The next step is a grist mill, a sort of giant coffee grinder that separates the barley sprouts from the peated sugar and starch. Laphroaig keeps the peat fires burning longer. Later this "malted barley" is moved into a kiln room, where it is dried for 18 hours over a peat fire, to get just a hint of the flavor of the smoke into the grain, and dried for about another two days with hot air. And he didn't even drink.Īs Islay Campbell, the manager, explained the process, barley that has been soaked 36 hours in water is spread out about six inches thick on the three "peat floors" in the distillery, where it is turned regularly as enzymes in the grain begin to convert starch into sugar and produce heat.
I put a little pure spring water into a glass of this, sniffed, and was rewarded by my own Proustian epiphany: the warm, welcoming smell of my grandfather's coal cellar on a frigid winter's day. One of them, Laphroaig, at the southern end of the island near Port Ellen, produces perhaps the most heavily peated of all single malts. It must have been a great place to hide from the Inland Revenue I don't know how else to explain why eight separate distilleries, all but one of them still working, would come to be situated in such a small, remote place. Tuscania in February 1918, is a bird watcher's paradise, with unspoiled, empty beaches and dramatic peat barrens and sheep - many more sheep than people. Islay, so far out into the Atlantic Ocean that there's a stone monument to 266 Americans who died nearby in the torpedoing of H.M.S. But the bootleggers who started the industry hundreds of years ago put their stills in some of the most splendid countryside in Europe, deep in glens where the waters run pure, so there are plenty of other things to see if you go. Probably only a truly besotted devotee of the distiller's art would go to Scotland just to see how whisky is made. A few steps away you can usually buy a bottle or two at the distillery shop, unless it's a Sunday.
A distillery is redolent of yeast, sweet fermenting mash, steam and (in many places) burning peat, topped off with a wee dram of the finished and properly aged product, which at most places is offered free. But there are others farther afield, from way out in the Hebrides in Islay (pronounced EYE-lah), where some of the smokiest, most heavily "peated" malts are made, to the Orkney Islands far up in the North Sea.Ī visit to a distillery in any of these places is not only a pleasant way to find out how single-malt whisky is made but also a feast for all the senses. Some of the most attractive single-malt distilleries are right next to Edinburgh and Glasgow, the first stops on any tourist itinerary. With more than 120 distilleries, Scotland presents a rich course of study, maybe even a doctoral thesis, for somebody prepared for the rigors of thorough research.
Distilleries on the tour, signposted with a schematic drawing of a "peat reek," the pagoda-like cupola that covers a distillery's malting floor, include Knockando, Tamdhu, The Glenlivet and Glenfiddich and others whose products are readily available in the United States. THERE'S long been a "Whisky Trail" through the valley of the River Spey in the Highlands of northeastern Scotland, famous for its salmon, scenery and some of the best-known single-malt whisky.
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