Beyond the Glens: Georgie Bell from The Heart Cut

If you love whisky, there are hundreds of distilleries across the world pursuing flavour based on passion, provenance and a “taste of place”. Just look "beyond the glens" and the global "big five", says award-winning indy bottler Georgie Bell from The Half Cut.

“I know I’m on a Scotch whisky podcast,” Georgie Bell co-founder of indy bottlers The Half Cut chuckles, before pressing home her point. “It’s Scotch and, not Scotch or…” she insists.

“Whisky is now made across the world, and there are passionate individuals who are making whisky to the quality of Scotch. You just have to take a look at the recent World Whisky Awards and who the award winners were.

“Scotland was there of course, but there were distilleries all over the world who were racking up gold medals right? Taking home best-in-class prizes. And these distilleries across the world, they’re making whisky that’s at that quality, but they’re not trying to replicate Scotch.

“They’re trying to make whisky that tastes of home to them; that has a sense of place. And that is very exciting because actually when you think about it, what you need to make whisky is grain, yeast and water. You need time. You need a lot of money. And you need patience.

“Those six factors don’t have any geographical boundaries. You can make whisky across the world. You just have to have the “why not, what if” mentality to be able to bring that to light. And those are the distillers that we partner with at The Heart Cut”.

Georgie’s been in the whisky business for 19 years; since she was a 19-year-old bartender in Edinburgh. She was a global whisky ambassador for eight years, four with Craigellachie.

Two and half years ago Georgie and her husband Fabrizio Leoni started The Half Cut. (Three days later she gave birth to their twin daughters.)

The name comes from “the heart cut of the distillation process,” Georgie explains. “When the spirit runs off that final spirit still, distillers never take the first bit of the cut. They never take the last bit of the flow because of the undesirable flavours. They’re just not the character they want the whisky to be, but they always take their prized half cut.”

“The heart cut is different from distillery to distillery,” Georgie continues, “because of the way the spirit runs off the still. Different flavour congeners are going to come off at different times.

“We chose the name The Heart Cut for our independent bottler because we’re working with distilleries to find these incredible gems of casks within their warehouses. Kind of those prized one-off casks that really show the heart and soul of that distillery.”

Distilleries like Stuaning on the west coast of Denmark, which was the first distillery Georgie and Fabrizio partnered with.

It was founded by a group of friends intent on making a “distinctly Danish style of whisky,” Georgie explains. “I think four of them were engineers. One was a doctor, one was a butcher, one was a teacher, one was a banker.”

They had the water. They had the grain. But they didn’t have peat.

“But,” Georgie continues, “what they do have is heather. And once a year, they cut down some of this heather and they put it in the kiln during malting and they create a heather-smoked single malt. A flavour, that because of the heather and where they are, can’t be replicated anywhere else in the world.”

It's whiskies like Stauning, "whiskies with a story", that Georgie and Fabrizio are bottling. Others include Starward in Australia and Thomson in New Zealand, as well as Nc'Nean and Lochlea in Scotland.

So as Georgie says, it's "Scotch and, rather than Scotch or..."

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