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Meet the Jews distilling top kosher Scotch

Duo who met as teens as leaders at B’nei Akiva are now making award-winning kosher whisky

February 23, 2023 14:05
DS TAYMAN193
3 min read

Danny Saltman fell in love with whisky as a boy. It was an illicit affair.

“I’d watch my Zeide Michael reading his copy of the JC with his whisky and eating a green apple and I’d beg him for a taste.

Of course, he’d never let me have any, but one day he must have left it alone and I grabbed it and downed a whole shot.”

The eight-year-old Saltman, who grew up in Woodford and attended King Solomon’s High, was immediately violently sick and received a cuff around the ear from his horrified mother.

“I can still taste that first whisky, the same as I can taste the leather I chewed on at Golan Heights Winery when I was learning about wine tasting,” he smiles.

He confesses that years later he would help himself to whisky from his father’s cabinet before heading out with the boys. The love was real.

So passionate are Saltman and his commercial partner, Saul Taylor, about the golden nectar, they’ve created two businesses based around it.

As Dalkeith Brokerage they trade whisky casks.

The business was born after the pair, who originally met in their teens as leaders at B’nei Akiva more than 20 years ago but had fallen out of touch, bumped into one another at a wedding.

At the time, Saltman was employed by another cask-trading company, while former Hasmonean boy Taylor, had just finished working as an equities trader at a hedge fund.

“The fund had closed, and I was deciding what to do next,” he says.

After testing the water trading for himself, Taylor became interested in doing it professionally, and he combined his experience with Saltman’s alcohol industry networks, built over the years since he’d started work aged 16.

“After school, I’d dropped out of yeshiva and gone on to pick grapes at the Golan Heights Winery, but then came back here to work for one of their distributors,” he explains.

He learned about the wine trade with them for five years before starting work at The Grapevine off-licence in Hendon.

"I left to set up my own kosher off-licence called The Wine Man before going to work for Kedem Europe doing wine education and selling into trade and shops.”

The second business they’ve formed together is as independent bottlers, DS Tayman — a portmanteau of their first and surnames. Making their own whisky was a natural progression.