Raw Spirit (7 page)

The grist goes into a large cylindrical metal vessel called a mash tun; these usually hold many thousands of litres. Hot water is added, the resulting mixture is stirred to keep things going, the water is allowed to drain through the sieve-like floor of the mash tun and the process is repeated twice and some water’s recycled. Finally drained, the mash tun contains draff, which, converted into pellets or cake, makes a really good cattle feed (sadly for the cattle, there’s no alcohol left in this stuff, so if a distillery tour guide tells you they have ‘happy cattle’ nearby, just smile tolerantly).

The stuff that’s drained away is a sweet brown liquid called worts – hmm – and goes into one of the unsung containers in the whole distilling process: the underback (the mash tuns and washbacks get all the attention – it’s not fair).

Then it’s those washbacks. These are impressive big things which are usually made of Oregon pine and look like giant upside-down wooden buckets. Yeast is added to the worts and this is where fermentation happens. Looking into a washback once the fermentation process has gotten under way is very impressive; it’s a little Corryvrecken going on in there. You’d swear it’s all being kept swirling and thrashing around with a big propeller stuck in the base, but it’s all just the energy unleashed from the sugars by the yeasts. In fact the only motor in a washback is usually set into the lid to power a thin bar that revolves to knock the bubbles down, otherwise the foam threatens to overflow and escape like a cheap special effect from a bad fifties science fiction movie. Handy hint: don’t stick your head into a washback at this point and take a deep breath; the carbon dioxide has been known to knock people out.

Once all this excitement’s died down, what’s left smells like home-brewed beer and has an alcohol content of about eight per cent, so it’s pretty strong by beer standards (it also tastes like shit by any standards, frankly, though it apparently acts
as
a highly effective laxative in doses above, say, about half a teacup).

This fairly horrible liquid is then transferred to a still, the copper-constructed, deeply glamorous, photogenic part of the whole business (photogenic, that is, if they’ll actually let you take a photo; most of the Islay distilleries are pretty relaxed places and don’t mind cameras, but a lot of the more corporatised mainland ones won’t let you use cameras inside, citing the danger of a flash setting off the spirit fumes. I find this dubious; do they think people are still using nineteenth-century technology? You know; the little sticks like miniature builders’ hods loaded with flash powder which those photographer johnnies once utilised to take daguerreotypes of hackney carriages and passing Zeppelins with. I mean, honestly).

There are two still types, usually, and they are used in succession. They are both just big kettles, heated by peat or anthracite direct flame in very traditional distilleries, or by gas- or oil-fuelled jets, or steam pipes, elsewhere. The first is the wash still; the alcohol in the mixture boiling away inside the still turns to a vapour before the water in the mixture does and rises to the top of the still to depart through a pipe called the Lyne arm. The vapour is cooled, becomes liquid and then goes to the second still, the spirit still, where the same process happens all over again.

The liquid that’s sent from the wash still to the spirit still is called low wines; what’s left in the wash still after it’s finished its distillation – not a pretty sight or smell, as a rule – is called pot ale. Sometimes that gets added to the cattle cake too. Still no happy heifers though.

After both stills have done their bit comes a sort of testing cabinet called a spirit safe (also quite glamorous, in a brassy, glassy sort of way) where the distillers do some fairly basic chemistry experiments to decide which part of the resulting stream of clear liquid they’re going to use. You can’t use everything that comes out of a still; the first stuff to come out is overly strong and contains too many chemicals you wouldn’t want to swallow, while the last bit is sort of all weak and
pathetic
and gets sent back into the wash still to try again.

That first part is called the foreshots, the good bit is the middle cut and the last bit is the feints, though sometimes you’ll hear them referred to as the head, heart and tail.

There’s a big rectangular tank involved at this point which receives the spirit and is imaginatively called the spirit receiving tank (another unsung container – still unfair), then it’s off to the cask-filling bit.

Now, you
could
keep the spirit in bottles, ceramic jugs or even well-cleaned oil drums, but at best it would stay just as it was when it was first poured into the container (at worst it would eventually go off). The wood makes the difference. This may have been a class thing; in the old days poor people kept their whisky in bottles or flagons or a pail or something; the better off would have had empty casks in their cellars because they could afford to buy stuff like wine and sherry in that sort of bulk, and using the emptied barrels to store whisky in must have seemed a prudent and canny idea.

These days the casks used for malt whisky are usually exbourbon barrels brought in from the States, often broken down into their individual staves (the curved side bits, shaped a bit like these parentheses) and circular ends, to save transport costs. The barrels are reassembled in Scotland and the flavour of the bourbon adds an extra depth to the developing spirit/whisky. Sherry casks provide an even more salubrious environment for young and impressionable whisky as it matures, but they cost more – about £250 a throw compared to £50 for a bourbon cask. Some of the more adventurous distilleries have used barrels which have contained other drinks, like rum or red wine, and produced some very interesting whiskies indeed (more of this later). Whatever; after the filling, it’s off to the warehouse.

The pace slackens off here.

A lot.

Three years minimum by law before you can even call what’s in the barrels whisky – it’s still ‘spirit’ until those 36 months are up.

Most whisky spends at least twice that amount of time in
the
warehouse (wonderful, cool, beautiful,
fabulously
-fragranced places) and most single malts will age for a minimum of ten or twelve years before being allowed anywhere near a bottle. The reason these dark, quiet, usually earth-floored warehouses smell so damn wonderful (it is hard even for a heathen like me not to think of them as hallowed) is that, not to over-sharpen the point, even the best-made wooden barrels leak. The fumes find their way out of the casks and into the atmosphere; they even penetrate the usually very thick walls of the average bonded warehouse, turning those walls black because there’s a particular airborne fungus which thrives on just those vapours (and which, umm, is black). This happens at a rate of about two per cent per year, so a cask that’s been sitting for ten years will have lost about a fifth of its contents.

This sounds wasteful but it isn’t; it’s a bit like the infant human brain losing synaptic connections as it grows and matures; what’s left – the network of strengthened pathways in the brain or the concentrated flavours remaining in the barrel – is all the better for what’s been given up. This two per cent per year loss is usually called the Angel’s Share. Presumably because the Fungus’s Share doesn’t sound quite so romantic.

Once bottled, whisky doesn’t mature or deteriorate as long as the seal remains tight, though if it is uncorked and then – for some unfathomable reason – not finished, it will eventually go off in a year or two. (I am mildly horrified that this has been discovered.)

Oh; and store it upright, not flat.

That’s it.

‘Hello, ma darlin. How are you—?

‘The phone won’t stop!’

‘Won’t stop what?’

‘Ringing! I’ve had all these newspapers calling the house wanting to talk to you about us burning our passports! I’m going crazy!’

‘But we didn’t burn—’

‘Why are you always away when these things happen?’

‘Good timing? Ha, just kid—’

‘It’s not funny!’

‘Well, no, but—’

‘I’m going insane here. I had some woman from the
Scotsman
on earlier—’

‘I though this was why we went ex-directory. How did those—? Never mind.’

‘I don’t know what to do!’

‘Well, take the phone out.’

‘I’m worried they’ll come to the house!’

‘That’s a point; the fucking
Daily Mail
doorstepped me that time I said, Drugs; just say Yes.’

‘And I’m missing you. Help!’

‘Well, why not come out here? Come to Islay. Harriet and Toby were, like, dreadfully disappointed when I turned up without you. A less secure person than myself could almost have formed the impression it was you they were really looking forward to seeing, not me. Bizarre though that sounds, obviously. But yeah, come on out.’

‘How?’

‘Drive?’

‘Oh, come on, you know I hate driving.’

‘Well then … train to Edinburgh, another train to Glasgow, then … I think there’s a bus to Kennacraig. Or something like that. Probably.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘Right. Well. Umm … Fly?’

‘There are no more flights till Monday.’

‘You’ve checked?’

‘I’ve checked.’

‘Ah, what the hell, just charter a plane.’

‘What?’

‘Charter a plane. Drive over to Embra airport or get a taxi and charter a light plane from there.’

‘What, really?’

‘Well, no, not really, I was just—’

‘I could look into it, I suppose.’

‘Well …’

‘Is that okay?’

‘Ah, well, umm.’

‘You really wouldn’t mind?’

‘I, well, I, umm, no. No, I suppose, if you’re really missing—’

‘Where would I find that sort of thing? Yellow Pages, I suppose. I’ll call you back. Bye.’

Which is how, after a succession of false starts and on-again, off-again phone calls, John Jarrold and I find ourselves at an otherwise deserted Islay airport on a Sunday afternoon, meeting Ann off a dinky little twin-engine Cessna which left Edinburgh just 40 minutes earlier.

‘What was the delay?’

‘First one of the engines wouldn’t start, then the door wouldn’t close, then there was mist over the runway, then there was no air traffic control. The pilot was called Lorna and she was only 25. I said sorry for making her work on a Sunday but she said she’d only have been doing the decorating. It was
brilliant
!’

(Me, suspiciously:) ‘Have you been drinking coffee?’

The rest of Sunday – after Ann has settled in, had a welcoming dram or two with Toby and Harriet and promptly gone for a snooze – I spend with Martin the photographer, revisiting most of the distilleries John and I drove to yesterday. They’re still closed, of course, but looking very picturesque in the gently hazy sunshine with the calm sea lapping quietly against the rocks. We take what feels like about eighteen rolls of film, from which one frame later gets used.

Martin is staying with friends near Loch Gruinart, in the north-east of the island, but later comes to stay in the other self-catering flat along with Oliver, and apparently turns out to be an extremely good guitarist, though Ann and I miss the impromptu concert. Later it turns out we know people in common; Martin’s done a lot of album covers, including one or two for Shooglenifty; one of my favourite bands, plus I
know
a couple of the guys. Actually, the last time I saw Malcolm the guitarist was at my birthday bash in February; I vaguely recall getting all excited about a plan we hatched together about doing a joint musical/literary tour of Cuba with – hopefully – British Council money. I have a nasty feeling I was supposed to write the letter proposing this to the BC. Durn; I’d better tell Malc about my gratuitous passport-destroying antics …

We go mob-handed to the Machrie for dinner, utilising the bus-like carrying capacity of the Defender to transport everybody in one go. It’s on the way back in the darkness that I’m warned about the kamikaze proclivities of the local deer population, especially between the hotel and the farm, and so crawl dutifully along at 30 miles an hour, eyes peeled for antlers craftily disguised as branches lurking with malevolent intent amongst the roadside trees.

Each evening, I’m watching the progress of the war. It opens without the shock and awe we’ve been promised, but on the other hand there are no sudden chemical or biological counter attacks either. Which is good, obviously. Yet just a micron suspicious, too. I mean, if you’ve got weapons of mass destruction – as we have been so assiduously and indeed almost desperately assured Saddam has – isn’t now, when you’re being invaded by troop concentrations heading straight for your major cities, when you’d use them?

Anyway, it all goes very quickly and smoothly for the invading forces. The Brits sort of take Basra. The US Marines cross the Euphrates.

Then everything stalls, and it almost looks like another of the nightmare scenarios is going to kick in, with stubborn resistance in depth and behind the various fronts, irregulars attacking the supply chains. Then that all fades away too and it’s on to Baghdad.

Despite one or two scares, still no chemical or biological weapons turn up. I sit in the flat above the old barn each night, nursing a whisky, unable to believe this is really happening, that we’ve gone to war because, well, basically because George
Dubya
Bush and his right-wing pals wanted to, and Tony Blair was determined to do whatever Bush asked of him, seemingly happy to risk destroying the UN and sundering the EU just so that the US could have its second pushover war in two years.

But then, hey, I couldn’t believe it a couple of years ago when Bush lost the election and yet got given the presidency, and hardly anybody seemed to get upset (certainly almost nobody in America was
reported
as getting upset); not much national or worldwide outrage at the fact the most powerful nation in the history of the planet had been taken over by a cross-eyed cretin backed by gang of drooling, mean-spirited, proto-fascist shitheads.

My bedtime reading, when I’m not looking at other books about whisky, is
Stupid White Men
, by Michael Moore. It’s good – a little tabloid with the italics and so on, perhaps, but very to the point given the current situation. In fact painfully so; I can only take it a few pages at a time before my blood starts to boil.