To mountain bike through some place new puts you somewhere in the middle between tourist and traveler. On one hand, you have an intimate engagement with the land because you feel, taste, smell, hear and breathe its idiosyncratic qualities as you move through the terrain. But there’s no denying this fact: Your voyage by bike is still a flicker book of fleeting imagery. We riders don’t exactly linger. Well, most of the time we don’t…

In June of this year, Dan Barham, Callum Jelley, Richard Cunynghame and I visited Scotland. We wanted to explore Scotland’s wildly varied singletrack experience. But we didn’t just go for the singletrack, we went to Scotland hoping to understand something more about the land and the people, and we’d use single malt whisky as our looking glass.

There’s something you must understand: Scotch is woven into everything in Scotland. From an economic standpoint this is obvious. Whisky distilling is the great survivor of the traditional Scottish industries, as evidenced by the 1.19 billion bottles of Scotch whisky that were sold around the world in 2012 at a staggering value of £4.27 billion.

To put a finer point on it, Scotch constitutes roughly a quarter of Scotland’s exports. The drink, however, isn’t just a means of commerce for the people of Scotland; it’s a connection with their land, ancestors and national identity. Poets, musicians, painters and writers have long had a relationship with the single malt, not just as a liquid muse to fuel the artistic process, but as a narrative theme alone.