Ardbeg to be different

We went on our first distillery tour today at Ardbeg.



I have a pretty good understanding on what distilling entails, but this was my very first distillery tour ever so I didn't know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised that Ardbeg takes the approach that the distilling process is basically the same the world over so we won't bore you with all the details that are boiler plate distilling. Instead they focused on our particular history.

Ardbeg has been distilling in one form or another for a couple hundred years. I thought the 1970's where when the history got real interesting. During the 70's the whiskey market was doing very well, but Ardbeg was still distilling in a very primitive fashion. Ardbeg employed 90+ workers to do all the manual labor of harvesting peat, malting barley, etc. The workers and their families lived on the premises and Ardbeg was basically it's own village with a school, shops, and everything. They even employed multiple gardeners to grow vegetables and fish just to feed the workforce. This was back when the island had a lot more people on it. At one point Islay was home to fourteen thousand people. Now it is home to barely more than three thousand.

At the end of the seventies the bottom of the whiskey market dropped out. That's about the same time that wine started to become popular with the mass market. Ardbeg was shutdown and boarded up. The grounds started to deteriorate. In the late eighties it was bought by a whiskey company that used it to help make blended whiskeys. It eventually lost interest in the distillery because so much work and maintenance was needed due to its poor condition. The company started to knock all the buildings down and decided to level the entire site. At the last minute, in the 1998, it sold Ardbeg for 7 millions pounds to a smaller whiskey company that already owned a highland distillery and a speyside distillery. The warehouses still had barrels in them that had been aging since 70's. The old barrels ended up bringing in more than 5 million pounds when sold. Even still, the new company had to invest a lot of money into Ardbeg to renovate it.

The newer company introduced modern automation Ardbeg. Eventually the new company decided to get out of the whiskey business all together and sold all three of its distilleries to a French company for 300 million pounds in 2004.

Today the distilling operation is run by nine people. Six of them work in shifts to keep it going. They no longer harvest their own peat or do their own malting. The island now has a Maltings Plant in Port Ellen that supplies all of the island's distilleries with malted barley (which is also why Port Ellen smells like peaty-malted heaven). There are elevators to move malted barley around the distillery these days. One thing they haven't upgraded is their barley mill.



The mill was commissioned especially for the distillery and is over a hundred years old. At some point the wooden rollers were retrofitted to be stainless steel rollers, but other than that it has been unchanged. They have no spare mills, they don't even have spare parts for this mill. Once a year they shutdown to clean and oil the mill. They've had all the new pieces of modernized equipment break down on them since they reopened in 1998. The mill has never failed them.

After the barley is milled it moves to a series of barrels to soak. These are the largest barrels I've ever seen. They are two stories tall. I assume this is the sort of thing you need to make in order to receive the title “Master Cooper.”



Here is a photo of the grains in during their first soak.



We got to taste the wort during the second soak. I found it a little disconcerting that she instructed us to stick our finger in her little wort bucket to taste it. Even more disconcerting that she returned the bucket, contents and all, back into the giant barrel.

After the third soak the water is moved into the first still. Ardbeg's barrel capacity is larger than their still capacity, so they can only move half the contents at a time. While they've done some modernization, they haven't modernized everything. They gauge how much to move by shoving a stick into the giant barrel with a mark in the middle. When they see the mark they've pumped out half the barrel.



They use a two still process, once it condenses out of the first still it moves to the second. We're told that's pretty much how all Scotches are made.

At the very end we got to see the “spirit safe.”



During the late 1800's the government was trying to force all distillers to get licenses and start pay taxes for making whiskey. A lot of Scotsmen thought making whiskey was more of a birthright sort of thing so a lot of smuggling and cheating went on. The spirit safe was one of the measures that the government introduced because it helped them keep tabs on the process. I'll have to look up later what exactly it was suppose to prevent or enforce.

At this point we got to stick our finger in the final spirit before it was moved into a barrel. We all obliged. It takes three days to get from malted barley to spirit. It takes a minimum of three years of aging in barrels to legally be called a whiskey, but traditionally no self respecting distillery releases much before 10 years. Dawn mentioned how funny it was that someone would be tasting our fingers in 10 years time. Did I mention that Ardbeg was sold and reopened in 1998? Yeah, this is a big year for them. This is their first honest-to-god release since they reopened. Everything before this has been stuff from before they shutdown or early released stuff.