Meet Hamish Torrie, evangelist of Scotch ‘water of life’

Global Ambassador for the Glenmorangie Hamish Torrie at a past function. For the last decade or so, more and more upper crust Kenyans have been taking whiskey as their drink of choice. [Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]

Through the glass door, which is resolutely closed, you can see the marble floor and the LCD lighting with the word ‘Balcony’ shimmering on it.

Inside the super cosy Cigar Lounge of the Hotel Kempinski, there are no cigars in sight.

But there is a wall-to-wall closet through whose glass encasing you can see two brands of whiskey glimmering through – Hennessey and Glenmorangie.

Plenty of celebrities have been rapping about Hennessy for decades. From dead legends like Tupac Shakur to living dolts like Drake, but as far as I know, no star has ever sang about Glenmorangie.

‘Glen’ means valley, ‘mor’ means big and ‘angie’ is the Gaelic word for tranquil.

So this whiskey means ‘tranquility in the big valleys’, presumably of Scotland.

And we are about to meet their current Director of Corporate Social Responsibility, Hamish Torrie, as well as a brand ambassador and spokesman for this Scotch whiskey, who will forever clear Hennessy from the mind.

Drink of choice

For the last decade or so, more and more upper crust Kenyans have been taking whiskey as their drink of choice. It started with the Jameson craze, has now spread out to the Black and Red Label brands. The crème de la crème whiskey eaters boasting about Glenfiddich single malts; with invites to friends and clients to come and partake of 12 to 15 year old bottles of the same.

“It is all part of an aspirational lifestyle, symbols of success,” a cheerful Torrie explains. “You wear the Swiss watch, drive the German car, and drink the Scotch whiskey.”

Hamish would know about these things, having studied Mediaeval History of Europe at Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland, and smelling the scent of whiskey every time as he walked from the family village cottage to school, a route that took him past two whiskey distilleries in the Speyside countryside.

“There was the smell of malt in the clean Scottish air,” he says. “In college, during holidays, I took up a job as a whiskey barrel roller in one of the factories, and greatly enjoyed the camaraderie.”

As it turned out, the young Hamish had a real nose for whiskey, and after his graduation, the company asked him if he would like to actually work at the making of the drink.

Naturally, he said yes, and off they send him to the Scotch Whiskey Research Institute to learn about camphor and the top, middle and bases of whiskeys – which include alcohol notes of lemon, tonka bean, smoked oak and the other exciting things that make whiskey a distinct drink.

Whiskey, or usquebaugh in the native Scottish, means the Water of Life. Most Kenyans remember the expression “Don’t be vague, let’s go to The Hague” in relation to the trial of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto a few years ago at the International Criminal Court (ICC”.

It is actually the slogan for a whiskey brand called Haig: Don’t be vague, ask for Haig)

But it is not to Hague, but rather to Francophone Africa that Hamish Torrie went on his first whiskey tour of Africa, as an employee of Haig.

“I went to Cameroon, Gabon, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin in the early 1980s. And the smell of Africa – beautiful, powerful, intoxicating – has stayed with me ever since …”

He quotes the French writer Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

And it is Hamish Torrie’s work to tell Glenmorangie stories in his voyages to new landscapes, to give his listeners the sense of smell that will lead them to a new taste for (his) whiskey. 1860 – 1885 was the quarter decade that set up Scotch whiskey for global domination, thanks to a devastating bug called phylloxera that destroyed almost all the vineyards in France used to make cognac – the premier luxury drink of its time.

Production in France for cognac fell from almost 100 million hectoliters in the 1860s to below 20 million hectoliters by the 1880s.

Shared moment

And since nature, and the Scots, abhor a vacuum, whiskey flooded in, aided by the new industrial revolution in Europe, to replace cognac.

“This entrepreneurial spirit, plus a stringent adherence to high quality standards – unlike easily infiltrated clear drinks (like vodka) – led to the ongoing Scotch whiskey domination; that last year contributed ‎Sh723.5 billion to the UK economy,” he says.

Torrie, who used to shoot for sport in his youth but now fishes the Scottish streams in solitude for personal tranquility (the way some folks do yoga), says nothing beats “a fishing line in your hand, a fish in the water, and a flask of Glenmorangie in one’s sarron (kilt bag) out in the highlands.”

He feels very grateful to his family who provide stability in what is, often, a busy life on the road. “I am a whiskey evangelist,” Torrie chuckles, “and Glenmorangie is the Gospel I spread.”

Before coming to Kenya to evangelise about the Water of Life, Hamish had been in Lebanon.

I ask where else he has been spreading the word this year (2018) and he fishes out a well worn passport.

“Let’s see,” he smiles. “France, Germany, Switzerland, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon and now beautiful, noisy Nairobi.”

That is 13 countries in 10 months, talking about his beloved whiskey, which he says is not all about drink for him (which you must do responsibly, or perish) but nationalism, the whiskey bottle as a kind of Scotch patriotism.

“When you share a fine malt whiskey with friends or colleagues, it becomes a shared moment, and later like a fine whiskey, matures into a warm memory of convivial camaraderie,” he says.

Later,  when the sermon is ended, and the whiskey evangelist gone, (with the hot cup of coffee I forgot to drink having gone lukewarm in the snug cosiness of the Cigar Lounge), a scene from Hotel Rwanda comes to my mind.

It is the scene, near the end of the film, where the hotel manager hero Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) is in his office with General Bizimungu (Fana Mokoena), with the latter having discovered a bottle of fine malt whiskey, which he is appreciatively sipping – even as gunfire of battle rocks the streets of Kigali.

When Rusesabagina asks the General to hurry up as they have to go, Bizimungu, busy in the heaven of his Scotch whiskey, says dreamily: “Tell me, Paul. Do you think I will ever go (back) to Scotland again?”

That is the basic base of evangelist Hamish’s preaching – that good whiskey is a smell, a taste, and the remembrance of a place.

As for General Bizimungu, who loved his Haig, he was sentenced at The Hague in 2011, to thirty years in prison, for his role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide.