Robert Burns and Whisky: Scotch Drink, John Barleycorn and the Exciseman

At an Excise Court dinner, Robert Burns sang The Deil’s awa wi’ th’ Exciseman. A 1792 letter records the performance: an exciseman entertaining his company with a song against the Excise.[7] The moment catches what makes Burns and whisky so compelling. He wrote about the drink as a Scottish pleasure, a political cause and a source of poetic mischief, then joined the system he had mocked. Read Scotch Drink, John Barleycorn and his working record together, and the familiar drinking portrait becomes something richer: poet, adapter of songs and exciseman.[1][4][8]

Robert Burns and whisky in Scotch Drink

“O Whisky! foul o’ plays an’ pranks!” Burns addresses the drink as an unruly companion, not a solemn national emblem.[1] That affectionate accusation gives Scotch Drink much of its life.

Written in 1785 and printed in 1786, the poem belongs to the beginning of Burns’s published career. His first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, appeared on 31 July 1786, printed in Kilmarnock by John Wilson. Alongside Scotch Drink, it included The Cotter’s Saturday Night, To a Mouse and To a Louse.[1][2][8]

The poem’s 21 six-line stanzas carry an epigraph from Proverbs xxxi, 6 and 7. Its opening leaves the wine and classical drinking gods to other poets:

“LET other Poets raise a fracas / ’Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ druken Bacchus”[1]

Burns brings whisky into literary company on its own terms, without borrowed grandeur. But the convivial voice has an edge. His lament for Ferintosh concerns the loss of the Forbes family’s chartered whisky privilege. He mourns “Thee Ferintosh! O sadly lost!” and attacks the excise officers who make whisky stills their prize.[1]

Domestic pleasure, Scottish identity and resentment of official interference share the same poem. Whisky gives Burns a way to speak about who holds power over ordinary life.

A letter places the poem among friends as well as on the printed page. On 20 March 1786, Burns sent Scotch Drink to Kennedy, hoping they would share “a gill between us, in a mutchkin-stoup” at Kilmarnock.[3] The invitation gives a convivial setting to the poem’s direct address.

Freedom, whisky and the wording of a quotation

“Freedom and Whisky gang thegither” comes from a parliamentary argument, not an isolated toast. The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, written in 1786, addresses the Scotch Representatives in the House of Commons and appears at page 39 of the Kilmarnock edition.[5][12]

Charles Snodgrass, writing in The Bottle Imp, reads this poem and Scotch Drink as protests against the restrictive Wash Acts.[12] That context gives the celebrated line its political force.

The wording of the couplet is disputed. The BBC text gives:

“Freedom and Whisky gang thegither, / Take aff your whitter.”[5]

Snodgrass records the Kilmarnock reading as “Tak aff your dram!” instead.[12] Both sources support the familiar first line; the second differs. When quoting the whole passage, identify the text used rather than combining versions.

This is the value of checking whisky quotations. A memorable line can travel much further than the poem around it, shedding both its textual history and the political occasion that gave it meaning.

John Barleycorn: Burns reshapes an older song

Three kings vow that John Barleycorn must die. Buried in ploughed ground, barley becomes a person whose fate unfolds as an allegory: a character who can suffer, resist and return.[4]

John Barleycorn: A Ballad was written in 1782, but did not appear in print until the Edinburgh edition of 1787. Burns himself said it was “partly composed on the plan of an old song known by the same name”.[4]

He was adapting as well as composing. John Barleycorn already belonged to song before Burns gave him this treatment, placing the ballad within the wider relationship between whisky, songs and folk music.[4]

The poem’s imaginative force lies in that transformation of crop into character. Read only as praise of a drink, it loses much of its interest. Beside Scotch Drink, it reveals a different approach to related material: one poem speaks directly to whisky, while the other gives barley a body and a story.

Tam o’ Shanter: a witch story written to order

A request for a witch story helped bring Tam o’ Shanter into being. Captain Francis Grose agreed to include a drawing of Alloway Kirk in his Antiquities of Scotland on condition that Burns supply the tale. Burns sent him a copy of the poem on 1 December 1790.[6]

Written in 1790, it appeared in The Edinburgh Herald on 18 March 1791 and in the Edinburgh Magazine that March, before its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition of 1793.[6] Readers first encountered it outside a collection of Burns’s own poems.

Here the familiar cry “Wi’ usquabae, we’ll face the devil!” belongs inside a supernatural narrative.[6] It should be read as part of the poem’s dramatic voice, not lifted out as practical advice or a statement of Burns’s own judgement.

The commission also gives the tale a precise setting in Burns’s working life. Rather than simply spontaneous fireside folklore, it was a literary response to a request, tied to an illustration of a particular kirk.[6]

The poet becomes an exciseman

“I wish to get into the Excise,” Burns wrote to the Earl of Glencairn in 1787, asking for help. He obtained a post in 1789.[3][8] The poet who attacked the Excise had sought employment within it.

His working circumstances were changing too. On 14 March 1788 he wrote that he had taken a lease of Ellisland, on the Nith above Dumfries. Allan Cunningham’s account describes an excise district covering ten parishes there. After Burns moved to Dumfries in 1791, his excise duties were confined to the town.[3][8]

The tension between poet and official is real, but “hypocrisy” flattens an interesting life into a verdict. Both the satire and the employment belong in the portrait. So does the occasion when Burns brought an anti-exciseman song to an official dinner.[7]

Story box: an exciseman sings about the Excise

Verdict: the exciseman’s song

The Rosamond: a capture and a cannon legend

Burns was involved in the capture of the smuggling vessel Rosamond in February 1792. The exact day is disputed: Carruthers and McLean give 27 February, while G. Ross Roy, following Lockhart, gives 29 February.[10][11]

A more colourful claim is associated with the capture: Burns supposedly bought four carronades and sent them to the French Convention, only for them to be intercepted at Dover. The capture is recorded; the shipment belongs to legend.[10]

Legend verdict: the cannon sent to France

The carronades story remains disputed, not an established episode in Burns’s life. Carruthers and McLean’s suggested confusion with Anderson offers a possible explanation for how it arose.[10][11]

Reading beyond the drinking portrait

The cause of Burns’s death remains disputed. Past explanations have included alcoholism, sexually transmitted disease, lead poisoning and tuberculosis; the National Trust for Scotland reports that experts now favour endocarditis, associated with rheumatic fever contracted while farming.[9] The claim that he “drank himself to death” should not be presented as established fact.

The more revealing tension lies between Burns’s writing and his official life. He made whisky a voice of pleasure and resistance, yet worked within the system his poems attacked. The Excise Court performance brings those roles together without resolving them: the official could still sing against the office.

Where to go next

• Whisky in Literature and Art: place Burns within the wider subject.
• Whisky Quotations: Verified Sources and Misattributions: trace frequently repeated lines to their sources.
• The Illicit Highland Whisky Still by Edwin Landseer: The Painting and Its Story: explore another artistic treatment of whisky and authority.

Sources

1. Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive. Scotch Drink (Robert Burns). Text of the 1786 poem, online edition, undated. https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/cbu86-w0020.shtml
2. National Library of Scotland. Rare books by / about Robert Burns. Digital collection guide, undated. https://digital.nls.uk/robert-burns/books/
3. Project Gutenberg. The Complete Works of Robert Burns. Online edition, publication date not supplied in the fact sheet. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18500/pg18500-images.html
4. BBC. Robert Burns: John Barleycorn: A Ballad. Text and commentary, undated. https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/john_barleycorn_a_ballad/
5. BBC. Robert Burns: The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer. Text and commentary, undated. https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/the_authors_earnest_cry_and_prayer/
6. BBC. Robert Burns: Tam o’ Shanter. Text and commentary, undated. https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/tam_o_shanter/
7. University of Glasgow, Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century. The Deil’s awa wi’ th’Exciseman, SMM. Scholarly commentary, undated. https://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/the-deils-awa-wi-thexciseman-smm/
8. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Robert Burns. Online biography, revision date not supplied in the fact sheet. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Burns
9. National Trust for Scotland. Burns the man. Collections commentary, undated. https://www.nts.org.uk/collections/themes/burns-the-man
10. Gerard Carruthers and Ralph McLean. Did Burns Send Cannon to France in 1792? A New Theory of the Narrative. Burns Chronicle, 2022, University of Glasgow Enlighten repository copy. https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/273328/1/273328.pdf
11. G. Ross Roy. Robert Burns’s Politics and the French Revolution. University of South Carolina Scholar Commons edition, publication year not supplied in the fact sheet. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=burns_royessays
12. Charles Snodgrass, Association for Scottish Literature. Whisky: The Spirit of Scottish National Identity. The Bottle Imp, 2016. https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/04/whisky-the-spirit-of-scottish-national-identity/?print=print

This desk-researched article uses the supplied verified fact sheet, its editorial rulings, the cited literary texts and the historical scholarship identified there.

Last checked: November 2026