One of the biggest decisions a distiller makes isn't what goes into the mash—it's what gets left behind during distillation. It's a decision we've questioned more than once over the past seven years.

I've always been a huge fan of Springbank whisky. One of the things I love most about it is the depth of flavour many people refer to as the "Springbank funk"—that slightly wild, oily, earthy character that gives the whisky a real sense of weight and authenticity.

Much of that character comes from the way Springbank still makes whisky. They continue to do many things by hand, with relatively little industrial standardisation, allowing more of the flavour created during fermentation to make its way into the final spirit.

From the beginning, Chantal and I wanted to embrace a similar philosophy at Kinglake.

Our long, open fermentations give an incredibly flavourful wash, but creating those flavours is only half the story. You also have to decide how much of them you want to carry through into the whisky.

During distillation, the spirit comes off the still in three parts. The heads arrive first and contain lighter, more volatile compounds that we don't want. The heart is the clean, drinkable spirit that becomes whisky. Finally come the tails, which contain heavier oils and flavour compounds. Most distilleries stop collecting relatively early to produce a lighter, cleaner spirit. We deliberately keep collecting well into the tails.

That means more of those heavier oils and flavour compounds make it into our spirit. It also allows us to capture the peat character from the 25% peated malt in our mash bill. We collect down to around 58% ABV, whereas many distilleries would finish significantly earlier.

The result is a spirit with plenty of weight, texture and complexity.

Now, Chantal and I absolutely love the character of our spirit, but every now and then we find ourselves asking the same question.

Have we gone just a little too far?

 Is it perhaps a touch too oily? Too funky? Would more people enjoy it if we made a slightly earlier cut and produced a cleaner, lighter style?

 Our thinking has always been that the answer depends on the cask.

 In our very active 50-litre casks, and in bold French oak fortified wine casks, that heavier spirit balances the intensity of the cask influence. But when we refill 100-litres for example, where cask character will be much gentler, we're continuing to question whether the same approach is the right one.

One of the things I enjoy most about making whisky is that there are very few absolute answers. Every decision involves a trade-off, and even after seven years we're still learning, questioning and refining what we do.