But first there was the tasting on Marylebone Road. There was a Lagavulin 12, new releases from Port Ellen and Brora—two “lost” distilleries that have recently been revived after decades of being shuttered—and the star of the night, a Port Dundas grain whisky distilled in 1964 and aged for 52 years. Faber jotted down tasting notes on his phone. “Structure and restraint,” he wrote of the Port Ellen. The Lagavulin was “too youthful". 

Nothing compared with the Port Dundas. “It wasn’t just the age statement that was impressive,” he says. “It had a certain finesse and elegance.”

A day later, Faber boarded a flight to Inverness, where he set out for Glen Ord, a 179-year-old distillery that makes whisky for the Singleton series of single malts. “The weather was terrible but the air was clean and sweet,” he recalls. As it’s one of the more popular distilleries to visit in Scotland, the experience at Glen Ord was not exactly intimate, but Faber was still able to glean some interesting information, like how the distillery uses washback tanks made of Douglas fir imported from the west coast of the United States.

Things got more exciting as Faber drove west to the Isle of Skye. After stopping for a moment to admire the 13th-century castle at Eilean Donan, he ventured across to the island and made his way to its only distillery, one that makes some of his favourite whisky.

Nestled between rolling green hills and a shallow inlet, Talisker Distillery is a collection of whitewashed, pitched-roof buildings that has grown bit by bit since 1830. Its whisky, known for bold flavours with a delicate finish, has won many admirers through the years, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, who referred to Talisker in a poem as “the king o’ drinks".

“It’s all about the water,” says Faber. Scottish water is hard, with lots of calcium and magnesium. “It makes it taste masculine, for lack of a better word. It’s hard and angular versus soft and voluptuous, which is what you get when you use water without as many minerals.”

The distillery tour was a fascinating experience. "When I go to a Japanese distillery, there’s always a language barrier, but Talisker could answer anything as in-depth as I wanted,” says Faber. "When you go to a distillery you never stop learning."

He was particularly taken by the swan neck lye pipes that plunge into a bath of cold water, which cools and condenses vapour from the stills. “It’s what gives Talisker a peppery taste, but they can’t explain why,” he says. “It’s the kind of thing that captures the myth of whisky.” Although the distillery produces 3.5 million litres of spirit per year, it’s not exactly an industrial product, since it owes so much of its character to intangible forces like climate, water and mysterious swan neck pipes.

Faber usually prefers to drink his whisky neat, without any added water. “If you’ve gone to the effort of building your distillery next to a specific source of water, I want to taste the whisky with only the water it was made with,” he says. But he made an exception on Skye. “I had all expressions—neat, on the rocks. It’s the same water, so I thought, ‘Why not?’” 

As he ventured along the island’s heather-cloaked hills, Faber enjoyed a lot of Talisker. “We went to an oyster shack for breakfast and I had some Talisker 10. It was so good,” he says. He drank it with smoked haddock and the best fish and chips he had ever tasted. He sipped it with mussels for dinner. “It’s such a unique whisky—I fell in love with it. It’s the complexity. Sweet notes, peppery notes, umami. And once poured, it changes through its evolution in your glass.”

Faber’s next stop was the Speyside Cooperage, where workers assemble whisky casks from new American oak. “The level of craftsmanship still exists no matter how much whisky they produce,” he says. “Even if you modernise it in some ways, there are certain elements that can only be done by hand, like the cooperage or the master blenders.”

After the cooperage and a visit to Cardhu, which makes a large part of the whisky blended to create Johnnie Walker, Faber ended up at the Highlander Inn, a legendary whisky bar in the small town of Craigellachie. There he met the inn’s owner, Tatsuya Minagawa, who poured him some rare Scotch and even rarer Japanese whisky.

“I saw how much Japanese whisky is linked to Scotch,” he says, thinking back to his distillery visits. “I could see a young Taketsuru working there, watching and learning.” He still marvels at how much skill is required to turn a simple mix of barley, yeast and water into something as magical as Scotch whisky. “That’s not science,” he says. “It’s passion.”