Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I've given a rough guide to whisky-making above, and it doesn't vary much between
distilleries. Where it does and I think it's worthy of note, I'll let you know; otherwise,
just make the relevant assumptions. The stuff I'm looking for as I make these journeys
is the interesting bits and pieces that always crop up during every tour, especially if you
ask questions and keep your eyes open and senses engaged; the grace notes in a familiar
theme.
What I find intriguing is stuff like the fact that now they've got their new bottling
plant, next on the list of improvements at Bruichladdich is a Whisky Academy they intend
to open in the summer in an old de-bonded warehouse, to teach people about whisky in
depth, or the fact that a family of seven dolphins seem to have adopted the place, showing
up at the same time each year in the bay across the road from the distillery, or that it has
the tallest stills on the island (taller stills give the vapours inside a harder job getting out
to the bit where they'll be condensed and so tend to produce lighter spirits), or that what
they call their computer in the mash room is a blackboard … and yet they have webcams
set up at various sites throughout the distillery so you can watch what's going on, live,
from anywhere in the world.
It later turns out, as I discover through a
Guardian
article in early June, that Bruich-
laddich only got the broadband connection that makes the webcams possible due to a mis-
take by British Telecom. The contract was signed and legally binding before BT realised
that the distillery wasn't where they thought it was. So the outgoing signals have to be
bounced from Islay to Northern Ireland - admittedly only about 20 or so miles away -
then away back over to Edinburgh before disappearing into the Web.
It's this mixture of tradition and newfangled that's going to keep cropping up over
the next few months and (nearly) one hundred distilleries; very old tech and very new
tech existing together and helping, in the end, to make and promote a drink that has itself
changed and evolved over the centuries, sometimes with the grain of change in society,
sometimes not.
Evolution, in the way the stuff is made, marketed and appreciated and indeed in the
taste of the finished product itself, helps keep whisky interesting. At one of the earliest
stages of the process at Bruichladdich we're invited to taste some of the heavily peated
malt they intend to use for a future expression. This comes as a surprise because the Lad-
die - as it's sometimes known - is not a very peaty whisky at all, certainly not compared
to the reeking giants of the island's south coast.
The peatiness of malt is measured by the parts per million (p.p.m.) of the aromatic
chemical phenol it contains, and modern maltsers are able to produce accurately and con-
sistently pretty much any degree of peatiness a distiller requests. Of the Islay whiskies,
Bunnahabhain has the least peat at 5 p.p.m., while Ardbeg has the most; 50 p.p.m. In
between come Bowmore with 20, Port Ellen (as was) with 25, Caol Ila with 30, Laphroaig
