Whisky focus: What now for whisky?

Jon, Mark and Robbo (JMR). Those names may ring a bell. If you've been keeping an eye on spirits innovation over the last five years or so, you might remember the three cheeky chappies being purveyors of top-quality whiskies with a difference - through their Easy Drinking Whisky Company.

Trying valiantly to break through the stuffy and intimidating barrier between the dram and the drinker, they introduced whiskies named "The Smokey, Peaty One", and "The Rich, Spicy One".

It was a great piece of innovation - and perhaps gave whisky fans hope that after years of stagnant sales whisky might be in line for a renaissance.Sadly, in May, the company stated it was giving up on the UK market and focusing on the US. Mark Geary told the Herald newspaper in Glasgow that the UK was a tough market "to introduce a brand as a result of the low margins available". The US, he said, offered a "huge opportunity".

But it's not just those quirky chaps at JMR who are having trouble breaking open the whisky market to innovation. You might think that its problem was lack of financial clout - but even companies that one might impolitely describe as 'minted' are struggling to get new product to stick. Diageo, arguably the world's biggest purveyor of the dram, has had a big failure in the past six months.

In 2005 the company launched J&B -6ÞC. It was, they hoped, an innovation that would convince the 20 to 30-year-old drinker to buy into whisky. So far, the brand extension has failed. Abjectly. Yet another bit of evidence to demonstrate that whisky is in the midst of a rather ugly on-trade malaise.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in pubs. Buyers from pub companies and wholesalers who I spoke to recently could hardly have got less excited than when I asked to talk to them about blended whisky.

In the on-trade things seem to be in terminal decline, apart from imported whiskies, which are doing a lot around longer drinks and serving occasions. The scotch guys are just not doing as much, and seem a little lost at sea.

Now it is important to make a distinction here. While the whole whisky category in pubs is not exactly flying, the concern really does focus on blended whiskies rather than the more premium single malt category.

Some of the biggest and best-known brands in the on-trade are blended whiskies: Bell's, The Famous Grouse, Grant's and Teacher's to name four. But all is not well.

In the Greene King pub estate alone, sales of scotch whisky are down six per cent year on year. And given the size of the category that is a worrying statistic.

Its biggest issue is that so much of spirits in the on-trade, except the very top end, is about mixability. Whisky struggles in that department. And that is exactly why vodka continues to lay waste to it in terms of sales volumes.

Over the course of this focus we will analyse some of the reasons behinds whisky's struggles and look at what brand owners are doing to lift the category out of the doldrums - as well as focus on the positives at the more premium end of the market.

In addition to this, as you will see later, The Publican will take it upon itself to attempt to solve the whisky/mixer problem - with some interesting results!