Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'It will indeed … Hey, look! There, outside that house; a life-size plastic goose! Hey,
there's loads of them! And they're only 35 of your Earth pounds! I'm going to buy one!
Maybe two!'
'You really have lost all sense of value, haven't you, Iain?'
'… wonder if they light up. Hmm? Sorry, what?'
Whisky: the how-to bit
.
(If you already know how whisky's made, you may want to skip this section. Well, unless
you're one of these know-all types who wants to look for mistakes or something.)
Whisky is made from barley, which is a type of grain that grows well in Scotland's rel-
atively cool, damp climate. You harvest the barley, soak the stuff in water to start it ger-
minating, then dry it off again to stop it actually sprouting too far. The idea is to turn the
starch in the barley into sugar. (Barley's not much use as it is; I mean all you can do with
it is let it turn into another barley plant or eat it, basically. Sugar you can do something
useful with, i.e. start the process of turning it into drink.)
It's during the drying process that you can add the peaty flavour. In the old days peat
fuelled the fires that dried the germinating barley, and naturally some of the smell of the
smoke got into the barley. Back then every distillery would do its own malting. Malting is
what the whole process so far is called, and it produces malted barley, or just plain malt,
hence the name malt whisky.
Once steeped (nothing especially technical in the word - just Scots for 'soaked') the
germinating barley would be laid out on enormous malting floors inside the distillery and
guys would walk up and down, dragging boards behind them to turn the barley over now
and again, basically ploughing it to let the air get at every grain. The whole malting pro-
cess can take from one week to nearly two. Only a few distilleries still do this themselves:
Balvenie on Speyside, Bowmore and Laphroaig on Islay, Springbank in Campbeltown on
the Mull of Kintyre and Highland Park just outside Kirkwall, on Orkney. The rest source
their grain from specialist malt mills, specifying the level of peatiness they want.
Then you mill the malted barley - stopping before it's milled too finely, when it would
just be flour - until you have stuff called grist.
At this point distilleries have been known to explode.
No, seriously. Any fine organic dust mixed with air in the right proportions will ex-
plode if there's a source of ignition like a spark (a bad explosion in a custard factory
must sound perfectly hilarious unless you're actually present at the time), and because
barley's grown in the soil it usually arrives with a few tiny stones in it. The stones can get
caught in the metal rollers in the milling machine, produce a spark, ignite the malt-dust
