lesson.“If you go to Barnard’s book, The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom,” he’ll tell you, referring to Alfred Barnard’s definitive whisky guide published in 1887, “you find that all four of the distilleries that were in the south of Scotland did make peated whisky.”“I mean,” David says of Annandale, “we live in a bog frankly, so why wouldn’t we make peated whisky? But you know that gets me to one of my sort of pet things, which is I really don’t like the kind of Lowland moniker that we get labelled with, because I don’t think it’s got very positive connotations. So I always think of ourselves as south of Scotland whisky."In 2007, David and his wife Teresa Church took over the derelict remains of Annandale Distillery, in Dumfries and Galloway in south west Scotland.Started in 1836 by an ex-excise officer, Annandale was taken over by Johnnie Walker in 1893, precisely because it made peated spirit.“The peated spirit they were getting previously,” David speculates, “was coming from Islay. So into a ship of some sort, onto the Clyde coast and then presumably by train to Kilmarnock. Whereas with Annan, they could simply take it to the train station and whip it up to Kilmarnock.”In about 1919, David continues, Johnnie Walker experienced “liquidity problems” and sold Annandale to a local farming family, the Robertsons, who made Provost Porridge Oats, and it ceased to be a distillery.Until 2007, when David and Teresa decided they’d buy and restore the derelict distillery.They didn’t have a background in whisky, but David was a specialist in food chemistry. And more importantly he's an expert in sensory psychology and sensory evaluation. In 1989 David and Teresa had started MMR Research Worldwide, a market research company for the food industry.With MMR behind them, they decided to identify a whisky profile that would set Annandale apart."If you ask people what sort of whisky they like, you're gonna get 101 different answers. Different people like different things even within the same quite tight product category," David explains. "But although you take 300 people, there's not 300 points of view. There's probably five or six points of view. And being able to identify these is quite important.""We were able to take expert tasters of any type of food, and we could look at the relationship between the sensory characteristics of the products and what people liked. So if you think of these different kind of liking segments, you can build a separate mathematical model for each liking segment, and then you can tell you clients how they should change the sensory characteristics of their product to make it liked more."David and MMR applied the "algorithm", as David calls it, to whisky. And they identified a flavour profile for peated and unpeated whisky which no-one else was doing. David gave the two profiles to his long-time friend Dr Jim Swan, the so-called "Einstein of Whisky", and asked him to design two whiskies that matched the profiles.After several iterations, Jim did just that. And in 2014 Annandale Distillery was back in production, producing its first new spirit in nearly 100 years.Join John as he chats to David about the rebirth of Annandale Distillery, guided by sensory science and data modelling. And discover how Scottish actor James Cosmo became the inspiration and face of Annandale's Storyman blended Scotch Whisky.Slàinte!-------Socials: @C2GWhisky | @JohnRossBeattie Creator & producer: David HolmesArt work & design: Jess Robertson Music: Water of Life (Never Going Home)Vocals: Andrea CunninghamGuitars: John BeattieBass: Alasdair VannDrums: Alan HamiltonBagpipes: Calum McCollAccordion: Gary InnesMusic & Lyrics: Andrea Cunningham & John BeattieRecorded & mixed by Murray Collier at La Chunky Studios, Glasgow, Scotland Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    44 mins
  • Supertasters: How Women Taste Whisky Differently with Téa Nicolae

    Supertasters: How Women Taste Whisky Differently with Téa Nicolae
    Apr 16 2026
    Two months ago, in Episode 48 with Paul Bock and David Reid, they mentioned one of the regulars at their whisky and cheese gatherings brought along two bottles of Romanian whisky, which they agreed were “excellent”.“Romanian whisky?” we thought. “We need to find out more.”So we reached out to Téa Nicolae, Paul and David’s guest. And we got more than we bargained for, because among other things Téa’s a researcher working in the phenomenology of taste, with a focus on whisky and its cultural perception.In particular, she explores how women taste and experience whisky through her companies TasteVera and Women Vitae.“Women,” she says, “are more likely to be supertasters and have more tastebuds.”But their taste changes during their menstrual cycle. As hormone and oestrogen levels fluctuate, Téa explains, so does a woman’s “sensitivity to bitterness, to sweetness, to spiciness, et cetera.”The research is in its early stages, Téa, continues. But she says there's a growing body of "white papers" about individual female taste variations, much of it led by the research and writings of the Indian physician and ayurvedic practitioner Sumit Kesarkar.And she concludes: “Taste is a full body experience. It’s not just what happens in the mouth.”Téa’s originally from Romania.She came to the UK to go to university when she was 18 and eventually moved to Edinburgh. As well her two consultancy companies, Téa’s a co-founder of the Scottish-Romanian Business Alliance.Her “love affair with whisky”, as she puts it, started three years ago after reading Kesarkar's book “Single Malt Whisky”.“It was new way for me to access different parts of myself that I wasn’t accessing before.”“Whisky,” she says, “helps me ... because of the insights that I gain from interacting with people and understanding myself through drinking whisky... It's just about, and has always been about, just aiming to understand myself better and the world around me as well."When pushed by John: "So whisky is a gateway to that?" Téa replies: "I would say everything is the gateway to that, if you know how to maximise it. But whisky is a very powerful gateway for me, yes."So settle in as John explores the intersection of science, gender, and the personal soul of spirits through Téa’s storyAnd as for Romanian whisky?“Very few people know Romanian whiskies exist,” Téa admits. “Even Romanians don’t know that.”The two bottles she brought to Paul and David whisky are both produced by the Romanian drinks company Alexandrion. The first bottle was a Carpathian Single Malt.“That was the first single malt that was released from Romania,” Téa says.The other was JA.AR.“Jaar actually means embers. And it points to the fact that all the whisky that they produce and bottle is matured in charred casks,” Téa explains.These casks are usually wine casks used to make Fetească neagră, a native Romanian grape.“It’s translated as dark maiden and it’s a very dark luscious spirit,” Téa says of the grape. “And it was fascinating for me to drink a whisky matured in that particular barrel because the characteristics it had were very different from the wine in itself. But then the flavour of the wine was quite delicately coming through it.”Slàinte!-------Socials: @C2GWhisky | @JohnRossBeattie Creator & producer: David HolmesArt work & design: Jess Robertson Music: Water of Life (Never Going Home)Vocals: Andrea CunninghamGuitars: John BeattieBass: Alasdair VannDrums: Alan HamiltonBagpipes: Calum McCollAccordion: Gary InnesMusic & Lyrics: Andrea Cunningham & John BeattieRecorded & mixed by Murray Collier at La Chunky Studios, Glasgow, Scotland Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    30 mins
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