Harrison Ford’s New Whisky Is Smooth with a Little Bite, Just Like Him

The other day someone asked me whether I wanted to drive over to the Sunset Tower Hotel and drink Scotch with Harrison Ford. I said yes.

You might consider that an obvious reflex, but not in my case. I took a Lyft to West Hollywood—I wasn’t sure how much Scotch would be consumed—and found myself filled with a fair dram of trepidation. I’ve met and interviewed a wide range of celebrities over the years, but Harrison Ford occupies such a distinct place in my generational pantheon that I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be able to utter words in his presence. (Surely, the Scotch would help.)

I suspect this is true for many men of my vintage. I was born in 1966. Star Wars came out in 1977. The Empire Strikes Back, 1980. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. Blade Runner, 1982. Witness, 1985. The Mosquito Coast, 1986. Working Girl, 1988, the same year I graduated from college. Through my formative years, and way beyond the obvious iconography of Han Solo and Indiana Jones, this carpenter-turned-actor, who turns 84 in July, offered a sort of big-screen template for what it signified to be a cool guy.

Naturally, this must be why the folks from the Glenmorangie distillery in the Scottish Highlands sensed that it would be a good idea to approach Harrison Ford about creating a Harrison Ford whisky. Ford genuinely happens to love Scotch, and he represents that essence of timeless cool that any brand would kill to associate with. But an undercurrent of my trepidation in the Lyft had to do with the Scotch itself. As in: What if I found myself sitting across from Harrison Ford, glibly drinking the single malt that bears his name, and I happened to hate it? What would I say? Ford is an actor. I am not.

Fortunately, I had no need to pretend. When it comes to making this beverage with Dr. Bill Lumsden, the legendary Glemorangie biochemist-turned-distiller, Ford committed to the bit. When I sat down with him, he was wearing a kilt, as was Lumsden.

“Want to get my friend a drink?” Ford said to his publicity squadron, and swiftly I had at my knee a glass of amber liquid. I breathed it in. I drank it down. For anyone familiar with the consistent quality coming out of the house of Glenmorangie, it should come as no surprise that one taste dispelled any of the usual skepticism regarding celeb collabs.

A polite exploratory sip led to undainty gulps and thirsty swigs, both because I was nervous sitting across from Harrison Ford in a kilt and because the whisky was seriously delicious. It turned out that when Glenmorangie approached him, Ford knew exactly what he wanted his signature spirit to taste like, but he had to locate the words to express that, which led to a questing transoceanic dialogue between him and Bill Lumsden.

What words surfaced at first? “Help me,” Ford said. “Because first I had to know something about the language, and I had to understand the process of distillation, and then I had to understand what the words meant. And I’m still working on it. But I know that this is what I was aiming for. I told Dr. Bill that I like a bit of boldness at the beginning, maybe, a little sharpness, a bite, and then an experience—that bite transforms in the mouth into something quite complex. He and I probably wouldn’t use the same words to describe it, but he listened very carefully, and he watched me, and I tasted many many whiskies, and then he began to develop for me what he knew that I would like. Because I do not have the sophistication to be able to make a whisky, for God’s sake.”

The way Lumsden conveys the job can make you think of a record producer tweaking knobs to get the ideal balance of sound layers. The secret to achieving that bite—which, Lumsden likes to stress, actually goes against the mellowness that drinkers tend to cite when they’re describing Glenmorangie—came from finishing the blend in toasted Portuguese casks that’d previously held red wine.

“Dr. Bill has a laboratory,” Ford said.

“We’ve got about 700,000 barrels of maturing whisky, so I’ve got a range of different styles in there, which allows me to fine-tune it for something like this,” Lumsden said. “What he was looking for was slightly atypical of Glenmorangie, so I had to make something which obviously Harrison was going to love, but I had one eye on our core Glenmorangie consumer, as well.”

“I am very fond of it,” Ford went on. “We went through a lot of hoops to get here. I’m very proud of the result. I mean, you can make a movie, and anything can go right or wrong. You may be proud of it or not. This is a project I’m proud of.”

And the way Ford describes it, the best part of the process might’ve been simply spending time in the Scottish Highlands without anyone acting weird about meeting Han Solo.

“The warmth of the Scots is remarkable,” he said. “I remember I went on for a ride on my bicycle, and I went down towards the loch, and I couldn’t find a pub—after about an hour or two of riding, I thought it might be a good idea to visit a pub.” So, Ford asked someone who was standing in a garden. “They said, ‘Oh, the pub has moved. It used to be there, but it ain’t there now anymore. It went up the road for a while, and it was there, but it’s not there anymore, but actually there is another pub up there…’ This went on for about half an hour.”

“This is going to sound like a strange thing, Harrison, but did they know who you were?” Lumsden asked.

“Oh, no,” Ford said.

“Which I think is very charmingly Scottish,” Lumsden said.

“When I went into a pub and took off my bike helmet and sat down, then I became Harrison Ford,” he said. “And by the way? I was treated the same—no big deal about it.”

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