Brian Kinsman and Adrian Newey on Committing Before the Result Exists
The Glenfiddich Malt Master and the Aston Martin Formula One Team’s Managing Technical Partner on how each commits to work whose results arrive years later
A cask filled at Glenfiddich this morning will not be opened for at least 12 years. The person filling it has to be right about a flavor that does not yet exist and can’t be sampled for a decade.
That is the working condition Brian Kinsman, Glenfiddich’s Malt Master, shares with Adrian Newey, the Aston Martin Formula One Team’s Managing Technical Partner, who spends his days shaping airflow around cars nobody has built. It’s also the premise of the Glenfiddich & Aston Martin Formula One Team partnership, now in its second year, and of its newest release. The 16-Year-Old Limited-Edition Release No.2 was assembled by Kinsman from casks laid down long before the two brands started working together. The method is important to their partnership, that the decisive work in both crafts happen where nobody can watch it.
Committing Before You Can Be Sure
How Kinsman reaches the point of committing is mostly a matter of time served. “The key thing is experience and a deep understanding of our distillate and cask profile,” he tells us. “My apprenticeship was eight years, during which time I shadowed David Stewart, MBE, pretty much every day and built up a great deal of knowledge on how Glenfiddich matures in different types of casks. I have now been with William Grant & Sons for nearly 30 years and there is no shortcut to experience. Every day is an opportunity to learn more about our stocks, flavour development and experimentation results.”
Newey describes what stops the design process instead: “With car design we have deadlines to hit and so the reality is that you just keep coming up with new ideas ,” he says. “You keep developing until the deadline says ‘that’s it, pens down, give it over to manufacturing.’ Of course, you always try to push deadlines, but if you push deadlines too far then you risk not being at the race.”
Where the Gain Actually Comes From
Neither craft begins from a blank sheet, and most of what goes into a bottle of Glenfiddich, or onto a Formula One car, was settled well long before its release year. Most of the time goes to the protective side, and that side sets the limits on the other, since spirit filled today has to remain capable of becoming a 12-, a 15- or an 18-year.
“The world of innovation in single malt is all about constantly balancing the past and the future,” Kinsman says. “I spend the majority of my time protecting what we have, ensuring the flavour profile of our core expressions is maintained and guaranteeing the spirit we will fill to cask today will create older expressions in the future.”
The thing that impresses me most about the whole AMF1 team is the attention to detail and the reliance each part of the team has on everyone else.
Brian Kinsman, Glenfiddich Malt Master
Kinsman says he also works with “everyone in the blending team and distillery operations teams to experiment and trial pushing flavour in new directions. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but we always learn something. Subtle changes in the way we operate the distillery, the coopering processes or the casks we source can all create a new flavour.”
While a single adjustment isn’t dramatic, a decade in wood magnifies all of them, which is how two bottlings carrying the same age statement can end up tasting markedly different. The 2025 release worked through the influence of American oak. Release No.2 layers flavor across five cask types, which adds weight to it while keeping it recognizable. The number on the label turns out to describe only one of the variables involved.
For Newey, “the gain comes from a combination of trying to be creative and come up with new ideas alongside meticulous attention to detail,” he says.
Those are not sequential steps for him. An idea has to survive the handover to manufacturing before it is worth anything—then it has to work with a set of components largely carried over from the previous car, so the performance is won in how those are refined and fitted together.
What One Craft Shows the Other
Two years in, Kinsman notices how tightly its parts depend on each other at the Aston Martin Formula One Team. “The thing that impresses me most about the whole AMF1 team is the attention to detail and the reliance each part of the team has on everyone else,” he says. “Tiny changes in one area of the design can have such a knock-on effect and seeing the factory operating is quite mesmerizing.”
The property he’s pointing at is sensitivity, the way an alteration in one place travels further than its size suggests, and his own material does the same thing much further upstream.
“In whisky, we can make a very small change to the new distillate and as it matures over years, and perhaps decades, the different path it takes to maturity can be really surprising!” he says. In practice, the smallest decisions are the expensive ones to get wrong, and they are also the ones whose consequences take longest to appear.
Beyond the Circuit
The first year of the partnership ran on what the two brands have in common. The second follows Formula One’s audience into the places it overlaps with luxury, design and entertainment.
For Glenfiddich that means meeting people in the cities around each race, not only at the track. In the US, the work sits in Miami, Austin and Las Vegas, with a bar pop-up on the Miami F1 Campus, a Prime 54 pairing dinner and tie-ups with Rao’s and Loews in Miami. Glenfiddich is also lining its plans up with those of the team’s other sponsors, so the whisky appears in those cities outside race week.
Underneath the pop-ups and the pairing dinners are two working methods that look nothing alike yet rest on the same bet: Kinsman fills casks he will not taste for 16 years; Newey keeps developing until the deadline says “pens down.”
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