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.
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.
I refer, of course, to Bushmills, which celebrates its 400th anniversary in April this year. Except, of course, there’s a fair bit of the blarney in there (“blarney” is Irish for “marketing” I think).
