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Distilling Port Charlotte Spirit

IN Making Whisky 4th November 2013/by Carl Reavey
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After a long run of unpeated Bruichladdich through the stills we have started to distill heavily peated Port Charlotte spirit this morning.  We plan to be running Port Charlotte for around a month before changing again, to Octomore, the heaviest peated whisky in the world.  The Octomore will take us through to the Christmas holiday.

The first 7.2 tonne batch of the pungent, peat-infused Port Charlotte grist was soaked in our lovely old cast iron mash tun on Wednesday of last week, the maximum amount of sugar being gently extracted to give a sweet wort.  Water was added and drained away from the grist in the mash tun four times, with the first and second ‘waters’ being used to charge the washbacks, while the third and fourth were recycled as the first and second waters of the subsequent mash.

Washbacks

Every stage of the process is enabled, overseen and controlled by people and people alone.

Yeast was added to the wort in the washbacks by hand, and a slow period of fermentation resulted in the creation of alcohol in a malty ‘wash’, which is akin to a beer.  It is this wash that charges the stills and is gently simmered and the vapours condensed to produce, first the low wines, and finally the precious spirit that will fill the oak casks.

Every stage of the process is enabled, overseen and controlled by people and people alone.  The quantities are measured, the flow regulated, the consistency checked and the speed determined by men whose responsibility it is to judge when to take the middle cut.  There are no computers telling them what to do, or when to do it, just a body of knowledge passed from man to man, father to son, generation to generation.

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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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