Whisky in China: Exploring Hai Seas Distillery and the Modern Chinese Whisky Scene

Max: Hello Exploring Whisky in China welcome to another episode of WhiskyAngelz, your cask, strength, chaos, whisky podcast. And time we're coming from ⁓ Welcome to WhiskyAngelz. We are in Shanghai in China and I've decided since I'm here anyway to explore the wonderful world of whisky but from a Chinese context. So how easy is whisky to come by in China? What are the bars and the pub experiences like in China? And coming up we have a special visit to of the micro distilleries ⁓ that in Shanghai. So please keep listening. All of that's to come. ⁓ Okay, so I'm out on Nanjing Road, which is, if you like, the Regent Street of Shanghai. And it's a very busy street, with lots and lots of people wandering around. And behind me is a shop that sells lots of whisky. Well, a bit of whisky. And it was quite useful for just getting an idea of how much whisky goes for, and what whiskies are really making it out here. This is very much a metropolis. It's very modern, it's very efficient, and everything is about as high-tech as it could possibly be. and what we're seeing there in the shop you can get a bottle of Bruichladdich for about 40 quid or bottle of 12 year old Glenlivet for roughly the same as long as it actually is Bruichladdich ⁓ and Glenlivet. got no reason to think that it isn't. It looks like quite a smart shop and quite a smart shopping area. ⁓ Okay, so let's on to bars and pubs. ⁓ What can you a hold of and what sort of prices can you expect to pay? ⁓ Well, the bars be just normal. bars that you'd get anywhere in the world or they can be really quite swish swanky and those sorts of places you can wander in in whatever attire you've got on they don't really mind what you're wearing they just you in there ⁓ so a glass glenfiddich example 12 year old would be about five fifty or seven dollars for a single ⁓ and for something like Bowmore 12 year old you might be paying eight pounds forty five or eleven So that sort of region. So it's not ridiculous pricing at all. It's fairly standard compared with the Western world ⁓ and it certainly is a good experience. So well worth if you fancy a whisky heading to one of the bars and one of the speciality bars particularly. Okay, that's enough chat about whisky. It's time to go and see some being distilled and maybe have a dram or two. So we've come down to the Hai Seas Distillery. where I'm joined by co-founders, Brian. Hi Brian, nice to meet you. And Dan as well. Nice to meet you So please do take us on a wee tour of what's inside.

Brian: Max, good to see you.

Dan: It's easily done, come on follow me. I'll take you to the Hobbit hole, if I can get it open. There we go. On the left you can see where we water our barrels. Come on through.

Max: Okay.

Brian: Next, the the next, the

Max: Wow, okay, so this is straight into where the still is.

Dan: So this is our big still, not big compared to some of the folk out there, but we're pretty proud of it. It's a Chinese still made by a company called Hulu.

Max: And it's boiling away in there.

Dan: Yeah, we're just making the last cuts on one of our whiskies.

Max: think we just need to start with the origin story. What led the of Hai Seas Distillery?

Brian: We met five and a half, six, oh my gosh. 2019, is that six years ago? That was six years ago. And it's funny when you first reach out to us, you mentioned that your son was in musical theater, and we just met another son who's also in musical theater. And that's how Dan and I met. We are thespians. We have been in the theater for decades, and it is a shared passion. Dan just popped up out of the blue. And on one of those nights after the show as we're enjoying our drinks at the bar, he just pointed up at one of those bottles and said, he can make whisky. And I thought, no way. Are you serious? Is that possible? You can make whisky? Because it has always been one of my dreams to create a Chinese whisky for the Chinese populace, to have something that we can be proud of.

Max: So it's all very nice compact setup. ⁓ you hit the smell, you can smell it immediately. It's a smell you're used to in a bonded warehouse.

Dan: Yeah, it's the lovely thing to open this up and just suddenly get a look at it and get that

Max: Wow, that is very cool. And what have you got here then? Talk us through just some of the barrels that we're seeing here.

Dan: So these major ones you'll see here in the central aisle are what we call our San Oak barrels. So they're three body barrels. One of the initiatives if you like or new things that we're doing with making whisky here in China is that we were really interested in creating a collaboration between woods as opposed to dipping, moving your spirit from one barrel to another. We wanted to try and make a whisky where oak American oak and Chinese oak are all interacting with the spirit at the same time.

Max: It's quite a big leap from going, want to do a whisky distillery to actually opening up a distillery because you obviously do gins and stuff as well. How did you go about that? Is it a hard thing to do in China?

Dan: was sort of my background as a distiller ⁓ I think that ⁓ that meant was that we just did a few proof of concepts, we worked on a smaller scale, we had some smaller stills that we used and ⁓ was able to produce ⁓ gins and ⁓ young whiskies that Brian was interested in and ⁓ new ideas I suppose that we brought to the whole distillery, ⁓ of them have obviously flourished really well and so we've been able to grow and ⁓ continue to grow. ⁓

Max: And the name Hi sees then, what's the meaning of that?

Brian: Well, the hai in Chinese actually means ocean sea. So that's where Shanghai comes from. Shanghai means ⁓ top of the ocean, or ocean top. And then seas, well just like high seas. So there's this connotation, ⁓ least in English, of the high seas being the age of exploration and pirates. ⁓ has always been a destination that has attracted entrepreneurial from all over the world ⁓ over past centuries. And that's why I came here 20 years ago. ⁓ Our close friends are also entrepreneurs. People who've been attracted to the city as ⁓ they want to be part of the gold rush to go see what's China like. To be here in the beginning of the century. ⁓

Max: Yep.

Dan: I always laughed a little bit at it because it's sea seas, sea sea sounds right And memorable. ⁓

Max: Yeah.

Brian: Actually the Chinese character, the xī for the seas is also to on words because that is the same ⁓ xī from the word Xīwàng which means hope. So kind of like ocean hopes in Chinese. ⁓

Max: and the actual logo itself. What's the thinking there?

Brian: the dragon ship or the treasure ship from Chinese history. A thousand years ago there were Chinese ships like these galleons that just sailed all throughout the South China Sea and collected treasure. We also have a boat. We also are a great, we love fantasy and science fiction. So I think there's that inspiration in there as well.

Max: it's relevant to the hai seas. ⁓

Dan: I've still got the original sketch that I did of it. Yeah, I think that that mystical idea of dragons, the ability to go somewhere different, see something new. And we just love the simplicity of the connection to high seas.

Max: It's a very China symbol as well, the whole Dragon as well. Yeah, absolutely.

Dan: So we're trying to trying to fuse those ideas together that kind of collaboration as opposed to competition that that connection as opposed to

Max: Yep. Okay, let's go.

Brian: Try some of these. The X bourbon barrel. They will move our way down and try a few other things.

Max: the three-wood barrel. So explain that then.

Dan: So as I was learning to make whisky and as I was investigating the whiskies that I liked, one of the things I kept running into was ⁓ first iteration wood, the American style of putting spirit into a brand new charred barrel. you only used American wood then you were really getting a simple, delicious but straightforward flavor profile. What I decided and what I wanted to do was to start thinking about what happens if you include French wood into that flavor profile and what happens if you include Chinese wood. So we are making here in China our own barrels and those barrels are half French oak, half American oak and the heads are Chinese oak. And so the idea behind that was to sort of less be sort of dipping if you like, into different flavors and trying to create something that's happening really magically inside the barrel. you know, really chasing that kind of, that idea of doing something different and new and so far those results seem to be proving to be, you know, interesting.

Brian: So everything we're going to try today is one gold medal in an international competition. San Francisco World Spirits competition last year. And this is one of the gold medal winners. It's our three-body barrel and then finish in an experiment cask.

Max: Right.

Dan: And this is cast strength obviously. My personal preference is actually always ⁓ great to try it. Try it in the cask. But one of the things that my sort of study and reading recently that I always felt that I liked whiskies closer to sort of 46 and slightly below. I've just been learning about ⁓ ethanol water matrix, which when ⁓ you these two things together, water and ethanol, ⁓ the viscosity. that you'll get so the thickness of the actual alcohol itself in the drink is between 42 and 46 percent. my take on that is that you tend to be able to access more of the whisky. People often talk about it opening the whisky but I just think what we're actually doing is making it stick to the bits of us that pick up those. Welcome to try it on this and then I always try it with a little bit of water.

Max: Okay. Yeah, Well, slanj. ⁓ Slanj, or what would you say?

Brian: In Chinese it's like ganbei. Ganbei means empty glass.

Dan: I also like Dada and Dado, which means basically poor, boldly in Chinese.

Max: Okay, cool.

Dan: So it's definitely a bourbon style whisky, but it does something different I think too. I think it's much smoother. You get lots of lovely honey. We've been finding a little bit of what I call marzipan. There's a little bit of nuttiness to it that comes through. Obviously the caramels that you get out of the American oak.

Max: And you can almost taste the barrel side of it as well, can't you? You get a real flavour for the barrel.

Dan: I think there's a richness to it as well that comes from the French oak.

Max: Very, very nice. Try a little bit of water. Yeah, touch it with a bit of water. This is a thing where in the podcast it's like, really hope, which everybody could actually get to taste these sorts of whiskies because I think going on a distillery tour is such a great thing to do because actually get to the heart of the story of a place in the sense of whiskies.

Dan: It's good to add that level of experience to it. it embodies, empowers the stories and you get a different sense of the things. You really see where this is made and how it's made.

Max: Yeah, yeah. Well, there's the Three Oaks, San Oaks. It's very innovative. Yeah, yeah. That's delicious. Absolutely brilliant. Lovely. Yeah, yeah. One of the things that while I've been out here, because when you come to China, you don't really know what to expect because you're only getting the main political news stories and the batting backs and forwards politically.

Dan: Hmm. Cheers. To be rubbish, to be honest.

Max: No, exactly. Every media in every country is spinning their own politics, aren't they? And the thing about when you hear it's such a high-tech modern society, there's obviously going to be disparities. With every society there's disparities. But it's a very modern place to be. Has there been any challenges about setting up a microbrewery that you think... Is it just getting hold of barrels from different places or is it all straightforward?

Brian: It's like it's easy in some ways and difficult in some ways. So for example, Shanghai is a very commerce friendly, ⁓ business focused city. Like if you just walk around or drive around, there's commerce that's happening. are making money and they're chasing after their goals. ⁓ That being said,

Max: It's a busy bustling place.

Brian: applying for the license to open the distillery was very complicated. It would have been easier if we went to the farmland, countryside, and some other random province because Shanghai, it wants to be, it wants to minimize risk. so I think it definitely, we had to jump through a lot of hurdles, but we are, we are licensed. The only whisky and gin distillery based in Shanghai.

Max: That's absolutely brilliant, it? What a place to be based as well.

Brian: So let's see, over here we have our Chinese oak, the 100 % Mongolian oak cask.

Max: Mongolian, right, okay. So this is still San Oaks, so it's still Three Oaks. Okay, not this

Dan: No, not in this particular one. Experimenting with the idea of just creating a whisky that's 100 % Chinese.

Max: Right.

Brian: Okay. So this is Mongolica, Quercus mongolica. Okay. It is a distinct species from the Mizunara. Okay. It does share similar characteristics.

Dan: Yeah, and it's basically if you follow the family tree, the connection is just above. I think you straight away get ⁓ the stronger nuttiness, that marzipan that's really coming even in those small amounts of Chinese oak. You can really get it.

Brian: the colors a lot lighter compared to all of our

Max: lot later.

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Brian: Yeah. We should get some strong vanilla notes.

Dan: Again this is barrel strength so...

Max: Yeah. That's lovely. The problem with my analysis of whisky gin is to be, it's lovely isn't it? ⁓ Everybody's going for the different notes. ⁓

Dan: In fairness to you though, there are people who have got amazing skill at tracking down notes and different senses and smells and I don't like to get too snobby about it to be honest. If you like it, that's great. Enjoy it. ⁓ That's enough for me.

Max: So tell me what's been your favourite whisky that you've had come out maybe between the two of you.

Dan: For me it's pretty simple and it's to do with the fact that we're a young distillery. I I showed you and we tapped on the 8-8 and I remember really clearly Brian and I unplugging that for the first time and just going, having a little sip and just looking at each other and going, holy, this is good. This is really good and this is something that's not like anything else.

Brian: It's a bit like tasting ambrosia. That's what I would expect. It's like, ⁓ my gosh, we made this? this is, ⁓ my.

Dan: That's a pretty exciting moment for two sort of hillbillies from our back of the US and Australia who are coming here to China to make some whisky. I'm not meaning to degraded what we are, but we're this sort of young up and coming crew that are trying some different things and for us to taste that whisky for the first time for me, that was super exciting. So whenever we get people here, what I started doing, because this literally is our very first barrel of whisky, is I always like to sort of give it a bit of a tap and say hello, because it's... Get in there and give it a hit. It's important to just say good morning.

Max: Morning! There we go. Ah yes, that one's going to be remembered for a long time isn't it? That's going to get used in all kinds of places. we should... 100 years time, you know? There'll be a thing, everybody will be worn shiny by everybody patting it. that lovely patina...

Dan: from a thousand hands. Yeah it'd be nice if that's true. We're slowly drinking away the first.

Max: Yeah, well that's the problem. need to keep... You've got a bottle of it somewhere that's gonna sit on a shelf somewhere. Wow, that's honey. Look at that colour.

Dan: There's a couple sitting in my house. Yeah, yeah. the darkest. You can see the difference between that one and the last quite clearly.

Max: So this is the one that you kind of walk up and went, we've done this. We've got this in the can. This is happening now.

Dan: I think less of got this in the can but just a sort of a recognition that that the new ideas that we were bringing to bear were gonna make something different, gonna be something. so that's a really lovely place to sort of get to when you're taking risks and trying new things. Yeah,

Max: Slams! Listen guys, thank you so much for having me here today. It's been absolutely fascinating and hopefully we'll see Seas on the shelves in local ⁓ in years to come because that would just be absolutely amazing and ⁓ hats to you. ⁓ it started and getting it running is such a huge achievement, isn't it? ⁓

Brian: Slime?

Dan: ⁓ that's down down Joe. Yeah, thanks very much.

Brian: excited to show you around.

Max: Yeah, brilliant. A huge thank you for tuning in to this episode of WhiskyAngelz. Please do follow along and subscribe. A big thank you to the guys at the Hai Seas distillery for looking after us so much and hopefully that's given everybody a bit of an insight into in China. ⁓ That's for the time being. ⁓ Take