McKinley & Co. Whiskey Found in Explorer's Shack

Insert your favourite whiskey on the rocks joke here. Photo courtesy: the lede

Three crates of Scotch whisky and two crates of brandy left beneath the floorboards of a hut by the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1909, at the end of a failed expedition to the South Pole, have been unearthed by a team from the Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Al Fastier, who led the team, said the discovery of the brandy was a surprise, according to a news release posted online by the trust. The team had expected to find just two crates of whisky buried under the hut. The trust reported that that ice had cracked some of the crates and formed inside, “which will make the job of extracting the contents very delicate.”

Location of hut. Photo courtesy: the lede

Richard Paterson, a master blender for Whyte & Mackay, which supplied the Shackleton expedition with 25 crates of Mackinlay’s “Rare and Old” whisky, described the unearthing of the bottles as “a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers,” since the recipe for that blend has been lost. “If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated.”

Mr. Paterson addressed the question of what the whisky might taste like in a post on his blog when the plan to dig it up was first announced, last year:

[W]hiskies back then — a harder age — were all quite heavy and peaty as that was the style. And depending on the storage conditions, it may still have that heaviness. For example, it may taste the same as it did back then if the cork has stayed in the bottle and kept it airtight.

But if the whisky is on its side, the cork may have been eroded by the whisky or air may have got in some other way — especially if the corks have been contracting and expanding with the temperature changes over the years and seasons.

The hut in Cape Royds, Antarctica, where the explorer Ernest Shackleton spent the winter of 1908 before making a failed attempt to reach the South Pole.The trust’s Web site has a detailed history of the failed expedition. Photo courtesy: the lede

The video shows the efforts to preserve the hut built as a base for the Shackleton expedition at Cape Royds, Antarctica, in 1908:



Via thelede