Glen Garioch Distillery Tour

While in Scotland I visited Glen Garioch (pronounced 'Gerry' in Doric), makers of Single Malt Scotch Whisky. It is located Oldmeldrum, an agricultural area where Barley and Crystal Spring water are in abundance. It was only natural that a distillery would be there!

Glen Garioch was founded in 1797, and is one of the oldest distilleries in all of Scotland. Recently it was bought by Suntory, and the new owners insisted on process changes (for consistency), but all the original buildings are still in place to viewed.

Basically, Malt Scotch is made from two ingredients... Barley and Water. Barley is in plentiful supply in Scotland, and because of the constant rainfall, fresh clean water is always in supply.

The tour started in the Malt Room. In the past, Glen Garioch used to do their own malting. Barley was spread on the floor and ocassionally paddled to allowed the barley to air and germinate. This is now done out of house, but the facility still exists.

The Barley was then kiln dried in the ovens next door. The ovens were traditional, in that they were peat fired. Glen Garioch used to mildly peat their Barley, but now get their barley out of house.

The dried Barley is called grist. The picture below shows a Barley grain before and after the kilning process. The grist is rich in Sugar and ready to be sent to the mash drums.

Below is picture of an empty and clean mash drum. It's cleaned on a regular basis (the staff don't work weekends). Hot water and Barley are mixed together and stirred together. The resulting mix is rich in sugar. The liquid (wort) is sent to washback drums where yeast is added to allow for the fermentation process to begin (see below). The solids in the mash drum are collected and sold as cattle feed to local farmers.

Below shows a photos of the Washback drums and yeast.

The photo below shows the appearance of the washback... it's appearance is similar to beer and at this point it is still fairly low in alcoholic content (about 8%).

The next step is to distill the alcohol so it's to the right alcoholic content. The photos below are of the condensor, wash stills and the spirit stills. The wash stills are the first distilation, and are low in alcoholic content. The spirit stills are the more refined alcohol stills and are VERY high in Content (about 75% alcohol).

Testing of the spirits takes place in the Spirit safe, which can be seen below. The safe is a sealed by the order of Her Majesty for excise on alcoholic products.

Once the final spirit is collected, it is put into barrels and allowed to age. About 2% alcoholic content is lost per year as the spirit is allowed to mature. In order to be called Scotch, the Spirit must be aged for a minimum of three years, else it is defined as a spirit. Glen Garioch has three different expressions currently commonly available, and 8, 12, and 19 year old Scotch. The 19 year old Scotch was made prior to Suntory's takeover, and would have the traditional distilling methods with in house malting and peating.