DYC: Spanish oldest whisky distillery

By Miguel at 2010 Dec,14 in Featured , DYC

Destilerias Y Crianza del Whisky is the result of a man’s determination: Nicomedes Garcia, to create a whisky with the highest standards of the scotch whisky but with a reasonable price. Fifty years later, DYC is the best selling whisky in Spain and they are entering the market of the single malts.

distillery dyc

Humble origins

DYC stands for Destilerias y Crianza del Whisky ( distilling and maturation of whisky ) and it is an enterprise created in 1958 by Nicomedes Garcia Gomez. He started working on his father’s humble distillery of liquours at Valverde del Majano in Segovia, creating in 1919, with just only 18 years, Anis Castellana.

Nicomedes was a bussinessman and started all kind of things like a bus company, a marketing agency, a ships company. But he started making whisky just by bad luck.

A bad luck strike

In 1929 a batch of Mahou beer was rejected by a client because it was faulty. So instead of dropping the beer, he distilled it and stored in oak butts. After three years he gave a try to the potion and he realized that it wasn’t that bad at all, so he spent all the war drinking that whisky and started up the interest in distilling whisky.

Inspiration

Pot stills at DYC
In 1955, after being travelling around Scotland he talked with some friends and they founded a whisky destillery at Palazuelos de Eresma on the place where the old Marques del Arco’s mill was standing. The place was choosen for the great quality of the water supply from the river Eresma, the good climate for whisky maturation so near the sierra de Gredos and the near supply of good quality barley from the fields of Castilla.

Success

The first distillation started in February of 1959 after having fought to change the law that forbid distillation of malt in Spain. It wasn’t till 1963 when the firsts bottles were made available to consumers.

The DYC distillery includes the distilling factory, a bottling plant and a warehouse for maturation.

DYC began to grow exponentially and by 1987 its sales stock up to 40 million € and owned the 46% of the spanish market. DYC even bought a scottish distillery, Lochside, to secure an extra supply of whisky to create their blends.

In 1989 DYC was sold to Pedro Domecq group and at a later time sold again to Beam Global.

The process

bodegas dyc
DYC uses a double distillation process similar to scotch whisky. The mash is distilled in pot stills made with the same techniques than scottish ones.