The next day I drove further north, and I thought I'd visit the Edradour distillery since it's the smallest one in Scotland. It really is pretty small, only one step up from a backyard operation. There's nothing bad about that, however. I know from visiting real-ale festivals that the quality of beer you get from small-scale nobody's-ever-heard-of-them breweries far surpasses the drink that the large corporations market as beer. Edradour brewing seems to have a workforce of three men, which is comprable to such places as the Milton brewery. And I'll go further to say that their whisky is worth knowing about.
I'll go over the process of manufacturing whisky in case the reader needs a refresher course. You start with barley grains, and these you soak in water and the seeds germinate. Once germinated, and the green sprout starts to appear, you roast them. The result is called malt, and if you can get your hands on some, you'll discover that it tastes really nice. The malt is then ground into a powder to increase its surface-area, and the result is called grist. This is mixed with hot water and placed in a big vat called a mash tun for a couple of hours and the starch molecules are broken-down into a sugar called maltose via the action of enzyme amylas. The sugar solution (aka wort) is drained and cooled to 20c, and put in a brewing tank. They add yeast, and this creates a solution of 8% alcohol. This is distilled to increase its strength and you're left with whisky. That's the basic idea of the process, but as any good cook will tell you, there is an awful lot of fine-tuning involved to get the best results: the temperatures, timings, the ratios and sources of your ingredients and so forth all take a bit of trial-and-error to optimize.
The mash tun at Edradour is cast iron, and dates from 1910. It has a perforated floor made from brass through which the sugar solution is drained. It has a mechanical revolving rake to stir the mash and make sure all the grist is subject to the enzymes. They seem to fill it with 3000 litres of water at a time, which comes from a nearby well, and it seems that you can get two batches of wort from the same batch of grist; that is once you've drained your wort the first time you can fill the mash tun with water again and do it again. This is a little like the first and second pressings of grapes in the wine-making process, and I wonder if they find the first wort is better than the second.
What I thought was interesting was the cooling techniques they used. "Edradour" apparently means "two streams" in gaelic, and the brewery is situated where two streams meet. They have a plentful supply of cold water, and they pipe the streamwater into the brewery building. It flows through the pipes of a rather fun heat-exchanger which dates from 1933, called a Morton Refrigerator I think. The wort coming out of the mash tun at approx 70c enters the exchanger at the top, and by putting your hand over it you can feel that the liquid is very hot at this point. By the time it has flowed to the bottom it has mysteriously been reduced to room temperature. It's magic!
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The streamwater is also allowed to flow through two large outdoor tanks, and the gases from the distiller (at 82c) pass through copper coils which are buried in these tanks. Thereby the vapourised alcohol condenses and may be collected. You might expect that the stream is warmer beneath the brewery, but apparently they've had biology students analyse it and there's really no difference. What immediately strikes me is that they should heat the water for the mash with the excess heat, instead of just putting it into the stream which is wasteful.
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I could talk a lot more about the precise details of brewing, but I don't think it would be elucidating to the reader. I will take the trouble to explain a few things about the post-brewing process however. In Scotland they typically distill the spirit twice, whereas in Ireland it's thrice. The spirit resultant from the second distillation is 70% alcohol, and this is put into casks and stored in a warehouse for a decade. The casks are wooden, and allow a little evaporation to occur through the wood. The casks can expect to lose approx 20% of their contents over their long wait, which is refered to as the "angel's share". To reduce the "angel's share", they dilute the spirit a little before casking, and so it actually goes into the cask at 63% alcohol, and it comes out at 58%. This is known as "full cask strength whisky" and you can buy this in their shop. It contains these molecules called "fatty acids" which probably behave a bit like fats. In particular, when you cool the whisky by pouring it over ice, these things congeal and make the drink go cloudy. The modern consumer can't cope with cloudy whisky, so normally it is cooled to -3c and filtered before bottling. At Edradour you can buy it without this "chilled-filtered" stage, and so you get something with a more original taste. I purchased a small bottle of their whisky: very nice.
Another post-processing stage is to store the whisky in a cask from a different brewery for a while so it can garner a flavour from it. This is called "finishing". The port finish is created by storing the whisky in old port casks for seven years, but that's an extreme case: other finishes can be gained from storage times of under a year.
I had a fun experience post-tour: as I was getting into my Fig in the distillery car park when I was swamped by Americans who were travelling on a coach tour. They asked me about my Fig, they photographed me in my Fig, they photographed themselves standing in front of my Fig. I thought it was great! They asked if it drives like a race-car, and I said it does because it's very low on the ground, especially if you let the the tyres drop to a slightly lower pressure. One of them was apparently "into" reconstructions of the American Civil War, and noticed that I was wearing a Confederacy flag on my hat. I was told that he was a supporter of the Unionists, and I was thinking "oh my golly where is this going?" they went on to explain that he used to have a real canon and I was thinking "oh my golly are we going to have a punch-up now?". Some Americans take great offense at my hat, as I will recount in the the section called “Trees For Life”. However they left peacefully and we were all happy.