Lyons goes to Speyside - Roll out the barrels

Will Lyons writes for Scotland on Sunday and has done some fantastic pieces on the Indian situation. Recently he paid a visit to Benromach Distillery and even put in a day's work.

Today's guest story was originally posted on Scotland on Sunday, but Will told me it would be fine to repost here.

As a complementary piece, check out my story on Benromach - though Will's is better.

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Roll out the barrels

Will Lyons

AT A TIME of day when most of us are just about managing to negotiate a bowl of cornflakes, Mike Ross, the stillman at Benromach distillery, is already at his post, pouring two tonnes of malted barley into a mash tun full of warm water.

"We have to be very careful not to get this wrong," he says, staring straight ahead at a small temperature gauge on the opposite wall.

Handing the controls over to me, he adds, "A slight miscalculation at this stage and we could end up with either not enough sugar or too much sugar." A strong smell of Horlicks fills the room as I tentatively spin the lever, careful to keep the temperature at 64.5ûC.

Beyond the industrial sound of rushing water, the distillery manager Keith Cruickshank paces down the floor. "How we doing?" he asks. "Make a mess of this and you'll throw the whole operation out."

Welcome to Speyside - the engine room of the Scotch malt whisky industry. As the three of us peer nervously into a churning mash tun, around us the region hums with the noise of hundreds of distilleries, many of them working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sweating it out to meet the growing demand for Scotland's golden spirit. These are good times for Scotch whisky.

Last year exports of Scotch generated a record £2.5 billion, with nearly 90 million cases exported worldwide. To put that into context, for every second in the day the equivalent of 33 bottles are shipped overseas, earning the industry £78 - or £6,739,200 a day. Laid end to end, those bottles would stretch from Perth, Scotland, to Perth, Australia.

Industry analysts say this could be the beginning of something even greater. On the horizon lie India and China, two of the biggest spirits markets in the world. In just ten years, growth in China has risen from 0.7 million litres to 5.7 million litres, fuelled by a burgeoning middle class which has acquired a taste for whisky. In India the potential is even greater. While the Chinese still predominantly drink beer, India is largely a brown-spirit-drinking culture. Attend a dinner party in Mumbai and you are more likely to be served a glass of whisky than wine or beer. The prize is massive.

To China and India can be added renewed demand from South America, eastern Europe, Russia and, of course, the United States. Suddenly, owning a distillery doesn't look such a bad investment.

Press PLAY to see Scotland on Sunday's exclusive slideshow from Benromach (may require right-clicking to select "play")

Will Lyons visits the distillery, discusses the "new make spirit" with manager Keith Cruickshank and meets with the Urquhart family.
Pictures by Rob McDougall

Benromach was mothballed in the early 1980s. Back then whisky production stagnated under the twin pressures of the oil crisis and a baby-boomer generation that didn't touch the stuff. On top of this, single malt was seen very much as an old man's pipe-and-slippers drink.

It was saved in 1994 when Elgin-based bottler Gordon & Macphail bought it. At the time the distillery was virtually derelict. All the fixtures and fittings had been ripped out and sold by its previous owners.

Over a three-year period Gordon & Macphail overhauled the operation, putting in a new mill, mash tun, three wooden washbacks and two brand new copper stills. The result is a boutique distillery inside an ancient shell. It's a bit like a fully refurbished classic car. And, like a classic car, there are no computers, electronic charts or detailed spread sheets. The multinationals may run their hi-tech distilleries with banks of computers and remote controls; in Benromach, there's just Keith, Mike, me and a clock.

It strikes 9am - time to empty the mash tuns. Keith and I slowly drain the mashed liquid into the worts receiver. Here, the water is left to cool. (The grain in the mash tun is later removed and sold to a local farmer for cattle feed.)

"Can you drink this?" I ask, sticking my head over the top.

"At this stage the liquid is very high in sugar," says Keith. "You could drink it, but you would soon feel the effects around your waistline."

"It's a bit like an old-fashioned energy drink," adds Mike.

The three wooden washbacks loom in the distillery like oversized barrels. Inside these larch containers there's a lot going on as the fermentation takes place. Keith slings me a plastic sack full of a damp, clay-like substance (the distiller's yeast) that I drop into the wort. On top of this I add some brewer's yeast, a dry, finer grain not unlike demerara sugar. Below, the liquid starts to fizz, the start of a centuries-old process that turns the sugar into alcohol.

Keith tells me fermentation is a useful tool in determining the flavour and style of the whisky. A long fermentation (100 hours) gives it a rich, fruity, complex character, whereas a shorter fermentation (48 hours) gives it a spicy, nutty flavour.

"The flavour of whisky is like a big jigsaw," he says. "Some pieces are larger than others. On top of the fermentation we have copper contact, for example. How much copper you add to your vapour will affect the eventual outcome."

In short, the more copper you add, such as the long stills at Glenmorangie, the lighter and more delicate the whisky. The less copper, such as the small, dumpy stills at Macallan, the meatier and heavier the spirit.

Fortunately, Keith has a fermentation he prepared earlier which we begin to pump into the two pre-heated pot stills. At about 78ûC the alcohol starts to boil, the vapour is collected, cooled and converted back into spirit known as low wines. Today, most malts are produced by double distillation. So the low wines are pumped into the second pot still for another go. The end result is a clear liquid referred to as new make spirit. Keith hands me a glass.

With an alcohol content of between 60% and 70%, I refrain from tasting, opting instead to nose the glass. Despite its disappointingly bland appearance, I pick up a toffee aroma with notes of nail polish, smoked bacon and a hint of peat. Mike grabs it off me and says he can detect bananas, while Keith adds his own notes of bubblegum.

This is where whisky appreciation differs from wine. While wine descriptions grew out of the ultra-conservative tasting notes of writers such as Michael Broadbent and Hugh Johnson, whisky has always been more adventurous - and malt whisky even more so. The night before, I enjoyed a malt tasting with the Urquhart family, owners of Gordon & Macphail for more than 110 years. Putting his nose into a glass of Linkwood, Michael Urquhart came up with "fudge, gooseberry, green apples, violets and Deep Heat".

It is this type of appreciation that has electrified the industry over the last decade. "When my father was buying Islay malts to bottle back in the 1960s, you couldn't sell them for love nor money," said Michael. "Nobody wanted them. Now we can't get enough of them."

He believes the growing popularity of malts is linked to our increased love of spicy, more exotic food. "Everyone is so much more adventurous these days. The proliferation of cooking programmes, celebrity chefs and restaurants from all over the world has really helped. More than ever people are asking, 'Does this whisky offer a challenge? Is it going to make my palate go through the Olympics?'"

By far the biggest influence on a whisky's flavour is wood. This is where Gordon & Macphail is a past master. It has been buying malt whisky from other producers and ageing it in its own barrels, bought from Jerez in Spain and Kentucky in the USA, for decades. But this model is under pressure. With sales of malt whisky booming, distillers may be more reluctant than previously to sell their prized stock to bottlers such as G&M - hence the company's decision to purchase Benromach.

Back at the distillery, Keith hands me an empty bottle. After a visit to the warehouse we select a cask and I get to fill my very own bottle, which is then signed and dated. Behind, the distillery machinery chugs on; there is the milling for tomorrow's mash to be completed and the washbacks to be filled, ready for another production run. The visitor centre fills up with tourists while the roads outside rumble with the sound of lorries transporting whisky to the port, from where it will be dispatched to the four corners of the world.

"The last time we did this - let someone fill their own bottle - it was for two Germans," says Keith. "They were intent on getting a little bit of the charred wood from the cask into the bottle to take back home."

With so much of Scotland's manufacturing industry having fallen silent, it's nice to experience a sector booming. It may be our national drink, but it has a truly global appeal.

The appliance of science

ACCORDING to the Scotch Whisky Association, there are more than 100 stillmen working in Scotland. Many, like Benromach's Keith Cruickshank, worked their way up through the industry, learning the principles of distillation and maturation from their forefathers.

In many of today's hi-tech distilleries, most stillmen spend as much time monitoring a computer as they do a mash tun.

Heriot-Watt University offers an MSc and diploma in brewing and distilling, the only courses of this type in the UK. Graduates are introduced to the theory and practice of malting, brewing and distilling, and the courses attract students from as far afield as China.