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The 2012 Barley Harvest

IN Barley 3rd April 2013/by Carl Reavey
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We enjoyed our best barley harvest ever here on Islay in 2012.  The weather on the west coast was very good for the first part of the year, and reasonable for much of the summer.  The only real difficulties we had were actually bringing the harvest in when the rains started in September.  Despite this, ten Islay farms brought home a total of around 930 tonnes of quality grain.  A tremendous achievement. Unfortunately, our colleagues on the Scottish mainland were not so lucky.  They had to endure a very poor year of weather throughout  2012, a cold wet and miserable season which badly affected the productivity of many farming operations – including the crops of malting barley.

Particularly hard hit were our heroic organic farmers who have made such a huge commitment to producing organic malting barley for us. The good news is that their crop was brought in, eventually  – the bad news is that it was not suitable for malting without screening out an unsustainable amount of the grain.  Every cloud has a silver lining however, and that was certainly the case in this instance.  The bad weather and poor harvest meant that the cost of feed barley has been very high – the resulting shortages inevitably being reflected in higher prices.  So the farmers who worked so hard to deliver our organic barley have at least been able to find a ready alternative market. The downside is of course that we will not be able to produce organic spirit this year.  This will not be an issue in the long term as we have lots of lovely organic whisky slumbering in our warehouses on the banks of Loch Indaal from our previous successes.  It does mean however that we are going to be distilling 100% Scottish, conventionally grown, barley  this year alongside the Islay crop. At Bruichladdich, we share many things with our Scottish organic barley farming friends.  We share a passionate interest in the land and the people who work it.  We are tough enough to take the tribulations along with the triumphs – and we are eternally optimistic.  We are certain that 2013 is going to produce a great Scottish organic barley harvest – and we look forward to working with it again.  Land and dram united!

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WMD – THE STORY OF THE YELLOW SUBMARINE HAS BEEN FULL OF CHARACTER AND CHARACTERS RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING.

It started with our friend ‘Demolition Dave’ helping Duncan McGillivray and his gang to demolish the old Inverleven distillery – buying up all the old equipment for scrap and loading it onto barges on the Clyde. All so Duncan had some spares to keep Bruichladdich running in the days of No Money.

As this odd flotilla was being towed round the Mull of Kintyre and up to Islay, Laddie MD Mark Reynier received an email from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in the USA who had been monitoring distillery webcams on the grounds that our processes could have been ‘tweaked’ to produce the dreaded WMD. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’.

Never one to allow the opportunity for a good story to pass him by, or to get his beloved distillery in the news, Reynier embellished the tale, which soon grew to involve spies and the CIA and visits by weapons inspectors. All of which made great headline-grabbing copy in the febrile media atmosphere then prevailing around WMD.

One of the stills from Inverleven was dutifully set up outside the old Victorian buildings, and became an iconic sight, with a pair of Duncan’s old wellie boots sticking out of the top to represent those weapons inspectors searching for dangerous chemicals deep in its copper bottomed interior.

A special bottling was commissioned (of course) and dubbed the ‘Whisky of Mass Distinction’ (geddit?) and much hilarity ensued. At least among the Laddies, the rest of the whisky industry having long since given up on the noisily irreverent rebels.

WMDII: A YELLOW SUBMARINE

Things were about to get even more eccentric because, shortly afterwards, Islay fisherman John Baker was heading home to Port Ellen when he spotted something awash in the sea off the bow of his boat. Being a resourceful man, he attached a rope to said object and towed it into the pier where Gordon Currie lifted it out of the water. It proved to be a very beautiful yellow submarine.

Very conveniently, the yellow vessel had ‘Ministry of Defence’ and a telephone number stencilled on it, which was of course immediately called. What happened next was to become the stuff of legend. He was connected to the Royal Navy. “I have found your yellow submarine” said John. “We haven’t lost a yellow submarine” said the Navy. Which was an odd response as the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming.

John and Gordon then loaded the submarine onto a lorry and took it to a secret location in Port Ellen (actually fellow fisherman Harold Hastie’s back garden). The local newspaper was called, then the nationals, and the following day the red-tops were full of pictures of the two friends astride the lethal-looking machine, carrying fishing rods, and asking: “Has anybody lost a yellow submarine?”

Hilarious… unless you were the Royal Navy – who did eventually admit to it being theirs. HMS Blyth, the minesweeper that lost it, eventually came to pick it up, slipping into the pier at dawn to winch it aboard. By that time, Bruichladdich had (of course) commissioned another bottling, WMD2: The Yellow Submarine, and a box of lovely liquid was graciously offered, and accepted by the captain as a goodwill gesture.

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