Here are some more pictures, which fill in the gaps from my recent trip to the Springbank Distillery in Campbeltown, Scotland: the Holy Grail of distilleries IMO.
A shot of the exterior and that is a belt-driven wheel you see!
This is the kiln above which is a hopper where all the recently malted barely sits and is dried over the heat and smoke. This takes 24 plus hours. All the grain is transported using worm thread conveyors below the hoppers
When the barley is dried it is transferred into large hoppers for storage before it is ground and added to water to start the distilling process. At the end of the room there is the very latest in computers which the distillery staff use to keep track of what grain is in what hopper and the date it arrived there, i.e., Longrow - peat smoked, Springbank - part peat, part oil fire dried and Hazelburn - 100% oil fire dried)
Here's the 'computer' the distillery staff are only too proud to show off!
Once the barley is milled to produce grist, the grist is put into a large tank, the mash tun and water sourced from a reservoir in the hills above the town. This water is heated to extract all the sugars and flavor form the grist. At this stage the process is quite similar to beer production. This particular mash tun is over a 100 years old!
After the mashing the liquid now called wort is transferred to large wooden tanks called washbacks. Here the yeast is added to turn the sugars into alcohol. The washbacks have heating elements in them to maintain a constant fermentation temperature. This process lasts about 3 days, which is slow for whisky, but the production in Campbeltown is not a hurried affair! The resulting liquid is again very close to beer!
Here is where the liquids post distillation are pumped, having past through the spirit safe. You can see the third still in the right of the picture.
Here is where the final sprit is gathered and it is also in this room that the barrel are filled, by gravity, with a device that resembles a petrol filling nozzle!
More of the good stuff in storage. By the looks of things a 12 y.o. but who knows what it might end up. These are sherry cask's, which you can tell from the deep lip.
This is where there is a marked difference between whisky and bourbon. Due to what I understand were post prohibition laws bourbon cannot be stored in barrels that have been previously used for storing alcohol and after each use a bourbon barrel must be destroyed (or sold to Scottish distilleries!) to prevent someone sweating the barrel for absorbed spirit! The barrel's age and what was previously stored on it imparts color and flavor the the whisky. BTW to be called 'whisky' the distilled spirit must be in a barrel for two years!
