The Glenburgie-Glenlivet Distillery does not exactly flauntitself. It lies up a Morayshire back road between Forres andElgin without even a sign to declare its presence. It is adistillery that metaphorically keeps its head down and gets onwith the job.
There's a reason for this. Glenburgie's job is to producehigh-quality malt whisky for blending purposes - reliably andefficiently - adding its special qualities to the Ballantine'srange and others such as the export blend Old Smuggler. Itsowners, Allied Distillers, do not bottle the Glenburgie as asingle, although it has been bottled by Gordon & MacPhailand, of course, at cask-strength by the Society as No 71.
But if almost all of the Glenburgie "disappears"into the blends which make Scotch whisky an internationalphenomenon, let us think now about a whisky from the samedistillery which has almost completely vanished. But not quite.
This is called Glencraig. Between 1958 and 1981, theGlenburgie-Glenlivet Distillery had two contrasting pairs ofpot-stills, one pair of the familiar swan-necked shape and theother pair with shorter, cylindrical necks. These were known asLomond stills.
Because of the quite different character of the whisky thesestills produced - richer and heavier, although from the same mash- their product was given another name, Glencraig. Of course,none has been produced since the Lomond stills were replaced byswan-necks in 1981. So the Society's bottling of this whisky, asNo 104, was a taste of a disappearing heritage.
In the Fifties, Glenburgie belonged to the Hiram Walker stableof Scotch whisky distilleries and a spirit of experimentation wasabroad. The idea was to widen the character and style of thecompany's malts with stills which altered the "reflux"action by passing on heavier vapours to the condenser.
The Lomond stills were designed to this end, made bycoppersmiths in Govan, Glasgow, and installed in pairs atGlenburgie, Miltonduff and Inverleven. (Only one Lomond still - awash still in tandem with a traditional spirit still - is thoughtto survive in operation, at Scapa Distillery in Orkney.)
At Glenburgie-Glenlivet, the whisky from the Lomond stills wasnamed after the late Willie Craig, the company's productiondirector. His son Bill, now retired after becoming generalmanager of Hiram Walker's Highland malt operations recalls thisepisode - and also the fact that not all malt connoisseurs wereconvinced that the Lomond stills significantly altered thecharacter of the dram.
Feel free to argue about this, of course, if you ordered No104. It's not likely to be around long, for the Lomond stills hadto be dismantled before they were removed from Glenburgie, a veryinteresting distillery established in 1810 and now managed byBrian Thomas.
There is one unusual consequence from this time. Because theGlencraig from the Lomond stills had to be kept apart from theGlenburgie, there had to be two separate spirit safes and spiritreceiving vessels. These survive: so Glenburgie is probably theonly small malt distillery with just two pairs of stills whichenjoys this doubling-up.
Among Glenburgie's other historical relics is thetiny cottage-like building which first housed its originaloffices and maturing cellar. Here is an indication of how thewhisky business has grown.
It has changed, too. The time when every distillery had itsresident excisemen is recalled by a door which once closed offthe cabinet where the excise officials kept their hydrometers andother instruments for checking the government's share. On theback of this door, generations of excisemen scrawled their names,the way school pupils once did on their desk-lids.
But in whisky-making today, Glenburgie-Glenlivet has anotherdistinction. It is one of the few distilleries where at themashing stage, four waters are applied instead of the usualthree.
First, of course, the malted barley (grown in Moray orTayside, brought in at about 100 tonnes a week) is ground in thePorteous mill. Brian Thomas tries to produce as fine a grist aspossible, which is always a balance between extraction of thesugars and drainage requirements. He is working on proportions of11 per cent flour, 22 per cent husks, and 67 per cent middles.
The first water is pumped into the mashtun at 63.5 degrees C, and it takes two hours to complete thefilling. In due course, the worts progress to the fermentingstage. When the second water is added at 95 degrees, from asmaller tank, it is sprayed from above to get a good even mixthrough the "bed" of grains. This raises thetemperature of the "bed" to 80 degrees. These wortsthen go to fill the same washback.
Two final waters are sprayed into the mash tun, by which timethe temperature has reached boiling point. They extract the finaltraces of sugars from the mash, and are retrieved to form thefirst waters of the next cycle.
Brian Thomas's ideal final product is a sweetish, fruity andestery whisky. He believes strongly in the effect of yeasts uponthe final spirit, and unusually employs two distiller's and twobrewer's yeasts for each fermentation.
We lifted the lid on one of the 13 washbacks and lookedinside. The fermentation had died back, and we saw a dense andcreamy head, the colour of an Italian footballer's suntan."That's what you want," said Brian. It smelt delicious.God, I could have taken a dram of that and it hadn't even beendistilled. I had a good sniff, and I can smell it still.
Anthony Troon
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