This is my wash still. So we've taken our wash from the washback and we
put it into the wash still. As you can see these are relatively small pot stills.
When the distillery was built the
original design was not necessarily to produce quite as much whisky as
we're producing now. In fact, the law still requires that the smallest size of
still is 18 hectolitres, 1,800 litres. Which is not this one, it's my spirit still.
So that kind of dictates the size of the distillery. There has been, because
of the explosion in craft distilling in the last 10 to 12 years, they have
granted distilling licenses to smaller distilleries but at the time this
distillery was founded, and I would like to think pretty much we were at the
forefront of that, if we look back 12, 13 years ago when we actually
started to distill here, no one else was doing it. We didn't have the amount of
gin producers. We didn't have any single malt whisky distilleries. I really
genuinely believe that this was the catalyst. We had lots of people here in
the early days looking at doing it and I think we catalysed the industry, I think
we really gave it a reboot. So we're putting the wash in here. So that yellow
liquid I just showed you, my basic beer, my wash, that's what's in here now.
The wash still, we're just really using it to strip out the flavour, and the aroma and
the alcohol. We're concentrating those things down. So distillation works
because the flavour compounds, the aroma compounds, and the alcohols that we
produce during fermentation have lower boiling points than water. Now people
tend to think of boiling as 100 degrees centigrade or it's 100 degrees
centigrade which is the boiling point of pure water, distilled water at sea level.
It is not the boiling point of all liquid, so different liquids have
different boiling points. If you take salt water, will boil at a higher
temperature. But as I've just said we've got wash in here. So flavour compounds,
aroma compounds, alcohol, water, yeast cells,
all of those things are in the still and we're applying heat. It means that those
compounds will distil off, they'll burn off faster than we're burning off the water.
So at the moment, the alcohol, to give you a kind of visual, the alcohol's
doing this... and the waters doing this... So what that means is we're blasting off
the alcohol quicker, and the flavour and the aroma. We're always going to take
water you can't not do that, but there will come a point where we've got all
those other things off and now we're just distilling water. Well we're not
interested as distillers, we don't want to do that. We don't want to
make distilled water, we want to make whisky because it's a lot more fun.
So when we're not distilling alcohol off anymore, because that's the measure
that we use, we stop. These stills are actually quite high relative to the pot size.
Taller stills tend to give you a lighter, kind of sweeter whisky. So if you
want a kind of heavier, slightly more oily whisky on the palate, short, maybe
dumpy still. If you want a lighter texture you want to use a
higher still. So something like Glenmorangie, very fruity, very light,
tallest stills in the industry. It's a very light character on the whisky.
So, as you can see on the wash still it's a traditional kind of what we call a
lantern still, it looks like an old-fashioned oil lamp. We've got this
nip in as we come out of the pot, and then it flares out into this lantern.
And then goes up into a descending lyne arm which we'll talk about in a minute. So, as
we're distilling these compounds off, we have this narrow neck, so they accelerate
through there quite rapidly. But because that neck then widens, it's less pressure.
So they decelerate rapidly at this point. So they're fired through and then
decelerate and that causes those vapours to start swirling around in this area and
that's giving them a lot of contact with the copper, what we call reflux. So that
copper contact is very important, it's producing flavour and aroma complexes.
Additionally, I spoke about the height. So relatively, and I do mean relatively,
because if you could feel it it's quite hot where I'm standing, it's cooler here
than it is here. So if I am a little organic compound that hits its boiling
point here and I rise up in the still, I'm now further away from the heat source.
So I might drop now below my boiling point. I turn back into a
liquid in other words, and that liquid will rub back on the copper so that's
that refluxing we're talking about. So in order to make your way all the way out
the top of the neck of the still, you have to be really light, you have to have
lots of energy, you have to be very volatile. So if you have a tall still,
only those light, really highly volatile compounds are going to make their way out.
And our whisky's very fruity, it's very light. I've talked about those estery
compounds during the fermentation process, and we want to start distilling
those off. So, you make your way all the way to the top and then you go over.
Now we have a descending lyne arm which means once you've gone over the
top there's only one way to go, you're going to go down into the condenser.
For me, we've got enough fruit in us here, we've
got enough complex here, so we want you know the descending lyne arm is fine
into the condenser. We have shell and tube condensers. So we're
pretty standard, we don't have worm tubs, we have a shell and tube condenser, so
some of the noise you can hear that I'm talking over is the water pumping
through the condensers to keep them nice and cool. It's really really hot where
I'm standing, I could easily put my hand on the condenser. So we're cooling down
to around 17, 18 degrees on the distillate. That's nice and cool, we have
a very slow rate of distillation as you'll probably see. We don't want to
blast it through, we're not going to pour it out. Slower is better, we want to
condense it slowly, we want to really trap that flavour into the liquid that we're getting.
So what we're really doing on the wash still, on this first still is
we're stripping the alcohol, we're stripping the flavour, and we're stripping
the aroma out. And we collect all of that liquid. So all of the liquid
that we strip from this first still, it still is referred to as low wines.
Now on the first strip, the composite strength of that is going to
be somewhere in the region of 23, 24% alcohol. So that's the strip from
this first still. So we're just putting it into a big tank. But we don't leave it
like that, we need to add another couple of things to it before we can re-distill it.
So what we do, is we strip the low wines from the first still, and then we take
those low wines and boil them again in our spirit still.
Now as you'll see, our spirit still is a slightly different design, it has a boil ball in the neck.
Try saying that when you've had a few whiskies at the end of the day!
Similar height and a descending lyne arm. So the boil ball is causing again lots of
refluxes, causing those vapours to swirl around in the still and giving us
lots of copper contact. So from the second still, from the spirit still,
we're going to strip all of the liquid, as we do from the wash still. But on the spirit still,
we split it into three parts and it's very important that we do this.
The first part we reject, we call it heads, that's the easy way to remember it.
Distillers tend to refer to this as foreshots, but to make it easy, heads. So we reject
the heads, we reject the foreshots. We're primarily using them to flush and clean
the still from the end of the last distillation run, but also
we're rejecting some of those compounds we don't want in the finished whisky.
Methanol, highly toxic alcohol, all alcohol's toxic just be aware of that
everyone, all alcohol is toxic, but methanol highly toxic due to the way
your body breaks it down. And that tends to come off early in the distillation
run, it has a very low boiling point, 64 degrees, so we want to reject that, we
want to make sure we got rid of that methanol.
So we send that in to the low wines
so we mix the heads, the foreshots, in to the liquid that we're making from
our wash still, because we can re-process it. When we're ready, we divert the flow
to take the heart, or the middle cut. Now that's the bit that we're going to take
to turn into whisky today. Quite simply, we send it into another funnel in the
spirit safe, we redirect it to a separate collecting tank. We steal some.
That will take an hour and a half to two hours. When we've taken that, we redirect
the flow to what we call the tails. So you've got heads, hearts and tails is the
easy way to remember it. I would refer to it as foreshots which is the heads, the
heart, same word, and then I'd call it feints. F-E-I-N-T-S, feints.
The feints again, we want to reject we're going to be distilling off compounds that we
don't really want in the finished whisky. And they can be, I mean
they're highly toxic some of them, but also initially when you go on to the
feint they're quite bitter, quite harsh on the palate. Now you can take some of
the feints to balance the sweetness, those ester-y fruity compounds that you got at
the start, you want balance. If you take too many, for me the whisky becomes
unbalanced and whisky's about flavour, and if you unbalance it you don't get that
kind of flavour profile that you want. You can take some you just don't want to go too deep.
So again on the spirit still, on the second still, it's going to run for six
or seven hours so they run for about the same time. So the foreshots and the
feints, the heads and the tails, get mixed in with the low wines that we're making
here. So at that point they're then around 28% alcohol. So remember, it's 23% as
it comes from here, once you put the foreshots and feints in it raises the
strength to about 28, so that combination of what you've taken from
your wash still and the foreshots and feints from the previous distillation of
your spirit still is what charges your spirit still on the following
distillation run. And it always works in the same way. So we're going to run that
down as I said six or seven hours, when we've finished, we will have liquid left in
the stills. Remember I said we don't boil everything off, we've got lots of liquid
left in the stills at the end of the distillation runs. So what we do, we stop
it now, this liquid is hot. We've just been boiling it for six hours.
So it's dropped into a holding tank, we recover the heat energy the next time we
fill the wash still, so we get a bit of heat recovery from it, saves us a little
bit of energy, makes us a little bit greener.
So we run it through a heat exchanger. That liquid, the spent liquid, then goes to the
same farm that has taken the grain from our mashing process, and he will utilise
that liquid, he mixes it with his slurry, he sprays it on his land. He'll use that
effectively like a soil-improver, like a fertiliser. Can't spray it onto the crop,
onto the land only. Now I had a chat with him yesterday he tells me he loves it
because his crops come up half cut, which is the worst joke I know, quite frankly.
So, we've distilled, we've got our spirit. Our spirit comes off at about
73% alcohol, so a very, very high, very clean cut. That's really
really strong on the spirit safe, so about 72, 73%
and then, as you know, we need to mature it.
you