Glenkinchie
Finally I’ve got a whisky distillery visit under my belt! I took a trip up to Edinburgh on Wednesday and was lucky enough to get a very comprehensive tour of a benchmark distillery at Glenkinchie.
Glencinchie is one of only three remaining Lowland malt distilleries, it was established in 1825 and is situated about 20-30 minutes form Edinburgh. They operate tours for all visitors but I felt like we received some extra attention during our stay from Bill who has been involved with whisky for decades.
It’s great to see the journey through whisky production from the malted barley arriving to the unaged product flowing through the spirit safe. Nearly all scotch distilleries purchase malted barley from maltings off premises, the old malting floors at Glenkinchie are now the floors of the museum. So the beginning of the story at Glenkinchie is the hoppers, which feed the malted barley into huge grinders that chew the malt down into ‘grist’ ready for mashing.
A Hi-tech bit of traditional kit used for measuring grist size by filtering it trough a series of screens.
As with anything which is ground for extraction purposes, the coarseness is important. Too coarse and the starch/sugar will not be released, too fine and you’ll end up with a thick porridge.
The grist then goes on to the ‘mash tun’ where water is added over time at increasingly high temperatures. Water encourages enzymes within the malt to convert starch to sugar, then the liquid is drained of to fermentation tanks where yeast is added. Here, the type of yeast also plays a big part in the character of the resulting beer. Fermentation lasts between 2-3 days during which the beer will expand, bubble and do all manner of cool things like the bog of eternal stench in Labyrinth.
Finally the beer is sent to be distilled. Nearly all Scotch Whiskies are distilled twice, the first still is known as the ‘wash still‘ which produces ‘low wines‘ of around 22%, these are then sent on for a 2nd distilation which produces an unaged (or ‘new make’) whisky of around 70%. The skill of the distiller is cutting the whisky at the correct time. The middle part of the distilate is the usable product, the ‘heads and tales’ (or foreshots and feints) of the stream contain undesirable light alcohols like methanol and weak heavy alcohols respectively.
If you look at the bottom left of the above picture you can see the spirit safe which is used to direct the flow of alcohol from foreshots to potable spirit to feints.
The new make whisky is then ready for ageing in used American or European oak barrels. Bill told us that up to 90% of Glenkinchie produced at the distillery actually ends up in blended whiskies such as Johnnie Walker which suprised me a lot.
If you get a chance to try Glenkinchie 12yo you’ll probably find a light grassy freshness as is typical for a Lowland malt, with some wood character and the lightest touch of peat (8ppm i’m told).
Full Flickr set here.
