Book a Glen Scotia Distillery Tour
Our advice? Book in advance!
Campbeltown Whiskies
Campbeltown is well-known for being the whiskiest place in the world, and while it’s certainly a whisky region with three distilleries, there are solid plans afoot to increase the number by two more.
Distillery Tours
During The Campbeltown Malts Festival late May 2022, I was lucky enough to tour the Glen Scotia distillery. Normally, you pay for the privilege but Glen Scotia were doing them FOR FREE this time. Oh wow! I couldn’t believe my luck, I’d saved a tenner and signed up and reserved a space. If you want to take a tour, check out their page here: https://www.glenscotia.com/pages/distillery-tours
The Glen Scotia Distillery Tour
For this tour we were guided by Cheryl. She took us through the entire process, from milling the barley to cask. And then we cheekily ended up with a free dram after a free tour! I’ve no idea how that happened but by God it was good. Sláinte!
Photos of the tours
I’ll leave you with some photo’s that I took, overall, the tour is an excellent experience and well worth the price. I can’t wait to try some of the other whisky experiences they offer.
The Bobby Mill is a 4 roller mill which ensures the barley is ground down to the correct constituent parts: Flour, Grits and Husks.
Cheryl went on to explain about the malt bins and how the various ingredients are transported around the distillery.
The grist is added to hot water which extracts all the lovely sugars into the liquid.
This is done three times with some of the extract used to kickstart the process for the next batch. The bulk goes into the next stage.
Here we get an overview of the process. As you can see, the next step is to pump the resulting wort from the mashtun into the washbacks. This is where the yeast is added and the conversion of sugars into alcohol takes place. The resultant liquid is known as Wash and is now ready for distilling.
The liquid from what I would call "fermentation vats" or wash backs as they are actually known, is all pumped through to the stills.
From there the stillman monitors the spirit safe and you get the whisky ready to be casked. You can see the spirit safe in the picture below.
At the end stage the casks are filled with the various whiskies and this is where the real magic happens. Sherry and bourbon casks are used and the whisky ages in these for at least three years (to be called whisky) and often for much longer.
Each cask can only be used a maximum of three times before it's deemed finished, and then you'll find them adorning pubs and gardens as flower pots.
The whisky is married to Crosshill Loch water before bottling at 46%ABV, however some whiskies are left at cask strength.
And here we have the casks, there were more but I ran out of card space on my camera! Also, what really interested me were the camera's that were running so people who had bought casks could keep an eye on them! Smile please!
Thank you Cheryl and all the team at Glen Scotia!
Let’s drink to our next meeting, lads,
Nor think on what’s atwixt;
They’re fools wha spoil the present hour
By thinking on the next.
Hew Ainslie (1792- 1878)
