Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
land later this year or early next year, which will mean that Highland Park will have to
remove the statement, 'The Northernmost Scotch Whisky Distillery in the World' from
its packaging. 'Aye,' the driver says, 'the Shelties have been jealous of us having two dis-
tilleries and them having none for years.'
Since the seventies, Scapa and Highland Park have gone in opposite directions; Scapa
obscure, almost completely unpromoted and barely known, bumping along the bottom,
mostly quiet with only occasional short bursts of activity, and Highland Park going from
strength to strength, celebrating its bi-centenary five years ago with a flourish and a big
party that brought whisky connoisseurs and writers from all over the world, releasing
various medal-winning expressions of huge repute and just generally establishing a de-
served reputation as one of the very best malts made anywhere.
This is a good tour to do; while the open-plan, one-box-solution Arran tour lets you
see really clearly how all the different bits of the process fit together, the Highland Park
tour winds through the different stages building by building, but has more stages to see
in the first place. There's the realthing malting floors, for a start, with the barley laid out
in great flat drifts, like absurdly thick piled golden carpets covering the floor. You're en-
couraged to lift a few grains and sniff them, but asked not to eat them. Given that the
distillery workers are wandering about in their work boots through the barley, sticking
thermometers into it while you're doing this, it's an easy request to comply with.
The old malt shovels and hand-dragged wooden rakes still lie about the place, al-
though most of the turning of the malt - to stop it matting or overheating - is done by
a rather Heath Robinson machine with leather-wrapped paddles that looks like a cross
between a rotavator, a big old-fashioned lawn mower and one of the less successful but
defiantly eccentric contestants from
Robot Wars
.
Next there's the kilns, proper age-of-steam-looking waist-level fires in big brick and
iron ranges that look like they've come straight out of a twenties film set in a tramp
steamer. You half expect a couple of swarthy Lascars to appear at any moment, stripped
to the waist with grimy bandannas tied round their sweaty heads, to shovel more coke
into the furnace. The kilns burn peat for the first sixteen or so hours of the malt-drying
process, then switch to coke for the last twenty hours, until the barley only holds about
five per cent moisture. The humid gases released from the drying chambers exit the dis-
tillery through the two very-much-not-decorative pagodas which rise above the complex
of buildings set on a low hill just outside Kirkwall.
You can tell they make a lot of whisky here. The mash tun is huge, they have a dozen
washbacks - two steel ones outside and ten inside made from Douglas fir - and the stills
are big too, with flattish Lyne arms and outside condensers. When I'm looking round in
late July they've just started production again after a six-week silent season for mainten-
ance and general refitting. During this time the workers spent four weeks at Scapa distil-
