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The brand’s natural habitat is the cocktail bar, and master blender Brian Kinsman created the recipe with that in mind. That’s what Cornthwaite believes, and he claims that at independent William Grant & Sons “the family runs a 50-year forecast”. Yet Monkey Shoulder’s success was no overnight sensation, and it is debatable whether anyone enslaved to the City and its short-term culture of quarterly results could have pulled it off. The competition has finally woken up: 2016 saw the release of Copper Dog, followed by Whyte & Mackay’s Shackleton blended malt a year later. In 2017, volumes hit 311,000 cases, helped by a strong presence in travel retail. It grew steadily after its launch in the UK and France, eventually reaching the US in 2012, and passing the 200,000-case barrier two years later.

#MONKEY SHOULDER WHISKEY NEAR 80905 FREE#

Monkey Shoulder has somehow managed to escape being pigeonholed, leaving it free to compete equally with high-end Bourbons, Japanese whiskies and, more recently, a tsunami of craft gins in the on-trade. In other words, this is not really a brand about demographics or categories. It would be ludicrous to compare me with a 23-year-old bartender who is just out of uni and having a great time in Manchester, but we might share the same attitude to drinking whisky.” It was created not to have the stigma of a single malt or the familiarity of a blend.” Nor was it really aimed at that most targeted group in the history of spirits – the millennial.Ĭornthwaite says: “I’m 37, married with a kid about to go to high school, so I’m a millennial. That’s the whole reason Monkey Shoulder exists. In 2016, Monkey Shoulder’s former brand ambassador, Dean Callan, said: “Being fun is difficult in Scotch whisky because the category is so established as being serious. “Monkey Shoulder is about an attitude and approach to what Scotch whisky is, what it can be and how it’s used,” says Cornthwaite. Ask whether it contains other malts, such as Ailsa Bay from the firm’s giant whisky distillery at Girvan, and you may be asking the wrong question. Monkey Shoulder is a blended malt from three Speyside distilleries, which explains the three monkeys on the bottle’s shoulder. “Scotch in 2005 was a relatively stuffy category.”

“The gap was really about people who drink whisky or, perhaps more to the point, who don’t drink whisky,” he says. Its guiding light was “about being the new face of Scotch whisky for a new generation of whisky drinkers”, says the firm’s head of whisk(e)y, Jonny Cornthwaite, who insists it wasn’t about plugging a gap in William Grant’s portfolio. In 2005, long after anyone had wielded a shiel in earnest, Monkey Shoulder was released as a hip new brand of Scotch from the house of William Grant & Sons. Some developed repetitive strain injury causing one arm to hang low like a monkey’s.

Malt men would march up and down flipping the grain over their shoulders with malt shovels, known as shiels. The wet grain from the steep would be spread over a stone floor for a week to begin germination, and it had to be turned regularly to prevent the little rootlets from matting together. Once upon a time, all of Scotland’s malt whisky distilleries malted their own barley.

*This feature was originally published in the July 2018 issue of The Spirits Business Now it has become a stalwart of the cocktail scene. The blended malt whisky from William Grant & Sons made waves when it launched in 2005.

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